Eurydice's voice
OUTLINE:
I. Introduction
A confusion, a tension
Why it matters: the context of this work
II. Orpheus and Eurydice: the story
How it ends
History of the story
Since Ovid
When Orpheus is an alto
Inner people and story figures
III. Alternate organizations
Physiology of alternate states
Traumatized and defensive dissociations
Conflicting structures
IV. Love Woman and Work Woman / Eurydice and Orpheus
Driving competence: the woman warrior
'Animus possession'
Is Work Woman 'mind' as opposed to 'body'?
Work Woman's BITE
"I am tight": Work Woman unhappy
Love Woman: "beautiful and hidden, her shoulders
delicate and strong"
Love woman as soul
A crush on a femme: early love, early fear
In fairyland: enchanted and suspicious
Interested in the raw
Love Woman is worried about her mother
V. O maimed Eurydice: Love Woman as dissociated structure
Why Love Woman goes underground
Ordinary dissociated desire
Love Woman and Work Woman dissaffected
Suppression
Alternation/segregation
Ordinary unhappy roommates
VI. What needs to happen here
Working with their relation
Differentiating Love Woman and Work Woman
Advocating both, allowing and observing
Finding Love Woman if she's lost
Holding the tension
Giving the marriage a life in the world
Writing with Love Woman
VII. Eurydice's voice
Bibliography
Introduction
In what follows, unattributed quotations (except those
in the sections on Orpheus, where they are by anonymous web sources) are
from student writing 2002-2009.
I. Intro
What is this workshop about. A confusion and resource having
something to do with an aspect of femaleness. Conflicted relation to femaleness,
both in oneself and in the culture.
Something about music, something about being seized,
something about going into the dark, something about skill, something about
a couple separated into a lost one and a searcher.
In this workshop I have two ways into it:
- 1. A way of thinking about a contrast within womanness
that I've called Love Woman and Work Woman.
- 2. A myth that in this context is only partly relevant
but that I've used over many years as a way to feel the question:
-
- There's something about femaleness that goes under.
- And something missing it, looking for it.
A confusion, a tension
A young woman looking at two possibilities and feeling
a choice. Doing and being. Power and presence. Speaking and listening. Assertion
and attention.
- I was at a Women's Liberation conference in London, in
my early twenties, looking over the railing of a balcony in a big meeting
hall between sessions. Below, I saw a young woman kneeling in the aisle
talking to her friends. She was a thin-skinned pink blond, a bit slow and
heavy, and she had a quality I loved to see: she was feeling intensely
and naturally, she was the sort of girl whose skin would flush with everything
she felt. You could see she was continuously responsive, intensely present,
but as response not assertion. She was what one could call inward.
- At the conference there was another woman I loved to
see. She was a dark thin American, older, an honoured leader in the movement,
a public warrior, articulate, aggressive and engaged. Powerful. I knew
her name. Everyone did.
- I was a young woman looking for what I wanted to be:
a style in the world. I wanted to be both of them: privacy and power, fullness
and action. And yet I knew I couldn't be both. The girl whose being was
presence and feeling would have been terrified to make a public speech.
She would have had to force herself, and that in that forcing she would
have become thicker skinned, she would not have been able to go back to
blushing realness.
As I went on thinking about what to call the two ways of
being I had been holding in front of my eyes I was aware that the contrast
I was thinking about had for some while been called a contrast between femininity
and masculinity, and I knew I wasn't going to call it that. Both possibilities
are genuine female possibilities, and calling female assertion male has
been a way of intimidating women, shutting them down, keeping them out of
action and influence.
At the same time, looking at the blushing, feeling, resonating
girl and the tough warrior woman, it seemed to me there was something blind
about powerful action a sort of pushing ahead, willfully but insensitively,
where reserved perception continues to see and feel all the while.
This workshop is welling up out of my own quite charged
continuing confusion about the relation between these two forms of being.
Why it matters: the context of this work
The tension between these two states of being is a cultural
tension too. The confusion is central to something very large that we're
all part of, decisions about how we want to live, what's wrong with ways
our surrounding culture is organized.
We're in a remarkable historical era, in which, more and
more, women are in a position to work out revisions of our common culture
for the sake of everyone.
