embodiment studies semester magazine Fall 2005 - Goddard College IMA program   Juliana Borrero (alumna) , Tunja, Colombia Jan 12, 2005 Life without Goddard has been confusing, hard, isolated, unsatisfactory. It is as if all this work was done in order to (using my metaphor) crack a window, and after that - before I could even rest from the pain that it caused and understand the confused heightened emotion of graduating - I was tossed back to the other side and the window is back up again, and no one around me even acknowledges that there is a window, much less that it can be broken. The hardest part has been wanting so much for my relationship to feed from this but of course my man doesn´t have the map and doesn´t want me to show him the way in. Of course I can´t expect just because I learned to breathe underwater the whole world will be flooded for me to exist in or that just because I learned to travel through a wall they will know how to do it too. Sometimes I wonder why the hell I didn´t stay with my little poststructuralist two-step, and how much harder this has made my life, but I also have no doubt that what I´ve done ever since I started this road of real not knowing, or ever since I started to stand at my own edge, has been one of the most amazing things that have happened to me. And so I want to continue on this road, whatever it is, and I will say again that I think the work done at Goddard is really on the edge, and that I hope we can find a way to bring it together in the shape of publications, a concentration, a research group (I know that it´s the only kind of research I´m interested in), a colloquium or any excuse to get back together and see our pretty faces. After sending my CV to Goddard I felt my greatest interest for being there was to become a part of this "research group"; but I also felt unprepared; I felt I had to dedicate the coming years to prepare for this work, although it still is not very clear how. So the biggest question for me right now is what to do with embodiment ­ how to use it in a medium that does not see it, and how to continue developing it. It´s virtually impossible to talk about, where I work, but the more I know about it, the more I am able to recognize when people are doing it, at least in writing. It seems like it is an act of courage, like there is something that must be broken, and I´ve found that women are more likely to do it than men. Another thing that I´ve found is the more I get into it I´m being forced closer to psychology, which is hard, because the writing is so straightforward and plain for me, but I feel that I need psychology in order to understand where I´m throwing my students and how to help them get out of there alive and better. Because that´s another thing: once this initial certainty is broken, it feels like it´s a dangerous territory that is encountered. But unless this dangerous territory is encountered, there is no advance, there is no finding, there is only repetition. Now I´m going to tell you about the three spaces that I have found to be closest to embodiment: 1. Working with the literature teachers at my university on a project for a master's degree in literature, we were asked by an outsider what was the special vein, or the focus, or the "research line" of our literature department. And there are only three of us, but our happy conclusion was that what brought us together was an interest, and palpable research in something we decided to call "creative thinking" (the name was given by me, thinking of Heidegger, and how he talk about "the neighborhood between poetry and thinking"). Why not composition or creative writing, the outsider asked? Creative thinking sounds closer to cognitive psychology (how I hate these classifications!), creativity manuals and that kind of stuff, he said. It's a gamble but I fought hard to stay with the term "creative thinking", because it´s a lot more open, it allows for the connection between literature and epistemology, philosophy, embodiment, theory and fiction. It´s interdisciplinary. It´s a space that must be created, a space not touched. A space of integration, through which I could work towards embodiment. Of the three of us literature teachers: one is interested in aesthetic pedagogy, another in composition or creative writing, and I´m the only one who talks about the body although nobody understands what I mean by it (they ask: do you mean body language, semiotics of gesture?) 2. In any case, I´ve tried to be faithful to what I do, to "translate" into the local academic terms, to find a possible dialogue, relying on what everybody here seems to insist so much upon, which is "research". Writing articles and presenting them at academic congresses seems to be the accepted way of starting this dialogue, so I gave it a shot. We translated the essay from my thesis called "Autobiography of a social body" - which interweaves my thoughts on autobiography with the autobiographical writings of the students from the language and peace group ­ and presented it at a big "international" literary congress at one of the important private universities in Bogotá. I would read the paper with 8 students, reading their own parts, which often were quite intimate, so that it was almost like a performance or a dramatized reading. (First I asked if they consented to participating, and allowing their stories to be shared; and to my amazement, everyone responded with a solid yes, no matter how hard the story.) I would take the whole group of 15 students to Bogotá for three days, the big city, which most of them are uneasy about and didn't know their way around. We would hang up our "clothing rack" of anonymous autobiographical stories in a public area of this university, too. It seemed like everything was going well. Somebody had read our paper and was supposedly interested in it, but thought we lacked "pedagogical implications". We were teamed up in the same panel with Ms. Martelo, the teacher in charge of the "literature and the body" seminar at another university. When I heard her begin, I thought, it´s a perfect match. She said: body, subject, writing, Lacan, Derrida, Primo Levi, birth and she was a woman. I couldn´t wipe the smile off my face, I thought: she´s talking about exactly the same thing we are going to talk about in a different register. She´s staying in the realm of theory, and we´re embodying it. Before we started, I touched her red wine colored leather jacket and said, we´ve been in conversation for a while without even knowing, it´s amazing how connected our work is. Then we started. 8 students and I sprawled out over the whole reading space so that she had to get "off the table". Reading the thing with 8 other voices, of course, was impressive. The theorist was not the "owner" of the truth. The truth was literally constructed between all. It was dialogical. There was a rhythm. After we finished each one of them talked (from their experience, not theoretically) about what writing had become for them. Then we showed some slides. By this time it was 1:00 o'clock, and I thought: people will clap and everybody will split because it´s lunchtime and who cares about academia on an empty stomach. But to my surprise, people stayed, and there was about 40 minutes worth of discussion. Ms. Martelo came back to the table, and the questions began. The first question was how did you come to this interest in language and autobiography. It seemed that the question was aimed at us, but Ms. Martelo took the first word. I thought it was natural, she being the older teacher, and my hero because she had talked about the body. Ms. Martelo took the opportunity to say that the way we were approaching identity and the subject was not correct, because one had to know Lacan, and Lacan was very complex, and she was a psychoanalyst, and that we had to understand that identity was not a mirror (which is something I say over and over in my work) Basically she was saying we were interpreting the theory in a naïve and essentialist way. I am naïve, I thought, shit, so we really don´t know what we´re doing, and maybe she can show us. She spoke for a long time and said Colombians didn´t need any more thinking about identity, we were sick of identity. She was pissed off. When I had to answer the question I replied very briefly, saying my interest had come from the need to merge my creative work with academic work, from the fact that I was a writer, and what can a writer bring to academia. Then somebody said it was interesting how all these students were involved in this work. And Ms. Martelo took the word again, saying that she works with students in amazing ways and makes them read poems in other languages and arrive at the pure signifier of language, and how she had taught her son to read at the age of three. By now it was clear that she was defending herself with her nails. It was sad because none of her students were there. I was in awe of her defensiveness and her resistance to having a real conversation, which was so close . Somebody asked if it was not dangerous to work so much on our selves. If we shouldn´t be doing other people´s biographies. Someone said our work was important because it was political. Ms. Martelo said Colombians had had enough of politics, then a teacher from our university boomed back at her: How can you say that, when kids don´t even have paper to write on in rural schools, when they arrive at school without anything in their stomachs . There was aggression in the air but it was not we who were doing it. I was watching the fireworks go over my head, and thinking that our words must have caused some serious "structural changes" for people to be arguing so intensely before lunch. It was not about language or about theory. It was about who we were and what it means to say this is who we are. It was about identity. When the discussion ended, I wanted to say goodbye to Ms. Martelo and ask how we could come into dialogue about the body and literature, but when I turned, she was walking out the door, backpack over her wine colored jacket. No goodbyes. No alliances. So strange to me. I think the scene can be described almost in ethological -animal conduct - terms. Protection of a space, older animal vs younger animal, who is this newcomer into this field that belongs to psychoanalysis, and something very basic that happened when she felt that our presentation was embodied. I think what really happened, that day, during our presentations, took place underneath the words. To articulate it and make dialogue possible would have been the real challenge. By the end, my students were hysterical, beaming, smiling and laughing, they said if it was a soccer match we had won 5-0. We had a beer at a bar outside the college, all sitting in a large circle, and we couldn´t stop reconstructing the event. Deep inside, though, I