It is hard for younger women to realize that half a century
ago, in the 1950s and 1960s, even the smartest women believed they probably
were not as smart as men. It's shocking to remember that now, but most of
who we read and heard, the philosophers, the preachers, the journalists,
the professors, the politicians, were male, and these were men who themselves
believed they were smarter than any woman.
The women's movement has been truly radical in the sense
that it has more and more examined the roots. Writers in the movement more
and more have taught themselves and then taught us to stand outside the
common culture and ask what WE think of this and that question.
The other part of standing outside has been that we have
examined the common culture in light of its being a male construction: these
ideas are not universal ideas, they are male ideas. What are the
blind spots we can see in male systems? What needs fixing before common
culture will be better not only for women, but in general? Better: more
true, more suited to human flourishing.
There is a lot to do: it turns out that looked at in these
ways there are many things wrong with basic ideas in philosophy, science,
religion, art, romantic life, family life, community life, national life,
and on up. It is exciting to be working as a woman in this era just because
there is so much to do, and if we do our own work carefully and thoroughly
we are well placed to do it.
It is an exciting time to be working on these questions
also because there has been fine groundwork already done: we can work from
a strong lineage we can be proud of.
One of the things that is strong about it is just this,
that it has not given up on either the blushing girl or the driven, experienced
warrior-worker.
II. Orpheus and Eurydice: the story
This version is from the beginning of Book X of Ovid's
Metamorphoses, the Loeb edition translated by Miller.
In this scene Orpheus the poet has just married Eurydice,
who is his soul, that is, his younger and feeling self. The wedding is a
disaster. Eurydice, walking in a meadow with her friends, is bitten on the
ankle by a snake and dies, is carried to the underworld. Orpheus goes into
the underworld after her to plead with Hades and his consort Persephone
for the return of Eurydice to the upper world of life.
And through the insubstantial throngs
and the ghosts who had received burial, he came to Persephone and him who
rules those unlovely realms, lord of the shades. Then singing to the music
of his lyre, he said: "O ye divinities who rule the world which lies
beneath the earth, to which we all fall back who are born mortal, if it
is lawful and you permit me to lay aside all false and doubtful speech
and tell the simple truth: The cause of my journey is my wife, into whose
body a trodden serpent shot his poison and so snatched away her budding
years. I have desired strength to endure, and I will not deny that I have
tried to bear it. But Love has overcome me, a god well-known in the upper
world . By these fearsome places, by this huge void and these vast and
silent realms, I beg of you, unravel the fates of my Eurydice, too quickly
run. We are totally pledged to you and though we tarry on earth a little
while, slow or swift we speed to one abode. Hither we all make our way:
this is our final home; yours is the longest sway over the human race.
She also shall be yours to rule when of ripe age she shall have lived out
her allotted years. ."
As he spoke thus, accompanying his
words with the music of his lyre, the bloodless spirits wept . They called
Eurydice. She was among the new shades and came with steps halting from
her wound. Thus then the Thracian hero received his wife .
How it ends
The condition of Eurydice's return to life is that Orpheus
must lead her up out of the underworld without looking back. Somehow, at
the last moment, he fails to meet this condition. He sees her ghostly form
melting back into the darkness behind him.
In some versions of the story he is later torn to pieces
by a band of maenads wild, drunken women - and his severed head drifts
to the isle of Lesbos, where it continues to sing.
History of the story
Orpheus stories originate in the mountainous Greek kingdom
of Thrace; we have records of them from as far back as 530 BC, and Europe's
oldest surviving manuscript, dating to around 340 BC, contains a commentary
on an Orphic poem.
Orphic songs were part of practices in early Greek religion
said to be heavily influenced by Central Asian shamanic practices, and Orpheus
was considered a patron of music and poetry, more specifically of the enchanting
power of these arts.
Ovid's Metamorphoses is a narrative poem in fifteen
books completed in Rome in 8 AD, written in dactylic hexameter, the form
of ancient epic poems like the Iliad and the Odyssey, and
also of Virgil's contemporary epic, the Aeneid. Unlike these epics
it does not follow a hero through a series of adventures, but instead moves
associatively between stories from the vast mythic corpus of the Classical
world.
Several etymologies for the name Orpheus have been proposed. A probable suggestion
is that it is derived from a hypothetical PIE verb *orbhao-, "to
be deprived", from PIE *orbh-, "to put asunder, separate".
Cognates would include Greek orphe, "darkness", and Greek
orphanos, "fatherless, orphan", from which comes English
"orphan" by way of Latin. Orpheus would therefore be semantically
close to goao, "to lament, sing wildly, cast a spell",
uniting his seemingly disparate roles as disappointed lover, transgressive
musician and mystery-priest into a single lexical whole. The word "orphic"
is defined as mystic, fascinating and entrancing, and, probably, because
of the oracle of Orpheus, "orphic" can also signify "oracular".
-Wikipedia
Since Ovid
Ovid's Metamorphoses was the Classical work best
known to medieval writers and it strongly influenced medieval poetry. For
instance,
the tale of Orpheus was mixed with
Celtic fairy lore in the Middle English metrical romance Sir Orfeo. In this version, Sir Orfeo rescues
his wife from the King of Fairy, whose realm contains both the dead and
people thought to be dead but merely taken by the fairies.
At the same time, like other pagan sources, the stories
in the Metamorphoses were understood to be subversive of Christian
empire-building:
the poem's immense popularity in antiquity
and the Middle Ages belies the struggle for survival it faced in late antiquity.
"A dangerously pagan work", the Metamorphoses was fortunate to
survive Christianization, and the vitriolic voices of Augustine and Jerome,
who believed the only metamorphosis worth reading about was the transubstantiation.
Indeed an extremely concise, "inoffensive" prose summary of the
poem ("a metamorphosis-free Metamorphoses") manufactured in late
antiquity for Christian readers threatened to eclipse the poem itself.
The Renaissance was a revival of pagan attitudes of many
kinds, and the Metamorphoses in Renaissance translation was an important
source for Shakespeare, both for plots and for its non-Christian lightness
of attitude to nature and human relations. A Renaissance writer says "the
sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare."
The story of Orpheus and Eurydice then goes forward into
many forms of European creation, particularly painting, poetry and opera.
In the Divine Comedy Dante
sees the shade of Orpheus along with those of numerous other "virtuous
pagans" in Limbo.
In The Tale of Orpheus and
Erudices his Quene the northern Renaissance poet Robert Henryson created
an extended poetic treatment of the myth with distinctively Ovidian touches
and many references to music.
L'Orfeo, "one of the
earliest works recognized as an opera," was composed by Monteverdi
in 1607 in Mantua.
Glück's Italian opera Orfeo ed Euridice was
created in Vienna in 1762.
When Orpheus is an alto
All the versions I have described so far are created by
men and primarily interested in Orpheus rather than Eurydice.
The story of Eurydice may actually
be a late addition to the Orpheus myths. In particular, the name Eurudike ("she whose justice extends widely")
recalls cult-titles attached to Persephone.
My own sense of the Orpheus story as it has been understood
by men is that it is about the male artist who goes raging after an essential
lost part of himself but ends up leaving it in the dark; and about how both
the raging-after and the failing have something to do with wanting to be
compelling in his art rather than truly connected in his life.
The parts of the story that attract me are the image of
the girl going into the dark and an urgency about rescuing her. I had been
feeling out these aspects of the story for years when I discovered that
a later composer, Berlioz, had rewritten Glück's opera Orpheus ed
Euridice, in which Orpheus had been sung by a castrato or a counter
tenor, so that Orpheus was now being sung by a woman. (In fact there happens
to have been a big production of the opera at the Metropolitan Opera in
NYC last week, and Orpheus was sung by a very tall fat woman, Stephanie
Blythe, who got the best reviews of the production: "She owns the role
of Orfeo, singing with melting sound and integrity, and commanding the stage
with her impassioned yet dignified portrayal. Ms Blythe is the news.")
When I originally heard that Orpheus in Glück is now
a trouser role for a female alto, a light went on: of course! Both the lost
one and the searching one are women. I can read the story of Orpheus and
Eurydice as a story about Work Woman in search of Love Woman, and when it
is a story about these two aspects of a single women I have reasons to suspect
that the story might end differently.