still wanted to believe that this woman had something to say to us, that dialogue should have been possible. Or else academia was impossible. After that, we spent a whole afternoon hanging up "the autobiographical closet", and it looked better than ever. We saw people buzzing around, reading the clothing, writing graffitti, asking about our work. Then the next day at ten o'clock the organizer of the congress asked when we were going to take it down. I said tomorrow, and she said today is better. I said ok, this afternoon then. And when we got there in the afternoon, they had had the doormen take it down, and there were a couple of academics who were hysterical about it. So I don´t know, the feeling is certainly ambiguous after going to an event like that. I was not interested in any of the presentations, so much repetition of theory, so much babble. And dialogue is not really a possibility. It´s like they´ll tolerate you, let you bring your students, your pots and pans, let you make your noise, but they´re not really into it. There was also the sensation of how the capital looks at the province: they don´t really look, they just pack together, they just exclude. Other works on autobiography were not interesting: they defined, classified different types, there was no questioning, there was no fascination with what cannot be pinned down about life, with the way in which each person tells it, there was nothing surprising. Part of it has got to do with the fact that the research directors are directors, not real participants. Their own identity is never in question. As a matter of fact research seems to be based on that premise, the researcher´s identity is never a problem or a question or even a matter of thought. 3. The last space I want to talk about is the language and peace group: this is the real space I have invented in order to be able talk about what I want to talk about and write what I want to write. With this group of students I can talk about the body. They may not know Lacan, but they know when language is embodied, and they have learned to see through their own lies and those of others. They´ve all come far enough in this work that they can feel the pain of the shift between being able to speak in a certain way at the group, and having to return to this completely artificial use of language in order to respond in academia and at home. They have seen the window ­ felt the gap. This semester each one has been working on their own larger text according to their own rules, their own questions, their own structure, their own path of not knowing. I´ve talked about Ellie´s points for Wild Research, Gendlin´s questions for interpreting dreams, we´ve shared Cixous on writing from the body, Rich's on honor and lying, and parts of my thesis. Just talking about this has been super-exciting and subversive, I have felt as if I were showing them formulas in witchcraft. It´s hard to explain the intensity of each meeting. The seriousness of the work. Two girls get together during the week and go write (and cry) at a specific tree. 15 people each doing something completely different. I wrote barely anything this semester, my role was to pull the strings together, to pull the net out of the water and not let the fish escape. To help each one arrive at their intuitions for form, to see the threshold, to be brave and step where they had not dared. Also, it was an awfully hard semester for at least three of the students. Their family lives quite plainly broke down, and I was helping them go through it. We went through a very productive time the first half of the semester, where among other things, they discovered they could help each other, and so people who had already broken down or been able to face things in writing, were listening to and helping others who were going through it. We started a system like the advising group at Goddard, where three or four people had to present where they were at in their projects every time. It was amazing how others could see through and contribute to seeing sense and structure in these presentations. How people contributed to getting others who were stuck, out of the hole and into a place of mobility. I was very much into the work and very much in awe of it, so much that I started to have problems at home because my man said I was dedicating too much time to it. Then after the trip to Bogotá with them and with the intensity of the work every week, added to everything else I was being asked to do at the university, I pretty much broke down. The truth is that I felt used after we went to Bogotá. Of course I could never tell them this, but I had to do so much bureaucracy, I had waited in lines and done paperwork to take them to Bogotá, I had bought them lunch, I had watched them get drunk one night, I had babied them and waited for them and told them how to get to places, and at the end of the trip, nobody thanked me. I felt like I had been shoved into the mother position and them into the position of ungrateful children. And I didn´t want that relationship with them at all. I couldn´t listen to one more person´s problem or look at one more person´s writing. I had mountains of work to do. So did they. We tried to meet a couple of times, but we missed each other, our attention was crossed, some people were very stressed about their own problems, we were not connecting, I had my own problems at home, and what I wanted, which was the clarity to look at what we had done and tie it up, just wasn´t being able to happen. (All of which teaches me something about timing and balance in embodied work, because it's so intense.) Then fortunately there was one last meeting that was like a confirmation and set the right tone to be able to go on vacation. I felt almost shy asking them how they had felt during the semester, what they had learned from the work, how they felt about themselves, if they thought it was worth it. The interesting thing is that some of them felt shy as well, saying they didn´t know if they were invading my space, if I was tired of them . When we got over these apologies in disguise, it came out plainly and I think very unanimously: the semester was amazing; this had been the most amazing semester yet; they had discovered themselves and they had discovered each other; they had become interesting to themselves; they had learned not to be embarrassed about who they were. Life was crumbling but writing gave them something to hold on to, (even if they could not show their mothers, or at least not yet). Now I want to tell you about two specific people (names changed): There´s Carlina, beautiful to look at, as Ellie would say, whose life dramatically broke down this semester, her mother on the verge of suicide; who understands V Woolf like water; who writes some of the most visceral, bloody bodily prose I have read. All about women. One day I read to them the first half of Mother Language Wound, my work on mother and daughter. I was very shy about it but I also wanted to show them some of the most intense work I had done. The first half of this text includes the narrative of an abortion, and after we finished I said would they accept the challenge of writing 10 minutes about their mothers. Several of the students were completely blocked, which never happens. Others cried, and said they wouldn´t read it. Carlina was shaking as she read the narrative of an adolescent girl doing an abortion on herself, with her mother watching in approval through the crack of the kitchen door. It was cryptic, bloody, strange, hard to make out the story. She trembled and cried for several hours after. Then weeks later (she was in my North American lit class) she rewrote it, in English, to present at the slam contest I organize each semester. I thought it was too hard, too weird, how would she get people to understand, and in English, but she rewrote it from scratch, and there was poetry in her English, now the story was clear, but not pathetic, and she presented it in a bar in front of 50 people, with her two friends who each wrote a monologue about being a woman. It was so moving; when I have the text I´d like to show it to you, in her English. (Last word about Carlina. Her mother finally didn´t commit suicide, but left all her 4 children behind and went to find work in Bogotá. When we were in Bogotá, Carlina visited and in those days, what did she leave behind? Her notebook.) Then there´s the story of Paolita. I add the -ita to her name because of her small size. She looks thirteen years old, insecure as an adolescent, moving more like a man than like a woman, into literature, but not a particularly critical reader, into literature but doesn´t really know why. With green, feline-shaped eyes. For more than a year, she had persisted in coming to the group, although at the time of writing she was never able to say much. One of the first days when the word we were writing about was "body" she broke down and said she wanted to be just spirit, to be free of her dirty body. I knew there was something there, something which added to Christianity was her own time bomb. I was patient with her, didn´t press. Eventually, in her own time, and most importantly by her own initiative, she got there. It was hard to believe but not really. If every woman could tell their lives the world would split open, Lise says that somebody says. Yup. So Paola is the girl who has been going to this tree, with this other girl called Lizz who has been breaking down, and they´ve been working on telling their stories and discovering who they are. One Friday she arrived at the group early, and she said she had been writing all night, and that she wanted to read to me before anyone else came. It was a story of sexual abuse at 11 or 13, exquisitely told, almost slightly, considering the pain of what had happened. She reads about a girl looking out the window wrapped in a towel, scrubbing the harsh towel against her naked nipples like raisins, scrubbing her skin until it's red, trying to make it clean, trying to make it disappear. She writes about a man with the face of a hog grunting on top of her. All this time her voice is slow, kind of dazed, and then she writes about a girl taking scissors and cutting off her eyelashes, "she doesn't know why" she just cuts off her eyelashes, and her mother scolds her, says what a bad habit for a girl. And this is where she cries, at the cutting of the eyelashes, which is awesome because it´s also the release, as they fall on the ground the eyelashes become spiders and start walking on the walls. The spiders are her friends It has been so amazing to me to watch this girl arrive at what she had to say, and then the masterful way she gets at it in order to be able to tell it . One of the things she had to do, in her case, was to call the main character "she". To distance herself. On the day of the last meeting, she was finally able to read it to the other people in the group (we were all women that day), and that day I felt in her voice that she had been able to distance herself. Her voice still cracked in the cutting of the eyelashes but she was able to read through the pain, and say this is my writing. Amazing. And she thanked the girl who had first worked through her tale of sexual violence last semester for being her model of courage. So cool how things happen. It makes me think embodiment work is a lot about tossing seeds in the right moment and direction, and waiting for things to happen. Working with, not working on. That´s it. You´re free now. As you can see, this is a totally different dance from the poststructuralist 2-step. Love and thanks, Juliana     Favor Ellis (alumna) , Doula - two notes My friends, Fiona Josephine was born December 17 at 6:19 am, after 63 hours of contractions and pushing. ("Active" labor for 12 hours.) She and Rachel are healthy and perfect and beautiful. I don't need to tell any of you how incredible this was. After 24 hours, I found myself working with Rachel exclusively on intuition and fierce, raw, primal energy. I held her and stroked her and whispered to her as though it were the only important thing to do in the world. When Rachel was pushing, I noticed that cramps were building inside me, and when Fiona's head first emerged, I felt a release like I'd never felt. When I held her for the first time, my cramps came back, but subtle, and an energy came from her so warm and powerful, so soothing and assuring. I whispered all sorts of promises to her, of love and truth and stories. The midwives asked me if they could refer other mamas to me - one said I was one of the best doulas she'd ever worked with. They said I have a new calling. Thank you for your stories, and your love, and thank you for being so alive. See pictures. Much love and gratitude, Favor * all my writing since the birth is to remember details: purple soles 6pm pitocin 3am epidural 63 hours it's a girl! it's a girl! the cramps her pushing gave me the cramps holding her gave me the release you are so beautiful, so wise. you will remember so many things. i will always be in your life. i will be constant. i will love you. midwife to me: please keep doing this. other women need you. me to rachel: you are so strong. so brave. you are so beautiful. you are my idol. rachel breathed through everything. hee hee hoo. no screaming, no noise. i drew circles on her back. i stroked her head to toe head to toe, without stopping. imagine you are opening. relax, relax. i have never experienced anything like this. i am changed, and full.   Patricia Fontaine (LW) , Bare staring My friend and colleague in physical difference, Eli Clare, used to sit on his hands as a child to stop the tremors. Cerebral palsy makes his speech slur, his right arm shudder, his gait halt. Eli gets stared at. He gets gawked at. He gets gaped at, and he has strangers think nothing of piercing the privacy of his walk, meal, or presentation to query, postulate about, or advise him on his physical symptoms. Clare has written eloquently about his experience of being gawked, gaped, and stared at. One of the acts of resistance he's taken on to counter the gawking is to gawk back. Clare gapes at the gapers. And he flirts hard with those of his kind (transgender folk) as a matter of pride. Eli is no super-crip, someone social norms have elevated to be emulated for "overcoming" their disability. Nor is he pitiable ­ his stance and presence in the world precedes him down the street or in the classroom like wind picking up. This essay addresses a question posed to me recently about my own experience of having my birthmark gawked at. Although I've written extensively on being the receiving end of what I call "the stare," I've yet to think in terms of resistance. Unless you count the "I dare you to gawk at me while I am smiling at you," resistance, or the ever popular "it's OK if your child has questions" pre-empting of the child asking the parent in a loud voice "what's wrong with that lady?" Or worse, the child breaking into terrified screaming and pointing. There I usually beat it to the nearest exit. The difference between Eli Clare and me is that it is not my body that the kid is pointing to, or that people do double-takes about. It is my face. How does one create resistance to being stared at? And how in the name of creation does a woman with a mark flirt through it, fiercely flirt with how others see me as my mark rather than my me? I need to talk about two things here that intertwine: the challenge and context of being 'appearance disabled;' and the experience - both historical and cultural - of being stared at. This is a complex ride. When did I become aware of the stare? Had to be grammar school, the age at which I had enough of a little self on board to notice that I was last chosen for games on the playground. This was the second slap, the first being how kids' heads snapped around when I came into school that first day. And this is where the complexity begins as well, because I don't actually remember the head snapping. I think my first act of resistance, or perhaps, protection, was to create the counter to the stare: the blur. The blur allowed me to tune out the staring by focusing my gaze elsewhere, ignoring, pretending, and essentially obliterating a presence of staring other ­ as if it were not happening, and surely as if I were not the cause. Yet the blur also held the reality of hyper-vigilance: another place Clare and I differ. In private conversation, Clare has noted that his sense of blur entails an obliviousness to stares. My blur encases me, but still illuminates the starers, like radar or special infrared glasses. Scanning, seeking, and recording. The blur really didn't come into play until I was on my own in a school setting. It's not that there weren't shouted cruelties from stranger kids at the local ice cream shop or drugstore, but my younger sister was my buffer then, my witness, and would often taunt back, turning us away with a huff and the dignity small children can employ when no adults are around, becoming the adult proxy for each other. But as I grew older, the blur became less and less effective, especially as I quit using makeup and took my full color out on the streets. Although I still use the strategy to great effect, I can not quite block the other, and I can not quite divert the rush of shame that still surges about being the recipient of someone's gaping. My chief strategy is often to force myself to make eye contact with the gawker, the hope being that I will either shame them in the act of staring, or exchange some spark of humanity, my smile begetting something unexpected and genuine. What is a stare? My computer dictionary tells me it's a long concentrated look at somebody or something, often full of curiosity or hostility. To stare is to look wide open with shock, fear, or amazement; to express rudeness or defiance. What resonates with the descriptors are the words concentrated look, shock, fear, rudeness. I do not field amazement, nor do I field hostility. But I do field the stare, like a baseball lobbed in my direction that I have to catch or it will smack me in the head. I perceive the staring as rude. But is it? How else are people to verify what their visual cortex is registering? I do it too. Only I am clever about it, making sure I am well out of the person's radar before I sneak my look at the wheelchair, the scar, the colored face. I want information to fill in the dissonance in perception. Sadly, I also have a template of normative appearance, but damn it, I know this, and I fight it. Or rather, I engage in self-talk that lets me know I am seeing the other as other rather than human. This happens on a continuum, and here one gets into the continuum of disability. I have had many conversations with Eli about the fact that I am certainly gawked at by the curious and invaded by the well-meant, bent on 'enlightening me' that there is 'something I can do' for my face. Or there is that type of benign invasion, my version of super-crip, in which slightly breathless folks tell me I am so brave and courageous. This always bewilders me: brave and courageous how? Because I choose to teach and be mistress of ceremonies and attend concerts and give directions to tourists? What are my choices? To walk around with a face full of makeup, or wear a Goth hood or grow long hair that I spray in place around my chin, neck, and cheek? But Eli's body is in question, his undertaking of tasks like walking or talking or writing or eating requiring much more time and application than I would ever have to consider. I can cover my face in the aforementioned ways. Eli cannot hide his tremors, control his gait, or drink easily without a straw. I have a body that measures up to norms, but a face that does not. Perhaps that is why it does not occur to me to resist by gawking back. Not only do Eli and I have different styles of activism, we have different bodies. I am still too leery of provoking further stares by staring back ­ but Eli is angry, justifiably so, with a history and litany of damage done to the different that I can't hold a candle to. I wonder where my anger is? I'm angry at the norms, what my friend Ellen Fein calls the "basic pathology" of the culture: one is only deemed OK if the outside looks good. This is the legacy and mission of capitalist interests that fuel consumerist ideologies pervading the West - especially the US, in my opinion, a country in which "good" means bigger, thinner, and richer, and where achieving some or all of these seems increasingly the focus. A focus so insidious and so interwoven into visual value systems that my students, for instance, are genuinely surprised and shocked by the real motivations behind advertising and fashion: to keep women insecure about their looks and endlessly involved in the Sisyphean project of buying products (the boulder of "looking good" forever rolling downhill once the treatment/purchase/diet is completed) that will never allow true worth, real rest, or solid self-acceptance. What follows the rolling down of the boulder of consumption is the flattening of our insides: soul, spirit, wildness, and rock-solid connection to self. This is the context that surrounds staring and helps fuse what is a simple human response of peering curiously at difference with moral judgment, hierarchical sorting, and condemnation. Yes, I am angry at the norms, but not at the starers. Funny, but despite my shame at being stared at, the often unbearable strain of the daily onslaught, my act of resistance is to move on, and work toward holding and stabilizing my vulnerability in the face of my face's magnet for gawks. This is not always successful. There are times when I don't