Inner people and story figures
Myth is a way of talking about significant
psychological facts that allows us to recognize them without yet understanding
them well.
There are many ways of understanding myths and dreams,
but for the purposes of this workshop, mythological figures and dream people
are a way of talking about psychological facts rather than real people from
daily life. They can actually be facts about alternative structural organizations
within a single body, but dreams and stories seem to like to talk about
them using a metaphor of separate persons and their relations with each
other.
The structures I call Love Woman and Work Woman are not
the only structures women's dreams and stories can talk about. Others I'm
familiar with are children, various kinds of men, particularly the artistic
man Jung called animus, and a nonconscious larger self. There are also many
more minor characters.
What I'm mainly wanting to suggest here is that when we
want to know what's going on with us, it's always worth noticing how dream
people as aspects of ourselves - are relating to each other; and noticing
which story characters and which plot lines attract us.
I have often found that when students are indecisive or
stuck or somehow dissatisfied with their work, it is worth investigating
conflicts between their internal people.
There are different ways of working with these conflicts,
and I'll come to that later. First I want to talk a little more about what
the physiological meaning of inner people might be, and then about the particular
couple of inner people I call Love Woman and Work Woman.
III. Alternate organizations
We sometimes talk about ourselves as having different voices
in our writing or different personae in our social lives. We might notice
that our handwriting changes from large and round to small and tight. We
might notice that we suddenly look different if we fall in love or fall
into depression. We can learn to see that our friends are quite different
at different times. We may notice that we have different interests and a
different kind of energy if we take certain kinds of drugs. All of these
shifts are physical shifts - changes of something about the physical structures
of our bodies changes in how the minute parts of our bodies are organized.
There are five points I want to make here:
1. Bodies are capable of small or even very large shifts
of state.
2. These shifts of state can almost amount to different
personalities. That is, a physical/psychological state of a human body
is a motive system: it's a way of being interested in and energized in
relation to one kind of thing rather than another. It is a way of being
organized to want one kind of thing rather than another, or want
to be involved in one kind of action rather than another. These different
motive systems can be different styles of perception, different strengths
and vulnerabilities.
3. We can be conscious of small shifts in our motive states,
like mood changes for instance. It can also happen that states can alternate
and we don't notice, 'I' just identifies as the I of whatever state is
happening at the moment.
4. And it can also happen that we can have more than one
motive system going on at the same time. When this happens, most
of the time one of these motive systems is not conscious. It can be
active and influential without our being able to know it's there, although
we can learn to recognize signs of it indirectly.
5. Over time, we can rebuild ourselves as a structure
that is more stable as it shifts - that is, more widely connected and more
able to recognize shifts as such. (The Sufis and Gurdjieff talk about the
work of developing this stable larger self.)
In my experience dream and story persons can be ways the
whole body talks about its own array of possible and actual motive systems
and their relations to each other.
Physiology of alternate states
I don't want to spend much time on the question of how
these alternative motive states happen physiologically, but I'll just mention
a couple of kinds of structuring influences that might be involved.
One of the things that's known about the ethology of animals
who live in social groups - humans included - is that pheromones scent
chemicals given off by some members of a group will influence the
physiology of other members of the group. In many mammal groups for instance
a female in estrus gives off scents that drive adult males into aggressive
states where they fight each other. When individuals take up different dominance
roles in the group, they are found to have different levels of certain hormones.
- Hormones and other neurotransmitter systems
Hormones are potent state-shifting drugs. On days when
Wall Street traders are making more money, their testosterone levels shoot
up and they take more risks. When women's estrogen levels are high they
go to work in sexier clothes and are more sensitive to touch. Estrogen is
involved in the creation of oxytocin, which powerfully influences love and
attachment.
I take just enough estrogen so I can
have gentle feelings of empathy but not enough to drive my nervous system
into hypersensitivity and anxiety attacks. Temple
Grandin
- Sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems
- Belly brain and head brain
- Hemispheric specialization
You probably already know about the differences between
language and non-language hemispheres in human cortex.