exactly hate humans, but feel the urgent need to retreat to a place where there will be no interaction, and hence, no staring. I do not want this to be my living. There is something here right on the edge of possibility. Staring is bare. It bares both the object stared at, and the person staring. What if I simply allow the stare? What if I, on a day in which I am wholly inside my own skin, allow the energy of the stare to pass me by, as in Aikido, but engage the starer in his/her bareness? There is an extreme vulnerability in being caught staring, and an opportunity to go past the glancing visual blows ­ to exchange the essence of animal wildness inherent in that double take, and meet it. What if I use my color in this way? What if? Maybe that's flirting, the way one flirts with babies: deep, soulful, and completely bare. Consider: If my face bears staring, someone else's stare in fact bares them. I'm reminded of a Rumi quote I have over my desk: Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there. I looked up the source of the quote, and found this additional stanza: When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, event, the phrase each other doesn't make any sense. #158, Open Secret: Versions of Rumi. Translated by John Moyne and Coleman Barks. Putney, Vermont: Threshold Books, 1984. There is a profound sense of yes when I read this ­ as if the spiritual side of the whole configuration of staring is about more than rudeness, space violation, ignorance, and vulnerability. When someone stares at me, they are looking for something to explain the interruption in normalcy. In a sense, I am enabling an opportunity to experience something beyond language, beyond the startle, even. It is a "full moment." Indeed, the sense of "each other" is there, but it does not make sense in the polite frame of the word. We are both inside the act of the stare. And I began to wonder - what if I join that feeling of shame, and use it as a way to come right to the edge of my skin, the untamed flush of shame flaming all those blood vessels to open and surge? What if I meet the stare, instead of just receiving it? What if I act? Meet the other in the field, standing? This is not submission, courage, defiance, or altruism. This is attempting to find way soul to soul. What do you see when you stare at me? On a good day, I'll meet you there. References Clare, Eli. "Gawking, Gaping, Staring." Queer Crips: Disabled Gay Men and Their Stories. Bob Guter and John Killacky, Eds. New York: Harrington Park Press, 2004. Moyne, John, and Coleman Barks, trans. Open Secret: Versions of Rumi. Putney, Vermont: Threshold Books, 1984.   Becci Goodall (EE), Practicum journal session #1 Teens. Writing. Teens. Think about that. Think about hormones and moods. Imagine what I was thinking as I drove to the Juniata College library to meet the group of kids who'd agreed to meet me for a writing workshop. Look down at your "Mom sweatpants" and your "not particularly cool running sneaks" and suddenly feel as if you are actually 13 yourself heading into unknown territory. Zitty. Jittery. Unsure. You weren't cool in high school you aren't cool now . Think shit shit shit what was I thinking? Why did I pick this age group. Just shit. A thought enters my head. It is something deep and insightful I wrote down from one of Caryn's workshops on facilitation. Munchies! She said food was the magical fix-it for workshops everyone loves food a great ice breaker! Caryn specifically said that snacks can soothe many situations. And as a food junkie, that is sadly one of her nuggets of truth that I've remembered. So I cut a U-turn and head down 22. Now I'm going to be late but at least I'll have snacks. I run into the dollar store where I buy a bag of tootsie pops, glitter pens, and Chubbs fat notebooks . Perhaps I can bribe them to like me. To listen. To write out their hearts. My daughter is with me in the car; she's 16 and definitely the cool kid I never was. And by cool I mean she's already on her own path. Self assured, intelligent, and independent. All the things that scared me when I was a teen because I didn't have them. This is so strange. I'm questioning my abilities based on a certain population. Three weeks ago I had this master plan that I'd mapped out over the summer. It involved working with incarcerated teens. So I knew many of the variables. A. they were troubled. B. they all had drug problems. C. they would never be there if they hadn't been arrested at some point. So yes these things were scary on some level but on another they represented a constant. I'd be in the same room every Saturday with a counselor for assistance. I guess now I'd have to admit that these factors gave me a weird comfort. And now nothing is constant. I pulled this thing together in two weeks. And it feels helter-skelter, which is basically how I live my life. The thing is well the truth is that I wanted this one part of my grad school work to not be crazy-upside down running on the fly always late. Yet here we are. I'm lost. I've got glossy magazine pictures that speak to the evils of commercialism as I drive away from a store where I've made the vague attempt to purchase an ice breaker. Oh, I'm in trouble. "Erin, will this work?" "Mom, yeah sure, yes." She's fiddling with her iPod and has called ahead to her friends to warn that I'll be 5 minutes late. "It's ok Mom, they know you're late for everything." That's great the only thing they know about me is that I'm always late. Full panic mode If this were a movie it would sound like one of those old WWII flicks. You know the ones where everyone's in a submarine playing poker to the sounds of swing music. And then the horrible sirens out of nowhere WHEEEEP WHEEEP WHEEEEP! And you can't think. You can't breathe. And you don't know what to do so you run. Or babble mindlessly. "But is it cool? Will they think it's cool?" "Mom why are you asking me this is your thing. You're a writer. Do your thing." "Rrrright." I was sorta looking for an answer here. Some kind of guidance. Then she says: "Mom I can't do this for you. I don't wanna do it. I just wanna go to the meeting and I want you to surprise me." Ok. Well. Driving. Thinking. Shifting. Driving. At a red light on Moore an insight comes to me. There are some basic things I've learned so far from raising a teen. And though I don't know everything there does seem to be a certain constancy. For one thing they act as if they don't want structure or rules of any kind yet they function best within guidelines. As I think of Erin's peers I realize that the most troubled kids either have no parental guidance or are overwhelmed by oppressive rules. And I realize that I've been burned by both ends of this spectrum myself. The other constant is boredom and creativity. And here I'm saying that most of Erin's peers who are bored with school and life are simply not being challenged by the adults in their lives. So my job today is to challenge their innate creativity while providing a loose yet visible structure. They're looking to me as writer. I can't waffle on this or I'm gonna lose them. And I snap out of it - this isn't about being cool this is about being me. Well, more importantly them being them, which I can't do if I'm not authentic myself. Which of course means that I can't worry about being cool. Onward to the small huddle of kids. A soft spoken boy - Robert - with long brown hair hangs at the periphery. Another boy - Lloyd - listens to headphones and has this look of such sheer boredom. Shit. I continue to introduce myself and shake hands with each. Ted is self-assured and looks ready to go. Erin is there but somehow looks different as she mills with her friends. So this is it 4 kids. I was hoping for more. And Robert mentions that no one could get Kara by phone but she was planning to come. This is such a tiny group, and this worries me because it lends an immediate intimacy which may or may not work. So the meeting starts. We sit at a round table in the Juniata College library basement. And they aren't saying much. I'm pretty much talking. And they're just looking at me to explain the project, which I do, with growing excitement. And I realize that despite all the craziness, change, and uncertainty, I am excited. This is something that's been brewing in my head for years. I tell them that within the structure of the magazine they have complete freedom. I stipulate that they be passionate about what they're writing and that they should write about something they've wanted to write in school but couldn't because of school policy. And that was the magic word. A hand jabs into the air I'd like to work on some short stories about the history of Marijuana. The bored kid is suddenly interested. Me: "Sure but you'll probably want to use a pseudonym to protect yourself. I'll see what I can find you to read." Next kid says: "Hey can we go around the circle." Me: "Sure. Go." "Well I've done some work on hell houses; is that something you can do? And some peace protests in DC. I've actually filmed a documentary on hellhouses which is screening here at the college in two weeks." Ted. The self-assured film maker. He's already taking classes at the college. His parents are professors. This is what he tells me as he holds eye contact with every single word. As if he wants me to know exactly where he's coming from. "This is me" he says with his eyes. Is this a dare or a plea? There will be no fooling this one. He talks a bit more about this then we move on to Erin. She wants to write about media images maybe something to do with the idea of Barbie dolls. I feel odd having my own daughter in the group. But she is the reason I've been thinking about this magazine in the first place as she often chafes within the school writing classes. Once she wanted to write about discrimination against gays this led to Mom having to duke it out with a long list of teachers and administrators (we live in a farming town very conservative I believe they call it the Bible Belt of Pennsylvania). This and other experiences have brought us here in a round-about way. Then we finally get to Robert who is painfully shy. He looks so uncomfortable as he squirms and rubs his hands over his face as if he needs to crawl under the table. So I say: "It's cool if you don't want to share with the group. You can email me your ideas or maybe bring some writing to next meeting." "No." And then this torrent of words jumbles out in disjointed sentences, but with such passion. I want to write religion I can't stand religion and school and well the way religion isn't supposed to be in school but it is in school and what that does to me and there is so much wrong with school and the teachers and the religion." "So do you all hate school?" There I go making one of my classic generalizations (a weakness that both Caryn and Francis have pointed out in my Goddard critical essays). This upsets Robert a little. "I never said I hated school. There's things I like about school. What I said was that there's this thing about it that I hate. That I think doesn't get talked about." Ok. Clearly I need to listen to exactly what they are saying. Lloyd. "I don't hate school so much as wish it didn't bore me." Erin. "Me too." Ted. "Yeah. I don't hate it." Ok. Now one major assumption of mine has been shredded. Hmmm so far I'm making mistakes. But I'm noting them. I'm learning. Workshop lesson # 1: Structure and leadership are necessary. Workshop lesson # 2. Assumptions are dangerous. What's working here. Well yes Caryn was right on the food thing they all like the lollipops which I proffer now in my moment of regrouping and shuffling of papers. Pizza I should've brought pizza! Now that we've introduced ourselves around the table I explain what I have in mind for the magazine. I tell them that this is totally their thing and ask them to kick around some name ideas. I say that nothing is taboo but that those who feel the need to write about drugs/alcohol/sex should probably use a pseudonym as this will be a published thing. I explain that this isn't a class but a place where they can write from their own power. I'm not requiring anything other than free-writes and discussions during workshop time and some media imagery work (they'll bring media images that speak to them in positive/or negative ways) which we'll talk about during class. Ted mentions that he's not much of a writer - that he's visual. But that he wants to write. And this is the first bit of uncertainty I've seen from him. It's as if he wants it to be ok to not be good at writing. Which it is. And I tell him we need visuals for the mag but they have to be original they have to say something. And then he says no but I want to write. I want to take pictures and write. This is exciting. So I figure now might be a good time for a free-write. I think back to this session with Katt at Goddard where we free-wrote but it was timed to just a few moments. I wrote some crazy stuff in that workshop. So I'm going to do this. Please let this work. I pray to the god of pizzas and lollipops . So I explain the idea of free-write and that this is not really a thinking exercise but a letting-out type thing. "Start with one idea and then whatever words are in your head just throw them onto the page as fast as you can." "Sort of like vomiting onto the page?" I don't know who said that but yeah I guess that's one way of looking at it. "What should we write about?" The red-head again. "What do you want to write about?" "Pot." Again. "Ok make that your first word but keep going." Everyone else is ready and looking at me. "On your mark get set go." I hadn't planned to write but I don't want to stare at them as they write so I start scribbling stuff mostly nonsense anything to make it appear as if I'm not watching them. I'd planned to stop them at 2 minutes but they are still frantically writing as if there will never be another moment to write in their lives. So I add a minute. Scribble some more words mostly connecting, beginning or ending words. And. But. If. Perhaps. It. Done. Four minutes and still they scrabble and hunch over the fat little notebooks. Ok five. Five. Stop! They look up and they look different. Something has changed in the eyes. Lloyd doesn't look bored. Erin is deep in thought and smiling. Ted looks as if he's going to jump out of his skin. Robert is smiling. Obviously Ted has something to get out so I ask him if he wants to read, which he does. He practically starts reading before the end of my sentence. And it is this beautiful abstract free-write that flows out and wraps me in silver. And this is the non-writer? He finishes reading and then says that this is what happened to him last night doing a certain thing. He smiles. His whole group smiles. They are friends. They know what he did last night. I don't and I don't need to. We talk about a possible essay that might come out of that piece. After that we go around the table and as Erin reads her piece on body images and barbies, I notice that Robert has closed his notebook and placed clasped hands on top. I can't focus because Erin's free write is also abstract and amazing. It's not something I've read of hers. This is a new side that she's decided to entrust to me. Lloyd reads his bit next and he doesn't have nearly as much as the others but his lines are fluid and stream of conscious. His work reminds me of some beat poetry. He mentions that he can't write under the pressure of a timed thing, that it sort of stressed him out. Note to self figure out something else for free-writes. Some kind of balance. So I notice Robert is still sitting there looking extremely uncomfortable. What's going on I wonder. His smiling face has gone nervous and sweaty. He's actually wringing his hands. So I say, "I've got some other stuff to talk about Robert so if you'd rather communicate with me by email we can do that later or you can work off of that free-write to begin an essay or short story." "Yes. No. No. I don't want to read mine in group. I'll email you." He's so relieved. It's like letting a bit of air out of a taut balloon. He's ok now. I'm ok. We wrap up the meeting as I ask them to bring outlines and media images from magazines that we'll talk about. We all agree that we don't want to meet in a library again as it feels too schoolish. So we'll meet in front of the library next week but everyone will come with ideas for a better meeting place, which we'll go to from the library. Driving home I realize that although I made many missteps I was right on with the most crucial of my generalizations. These kids have much to say. They have long days and nights floating inside that are literally begging to be freed. Lightning bugs in jars . Words that can only be whispered or thought at school. Words that parents may not wish to hear. Wonderful beautiful words. And I am again amazed at the awesome transformative power of writing.     Caroloyn Hauck (alumna), Inhale For all this time I have been writing about desire, the reaching forward and pulling back of the waves, I've never been able to really notice the pulling back. I can see the white water moving toward the sand, but I can't feel the pulling back. I know it is happening. I know that beneath the surface water is being pulled back into the ocean, but really all I can ever see is reaching. All I can ever see is wave after wave crashing onto the shore. So I stand. I stand at the edge of a cliff, shaded and surrounded by trees. I stand and tell myself to watch with my belly. A quiet day. White birds and hundreds of little masses of kelp, stationary, but lifting with each rise of the water. The only way to understand the motion of waves is to breathe. In and out. Just do that. You are not seeing the water pull back, but if you breathe with your belly and let your eyes just fall over what is in front of you, it will happen. As you watch, you begin to feel the water pull back and you feel yourself inhaling. The water moves forward and you are exhaling. You do this for a long time. Inhaling, pull, exhaling, push. You feel it first in your belly. Only in your belly. You breathe slowly in and out until you can no longer feel the separation between you and the water. You can no longer sense distance. Space begins to feel abstract.Your shoulders begin to relax, begin to fall and you are wearing the kelp like a shawl. Your arms drop at your sides and the long white birds perch on your wrists. You are on your back facing the sky, bobbing in the water, listening to the water lap on the rocks. You are on the edge of the cliff breathing and tingling. Sensation has risen up through you, through your sex, and as you let it back out, your head sways gently forward from your neck. This motion continues as you stand on the cliff rooted like the trees around you, allowing your breath to sway your body the way wind sways the limbs of trees. You are not afraid that the swaying motion will make you fall, because you have already let go. The water caught you, pulled you out, pushed you back, pulled you out again.       Anna Hawkins (EE), from Reaching Into Feeling - three sections of a thesis finding remnants of dissociated feeling What's missing? Self, hands, voice Having taken Tomas' reminder, What about pleasure? in hand, as well as having done much contemplation about simply letting go and following my studies where they seemed to naturally be leading, I became bold enough to change my focus to pleasure. My study plan for this semester was organized around deepening my emotional awareness and intuition through literature and a little feminism. I began with Carol Gilligan's appropriately titled Birth of Pleasure. Gilligan writes about the loss of self that occurs in girls around adolescence, and in boys around age four or five. This loss happens when the authentic feeling knowing self steps into the background; a self aligned with acceptable cultural mores steps into the foreground instead. Many haven't realized or distinguished clearly between the presence of these two selves. Carl Jung, however, perceived these two selves when he was quite young. Somewhere deep in the background I always knew that I was two persons. One was the son of my parents, who went to school and was less intelligent, attentive, hardworking, decent, and clean than many other boys. The other was grown up-old, in fact-sceptical[sic], mistrustful, remote from the world of men, but close to nature, the earth, the sun, the moon, the weather, all living creatures, and above all close to the night, to dreams, and to whatever "God" worked directly in him The play and counterplay between personalities No.1 and No.2, which has run through my whole life, has nothing to do with a "split" or dissociation in the ordinary medical sense. On the contrary, it is played out in every individual. In my life No.2 has been of prime importance, and I have always tried to make room for anything that wanted to come to me from within. He is a typical figure, but he is perceived only by the very few. Most people's conscious understanding is not sufficient to realize that he is also what they are (Memories 61-62). Now Gilligan would argue that indeed, this division of self is a dissociation. She defines dissociation as our ability to remain unconscious or unaware of what otherwise we know. Dissociation differs from denial in that denial signifies a kind of blindness or obtuseness in the face of the obvious-consequences of actions that we are fully aware of but would rather not face In dissociation, we literally don't know what we know; and the process of recovery, now illuminated by the biological and psychological studies of trauma, centers on the recovery of voice and, with it, the ability to tell one's story (169). I imagine that Gilligan might respond to Jung's "it has nothing to do with a 'split,' it is played out in every individual" with a "but that's just it why is it played out in everyone, because it is a cultural dissociation, a by-product of patriarchy." Our heavy emphasis on conformity and assimilation into our culture leads to a widespread disavowal of our authentic feeling function. In fact, the loss of the feeling function is so pervasive that myths have been written about this loss. Robert Johnson, a Jungian analyst, examines two myths that address the wounding of our feeling function in both the masculine and the feminine experience in The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden. The feminine myth of the handless maiden is the story of a miller who wanted greater riches, so he made an agreement with the devil, who provided him with a water wheel to increase his productivity; in exchange, the devil simply asked for "that which stands in back of the mill"(58). No problem, the miller thought, it's only an old tree, what a good deal I'm getting. However, on the day the devil comes to claim his fee, the miller's daughter is standing behind the mill. The devil chops off the daughter's hands in payment. The daughter's hands represent the feeling function, and the rest of the tale recounts the terrible loss that the daughter contends with as she goes through her life trying to make do without hands, or with false ones - cold silver false hands in this tale. Johnson tells us that a woman suffers "in her generative or creative faculty, when her feeling function is wounded"; it appears as an "inability to do"(55). The bargain that most of us unknowingly partake of in our culture specifically wounds this young feminine in us, which responds to loss with "moods, depression, a general sense of malaise"(63). Marianne Williamson corroborates this in A Woman's Worth. "As maidens, we were crushed. We were treated with suspicious looks at the very moment someone should have been turning up the applause", and "we are numb to our own creative juices"(42). It was during my third semester that I began to articulate further the numbness I first had perceived that night walking home in the snow. I wrote about this numb vagueness: I've often felt like I move around in a dazed trance and wonder if I am indeed living my life. I experience a feeling of disconnectedness sometimes, and I feel like there are levels of really consciously getting what I am experiencing that I am missing in some way, that there is more to my experience, more richness, more depth, more aliveness, more emotion, more awareness, that somehow eludes me, or to which I seem to be unable to wake. I feel sometimes like I am in that shady space of sleep, where I know I need to wake up, but am just so tired that I am unable to, though I can perceive that there is such a state as being awake apart from the state I am in. Sometimes if I wake during the night I have to look around and remind myself who I am, and where I am, and sometimes I feel a strange puzzlement, this is my life? Or I might be with my boyfriend, and I look at him loving me, maybe we're sitting together in a peaceful moment with a beautiful Hawaiian landscape around us, and I feel like an actor in my own life. The palms and the ocean seem like a backdrop, and I'm the main character, and my boyfriend is the stunning leading man. In these moments I want to feel more, I want to get it, I want to be in full consciousness and full feeling and full experiencing of the love I have for him, and of the love he has for me. I want to realize, this is my life, and this is my man. I want the rose and amber and lilac hues of the spectacular sunset to permeate my being, and change me somehow into a creature as alive as the trio of birds, who sweep and swoon and switch places in their varying triangular dance flight across the setting sun sky. And quotations like this one, by Anais Nin from her diary of 1931, so piqued my interest and caught my attention that I knew there was something vital about it for me: You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death Some never awaken. They are like the people who go to sleep in the snow and never awaken. But I am not in danger because my home, my garden, my beautiful life do not lull me. I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing (7). But I'm presenting to you an awareness that is more developed, in retrospect. I can order these glimmerings in a way that was not visible to me at the time. I read The Birth of Pleasure and I knew, and I felt, that I had stumbled upon a treasure, upon a very map of dissociation, but I couldn't have spoken exactly of how this dissociation was also mine. This was still slightly unconscious. I wrote my first paper of the semester about the theme of voice within Birth of Pleasure. I think voice was as close as I could come to naming feeling as being the real issue for me. Voice has been a steady subtle subject that has interested me for some time. I've noticed that my voice can be a meter to let me know where I am with myself. If it comes out high and I feel somewhat constricted in my chest and throat, then I know I'm nervous, trying hard to please someone or be something I think I should be, and I'm generally not at ease with myself or the person I am with for some reason. If I catch this, it is a powerful tool for self-awareness. I might notice that I think I'm going to be judged by this other person I'm talking with, and then I can realize that I'm probably judging myself. I can look at that belief and consider how and why I shaped it, hold it, and use it in that interaction. When I really say what I think, feel, and know, my voice comes from my chest, diaphragm, or belly. I'm not sure which one, just that my voice emanates from a deep place, and there is not the constricted-throat effort of my high voice. With my low voice sometimes I experience a fear of arrogance - that I know too much and will intimidate others by my knowledge or by my claim to knowledge. I'm not sure what this is. I think if it were truly arrogance, then it would be spoken by my throat and not by my chest. Maybe I just experience the fear that it is arrogance because of my reaction as a woman, my experience as a woman, my cultural teaching of how to be a woman, don't freak out the others, don't make a man insecure, don't be "too much." Don't be too much, don't make too much of yourself, those seem to hit the mark, are the phrases that whisper to my low voice to quiet, quiet yourself, don't say too much, don't be too much, that's enough, you don't really know. It's like if I hold the center stage for too long, my voice turns inward, a vacuum and fear set in. When the energy feels particularly high, one way of dispersing the energy is to conclude my brief soliloquies with an "I don't know." I realized this while reading Gilligan, and I think this will need to be a practice, watching out for the "I don't know's" and the "I'm not sure's." In these situations, maybe I've said what I really think, and the energy level feels too high and I feel too vulnerable for having put myself out there with my personal thoughts and opinions, and its safest to retreat to my other self, the one who isn't challenging to others, is unassuming, the one who "doesn't know." The "I don't know" is like a release of energy, a sigh of defeat, a sharp plunge downward from the coasting paraglide on the winds and wings of my own thoughts. Silence reigns after I've conceded defeat with an "I don't know." Would the energy remain high if I got to the end of what I knew, and instead of negating what I've said with an "I don't know", I said instead, simply, "that's as far as I have worked it out now?" I used Gilligan's technique of an "I" poem, which is when you string together all of the first person "I" statements from a recounting of an emotional situation. I found my own "I" poem, made from the previous two paragraphs, quite interesting. It succinctly captures my feelings and my flits in and out of knowing and feeling. Gilligan strings her "I" poems along with single "I" phrases to each line of verse, but I think the meaning of this "I" poem comes across even clearer if I combine the phrases like this: I've noticed I feel somewhat constricted: I know I'm nervous; I think I should be; I'm generally not at ease with myself. I am. I catch this. I might notice I think I'm going to be judged. I'm talking; I can realize I'm probably judging myself. I can look; I shaped it. I really say what I think, feel, and know. I'm not sure. I experience a fear of arrogance; I know too much. I'm not sure. I think. I just experience the fear; I hold the center stage "I don't know" I just realized I think "I don't know's" "I'm not sure's" I've said I really think I feel too vulnerable "I don't know" I've conceded defeat "I don't know" I got to the end I knew I said "I don't know" I said instead "I have worked it out now." Kristin Linklater, a woman Gilligan worked with on the "natural voice", says that the voice of the psyche speaks directly and indirectly, and is sometimes hidden within the structure of a sentence (Gilligan 8). Gilligan tells us that the "I don't know" and the "you know" showed a struggle for meaning which "was often a struggle with language: how to say what you mean and be heard and understood" and these phrases often pointed to imminent dissociation, when "psychically we separate ourselves from knowing what we cannot bear to know" (68). When I zeroed in on Gilligan's theme of "voice" within Birth of Pleasure, at some level I hadn't fully grasped that "voice" was somewhat synonymous with our feeling capacity. This unfully grasped fact shows me more of my own split-perhaps I needed my feeling function intact to perceive that when girls and women recover their voices, they are really recovering their ability to stay grounded in the truth of their feelings? Now, a year after reading Gilligan's book, I'm amazed I didn't understand her completely. How did I conceive of "voice", then? I conceived of voice as some aspect of soul, or self, our ability to speak what we knew, but the background of my conception was abstract, intellectual, removed, left-brained. I didn't grasp the colorful feeling nature of "voice." I danced around my incomplete understanding; I can see that by choosing "voice" as the theme of my paper, I was circling closer to my realization about recovering my feelings. And by my fascination with the sound aspect of voice, this also was a clue that I was looking for the music, the feeling toned notes, underneath my words, both my written words and spoken ones. I also remembered while reading Birth of Pleasure that many of my dreams in the past involved the damaging of my voice or throat. These dreams gathered themselves together while I read The Birth of Pleasure, as if to present themselves as evidence that a trauma around my voice (feeling) did indeed happen. My dreams seemed to support Gilligan's work - that my psyche did look at the loss of my voice as a major loss, a loss of a deep aspect of my essential Self. Indeed, when it was mentioned my first semester at Goddard that a common experience for students was ultimately to "find their voice," a part of me leapt, and it must have been that buried part of me that wanted to speak, who wanted to say what she knew and own the fact that she knew it. Here are two dreams that came to mind in connection with voice: 1. I'm with another woman and we're in some kind of tower, like an air traffic control tower. Danger, excitement, and tension is palpable, we are key figures in an important mission, we are being pursued by the "bad guys." A gunshot shatters the glass. My comrade is dead. My enemies burst through the door of the tower room. They decide not to kill me directly, but instead someone takes a knife and slashes my throat from the inside, several times, all over. Their intention is clear that I should not be able to talk. They leave as I feel my throat filling up with blood. I know that it will soon be so full of blood that I won't be able to breathe, and will die. Then my daughter, and her daughter, come into the room, as I continue feeling the blood in my throat. I cannot tell them what they need to know, but then I think with an 'aha', "but I can write." 2. I look out my window to the king and queen's castle across the way, and I learn or see something about them through the window that is a secret I must carefully guard. I know this is precious knowledge and I must give this information to the right person only. Strange disembodied voices come to me and ask for the information, but I refuse. They begin to offer me money for the information, in greater and greater amounts, but I know I must only tell the right person. Then the voices become sinister and demanding, and one of them jumps into my throat and begins strangling me from the inside for my knowledge. I am unable to breathe, I am choking. I hear a knock at my bedroom door - it is my parents, I hope they will come in and save me, but I have no voice to call out to them with. Instead, they stay outside the door, and my mother asks my father, is she drowning? These dreams of mine are violent. They seem to tell me that I was robbed, that I know how the trauma occurred, through culture and early upbringing, and that the loss of my feeling function means death of my integral self. Gilligan notes that the loss of voice is experienced as "the psychic core of traumatic experience: the loss of the ability to tell one's story", not through the loss of voice specifically, folk tales tell us, but because people "lose the desire or the courage or the will or the ability to use their voices to tell their stories" (223). This violent trauma robs us of our ability to express our innermost self, our feelingful self. We lose a particular aspect of soul, an inner self, a youthful self, an integral self who knows and feels more than our small acculturated self does. I can't help but recall the children's movie The Little Mermaid, whose beautiful heroine, with an even more beautiful voice, agrees to let the ugly octopus wench take her voice from her. The little mermaid's voice is pulled up and out of her, into the octopus. The mermaid's loss of voice feels to her like she has lost her soul. Gilligan writes that "the road to pleasure leads through weeping, being beaten, and occasionally finding oneself unable to speak, because it requires finding one's way out of patriarchy"(152). The Birth of Pleasure also introduced me to my first potent doses of feminist thinking. Much later I read Audre Lorde, who wrote in Sister Outsider that of course she was afraid to speak what she deeply knew, "because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger"(42). This makes me think that not only are we dealing with Gilligan's dissociation, we are also dealing with the inherent vulnerability we feel when accessing our feeling self. I recall the vulnerability and fear I found when examining my "I Poem." Its easy to avoid this self, because, Lorde says, "we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us"(44). My dreams of violence to my throat confirm for me the inescapability of Lorde's word choice in her last quote - the weight of our silence, of our repression of our feelings, will indeed choke us. A feminist understanding - aligning with the father When Gilligan speaks about Iphigenia, Agamemnon's daughter, who has a change of voice when she aligns herself with her father and speaks in acceptance of her own death-sacrifice, I was reminded of the times when I have taken on someone else's voice, someone else's point of view, and spoken it as mine. I have turned away from myself when speaking this other "truth", the more accepted one or the one that rationally appears to be the "right" one. Gilligan notes that during our initiation process into our culture, "a voice is seemingly lost or confused with another voice that finds more cultural resonance and thus carries more authority" (224). Gilligan tells us that the healthy psyche fights losing its voice, and thus those girls who keep their voice may lose relationships (107). I think I did the opposite; in order to keep what felt like very tenuous relationships, ties that could stand little confrontation, I buried my voice. Gilligan describes relationship losses during her adolescence that were further compounded when she discovered that her parents were not grasping her experience of loss. When Gilligan tells us how she reacted, "I remember submerging myself, as if I were a whale or a dolphin, a mammal that could live under water" (163), I was transported back to a similar dream I had during my adolescence. I am at the bottom of the deep end of a swimming pool. I might be dead, but I am awake and aware of myself. I look up through the water and see my parents, and other people, standing by the side of the pool looking down on me through the water. I just watch them looking at me through the water. This dream seems to tell me that I was submerged in emotions, drowning in them, in my own pool that my parents could only observe from dry land, and furthermore, this pool of emotions was "looked down upon." A recurring dream of mine in childhood featured a black caped magician suddenly entering through the window and demanding I give him my peanut butter sandwich that I kept inside a small wicker basket. He kept demanding, and I kept refusing, even though I didn't even like peanut butter sandwiches. Eventually the magician snatched the basket from my hand and disappeared, and I felt sad and robbed, primarily because of the loss of the basket. Perhaps this dream, in its urgent recurrence, was signaling the beginning of this cultural loss, as my magic, the magic of feeling, was taken into the hands of the masculine. It seems reminiscent of the miller's daughter losing her hands, in the way that the basket, something I held in my hands, was grabbed away from me. During my third semester, I realized that I had absorbed the cultural paradigm that men are more intelligent, that their products will be superior. I tended to value men's works - novels, theories, even songs - more than those of women. I hated to admit that I had done this; I detected certain slightly condescending attitudes in myself towards the work of women. But by my subtle sneering at my gender, I was hurting myself, damaging my self-confidence, and rejecting a major aspect of my essence. By accepting the cultural attitude towards women, albeit subtle today, I lost a large sense of myself, and placed myself in the position of always needing to prove myself and play "catch-up." I finally read Marianne Williamson's A Woman's Worth; I had never thought much of reading her, when I was still trying to assert my ability to be as much as a man ­ it's just a woman's book, I thought, I don't need that. But after my journeys through the marvelously intelligent world that women showed me during my third semester, I abashedly realized that I had thrown out whole worlds of insight with the feminine. Williamson echoed, through her personal realizations, my own new understanding: we thought we were being such good girls by developing our masculine side That's what we thought real worth, real power was. We came to see women - usually beginning with Mommy - as weak and ineffective, so we wanted to grow up and be just like Daddy" who "slapped his little girl on the back when she achieved something in the world, telling her how proud he was - and meaning it. He didn't know what to do with the girl stuff anyway, since the feelings it brought up inside him were so threatening (63). This attitude contributed a great deal, I think, to the grueling splits I found inside during my first semester between the "driver and rebel." Both aspects of myself seemed to be in line with the masculine inside of me, almost like a father-son dynamic. If I espoused being a woman, I found I had a lot more freedom in escaping from these male dynamics inside of me, that weren't serving me at all, only trying to force me into a male defensive pattern within which I didn't belong. Virginia Woolf helped me move towards my true feminine consciousness. At one point in A Room of One's Own, she asks, "where shall I find that elaborate study of the psychology of women by a woman?"(81). Gilligan was one of many women who later answered Virginia's call. I read A Room of One's Own after The Birth of Pleasure. It continued to develop a necessary feminist understanding within me, and it broadened Gilligan's very personal discussion of dissociation into a collective experience, in which the history of women has affected, enforced, and shaped the dissociation that we are talking about today. Woolf notes that when a woman emerges from her history of repression and tries to assert herself, she will have a defensive and self-protective mind. "Her mind must have been strained and her vitality lowered by the need of opposing this, of disproving that"(Room 57). And this would have affected women's writing: One has only to skim those old forgotten novels and listen to the tone of voice in which they are written to divine that the writer was meeting criticism; she was saying this by way of aggression, or by way of conciliation. She was admitting that she was 'only a woman,' or protesting that she was 'as good as a man.' She met that criticism as her temperament dictated, with docility and diffidence, or with anger and emphasis. She was thinking of something other than the thing itself. Down comes her book upon our heads. There was a flaw in the center of it (77). Virginia is saying that we must attend to our personal emotions, to the submerged feelings, in order to present a creative work ­ sometime in the future - from an objective perspective, without our personal "I" stories interfering and distracting. Anger, for instance - she finds that anger impaired the potential of Charlotte Bronte, who left her story, to which her entire devotion was due, to attend to some personal grievance We feel the influence of fear in it; just as we constantly feel an acidity which is the result of oppression, a buried suffering smouldering beneath her passion, a rancour which contracts those books, splendid as they are, with a spasm of pain(76). This is one of the reasons that Woolf so values her own five hundred pounds a year, which give her the "freedom to think of things in themselves"(39). She has watched her own mind go through a healing process, from slowly sloughing off rage and bitterness, then discarding the pity and acceptance, until her mind regained that pinky newness of thinking purely of things. Woolf tells us that when women try to use the tools of men, such as the masculine sentence, we are not being authentic to the feminine experience. Charlotte Bronte, though talented with her use of prose, "stumbled and fell with that clumsy weapon in her hands. George Eliot committed atrocities with it that beggar description. Jane Austen looked at it and laughed"(80), and then she conceived her own sentence, perfectly suited for her own self. Jane Austen and Emily Bronte were able to succeed because they stayed with the thing in itself and "wrote as women write"(78). They ignored the voice of their internalized judge who tried to dictate what would be within the established bounds of acceptability. And they succeeded even though they had no tradition behind them, for "we think back through our mothers if we are women"(79). Virginia was really espousing the idea that women be women, and so work in a manner suited to themselves. She wonders how education could pay attention to the differences between the sexes, how the novel could be adapted to the body, how women might need a shorter novel to account for interruptions, and how alternations between work and rest, rest not being a state of nothing, might be accounted for in a productive woman's day. We still have to create our own voice and our own writing; we have to develop a "prose style completely expressive" of our own mind (99). Regaining that pinky newness of thinking purely of things meant, for me, writing as a woman, in my whole self, and not just in a disconnected left brained manner. When I examined the writing of female authors like Woolf, Colette, or Doris Lessing, for example, I found such intricate emotional knowledge, such tracking of the inner movements of feeling that I was blown away. This was a major part of my reconnecting my feeling function - reading and understanding why their writing worked so well. Why did it had this lively embodied quality? I wrote this when I was working out my sense of the transformative effect of reading literature as opposed to theory: A deeper understanding of the felt sense, or whole-bodied knowing, was something I craved, and is what has transfixed, surprised, and shocked me when I read fiction. I am amazed at the depth of emotional knowing that is conveyed in a glance, a gesture, a fidgeting. A character suddenly has a deep insight into another's intentions from the slightest detail, or the smallest unconscious yet observed grimace. I have felt naïve when reading books like those of Woolf and Lessing. These authors convey emotional depth and perception in such a way that I am made to become aware, and I am made to admit that it is so, it is true what they say; if one is super-conscious and feeling in a situation, and observes acutely, one will understand those small clues which indicate a coming together of people, or a pulling away. I feel as if I am studying emotional awareness, perspicacity, and am shedding some emotional naivete. Naivete comes not from not-knowing, but from a refusal to know the depth of things, a sort of chosen ignorance. Perhaps it comes from a clinging to childishness on some level, to avoid the responsibility that deeply knowing brings. Perhaps naivete is a natural state that we slowly move out of into awareness. Or perhaps, sometimes, naivete is symptomatic of a split within us, a split between our sensory feelingful intelligence and our linguistic analytical mind. The blue gem-like fish dream I had another dream that seemed to foreshadow what I would write a month or so later about discovering some kind of childish emotional naivete. I dreamt that I was in the backyard of the house I lived in as a child, and a man showed me that a patch of rocks could be scraped away with my foot to reveal a pond underneath. A pond in my very own backyard? I asked myself incredulously. And I could fish there, and before too long, I had caught a beautiful bright blue gem-like fish, and I was surprised and very happy. I wasn't sure about getting it off the hook, though, and I hoped that my companion would show me how to do it again. But my feigned unknowing of how to take my fish off the hook actually covered up my dislike of unhooking the fish, and I knew that if I acted like I didn't know how, my male companion would take the fish off the hook one more time for me. My advisor helped me with this one; she said that Virginia Woolf, for example, understands and feels, both. The fish represents the feeling function. My dream was pointing to my reluctance to feel, and my desire for the man to feel for me, by taking it off the hook. This dream was consistent with my theme of third semester, to dip down into feeling and the feminine; however, I don't think I was really able to integrate it until later. When I first fell in love with John and he bravely read me his love poems on his knee beside my bed, I thought, oh he's more connected to feeling than I, he's more vulnerable, he's able to go further than I. And that was somewhat the shape of our dynamic - he was the poet, and I was the intellectual in school. Something seemed a little reversed. But when I began to sense that the intellect didn't hold ultimate satisfaction for me in my studies, and rerouted my course to fiction, I began regaining my own ostracized creativity again. And perhaps my dream of the blue gem-like fish was showing me my error; I could feel the slithery fish of feeling myself, I had only to own this and take the fish off the hook myself, instead of letting my man do it for me. My feminine side could fish, and catch, and then name what she has caught as well. Emma Jung, in Anima and Animus, describes the psychic figures of the inner masculine and inner feminine that we have within us. In Jungian psychology, men are said to have an inner female, an anima, while women have an animus, or an internal male figure. In traditional gender roles in relationships, projection can happen when the inner anima/animus image is transferred to another person along with all its corresponding activities, "so that a man to whom the animus image has been transferred is expected to take over all the functions that have remained undeveloped in the woman in question, whether the thinking function, or the power to act, or responsibility toward the outside world"(10). Similarly, the woman on whom the anima image is projected is expected to feel for the man and create relationships for him. A combination of our contemporary cultural valuation of a typically masculine cut-off intellection, an educational system that still uses more male-authored texts, my own natural predilection for being an intellectual thinker, and my having a brilliant father I wanted to emulate more than my mother and who told me I had "cognitive ability", all converged in me so that I was more comfortable in thinking, instead of having a flexible inner discourse between thinking and feeling. And John, the chef, the poet, the musician, was probably, at a certain level, running more creative feminine energy than I was. But my change of course in my studies signified a change in my responsibility to myself, to know and to understand and to feel. And my change of course was not something unusual. Emma Jung observes: "the problem of how to be a woman frequently arises in the midst of the most successful professional activity. Usually it appears in the form of dissatisfaction, as a need of personal, not merely objective values, a need for nature, and femininity in general"(41). Emma Jung's work also seems reminiscent of Gilligan's work, in that women feel a loss of self in our culture, and this loss is experienced as numbness, in my own personal experience, and as the loss of the ability to say what we know and feel on an intrinsic level. This loss of the feeling voice is reductive of our full experience. I have already spoken about how our psyches regard such loss as an actual trauma. Emma Jung writes that "depressions, general dissatisfaction, and loss of interest in life" result "when the feminine side is so overwhelmed and pushed into the background by the animus," and that these "are all intelligible symptoms pointing to the fact that one half of the personality is partly robbed of life by the encroachment of the animus"(13). And Jung proposes a solution. When a woman seems to be engaged in a masculine intellectual way of life, through a course of study or career, and the feminine is left out, what is necessary is "that feminine intellectuality, logos in the woman, should be so fitted into the nature and life of the woman that a harmonious cooperation between the feminine and masculine factors ensues and no part is condemned to a shadowy existence"(13). I think I was right to suspect that some of my difficulties in life were not necessarily individual; they could be located in coming to terms with the role of feeling within our current society. Carl Jung stated that what appeared to be a personal problem sometimes was really a collective problem. The "personal sphere is indeed disturbed" but this is not primary; "the cause of the disturbance is to be sought in the collective situation" (Memories 261). This is why we have myths like that of the handless maiden. And this is why Gilligan needed to write Birth of Pleasure, to point to the collectivity of this loss of the feeling function. The cutting off of the hands, the choking of the voice, the loss of the ability to name in a specifically feminine way, and my own tendency to look to others for the expression or definition of feelings - all of these aspects of dissociation of my feelingful self were becoming revealed as I naturally followed my deep interests in my studies, without thought of the future or a secured result. Now I can see that there definitely was a pattern underneath what I was learning.   next page