The non-language hemisphere, which is often the right,
is more in touch with emotion, humor, metaphor, somatic sensation for the
whole body, sensing and acting in the here and now. This hemisphere has
earlier memory and earlier speech.
The other hemisphere, often the left, is more adapted to
fine manual skill, focused detailed perception, and trained cultural skills
including language. Its circuits are tighter and faster.
Relations between these two hemisphere happen through several
large bundles of connections, one between frontal parts of the cortex, and
one between those further back. At any given time relations between the
hemispheres can be cooperative or inhibitory in different combinations.
People and their momentary states differ in the degree
to which one or the other or both hemispheres are included in conscious
subnet.
There can be traumatized dissociations between left and
right hemispheres. The language hemisphere for instance might hype itself
in order to suppress feeling or childhood memory evocable in the nonlanguage
hemisphere.
Besides switching into nonfeeling language circuits there
are also many other ways to structure traumatized structural dissociations,
for instance:
- 1. feeling and action are suppressed, maybe at the level
of the synapse
- 2. feeling (and maybe behaviour) is active but assigned
to fantasy rather than something in one's real situation
- 3. feeling (and maybe behaviour) is active but it isn't
connected to perception of what it's really about, it's switched to seem
to be about oneself - retroflection
- 4. feeling (and maybe behaviour) is active that's really
about oneself but switched to seem to be about someone else - projection
- 5. feeling (and relevant behaviour) is overridden by
setting up behaviour of some irrelevant kind distraction
Conflicting structures
When motive systems alternate in relation to some ongoing
task like our studies or a love affair we are in conflict about those
tasks. We can't settle down to succeeding in them because we keep changing
our mind about what we want and what we think.
When more than one motive system is active at the same
time when we are physically organized to want and be interested in
different kinds of things at the same time one of these motive
systems being nonconscious - then there can be mysterious self-sabotage,
and all kinds of mysterious dissatisfaction and failure.
Needless to say I have learned about this stuff from personal
experience.
IV. A couple of women
So: Love Woman and Work Woman - Eurydice the soprano and
Orpheus the alto.
When I've worked with students we might find different
names for alternative structures as they find them in themselves. Some of
their names have been:
- Clinical Voice and Embodiment Voice
- Executive and Bliss
- Rational Management and Glow
- School Woman and Love Woman
- Me2 and Me1
The first thing to say about the two of them is that in
their present forms in us they may be immature. One might be more formed,
less raw, than the other, but my guess is that they need to be in good relation
with each other for either of them to be truly mature.
I'm making a point of this because we need to distinguish
between their relative maturity and their essential character.
Here's an example of my own: when I first distinguished
the two of them Love Woman was an overwhelmed beauty and Work Woman was
a cut-off competence. But Love Woman is not essentially overwhelmed
although I think she is essentially somehow beautiful - and Work Woman
is not essentially cut off although I think she is essentially about
competence.
To get at their more essential character as I discover
it in myself I'll bring back the image I began with, the fine-skinned rosy
girl and the cultural warrior. Connection and assertion. Immediacy, bodily
presence, the lively welling-up of the moment, versus goals that takes us
away from body and the present. Something like that.
I started thinking about the two of them because I was
in conflict about them: ie because they were conflicting structures
in me.
For instance Love Woman would fall in love with people
Work Woman did not approve of Work Woman basically did not want to
be in love at all. Love Woman wanted to have a baby when Work Woman wanted
nothing less. Love Woman when she did fall in love had a whole kit of romantic
illusions Work Woman could see through but somehow couldn't forestall.
Love Woman is prettier, more instinctual and emotional
and much less focused than Work Woman. In me she has rounder handwriting,
is moonier, swarmier, sweeter. She's a whole well of feeling and images.
In me she's fugitive; she'll take fright and vanish in an instant.
In some people Work Woman is the one who lurks out of sight.
In me she is the default. She's driven and focused, has small tight handwriting.
My sweetie can tell the difference at a glance. He'll say
"I haven't seen Love Woman for months."
At her highest pitch, writing philosophy papers, I've called
Work Woman Helicopter Gorgon Lady. She's kind of ugly but she doesn't care.
All she wants is to be deep in work, and the work has to be good at any
cost.
I'm much clearer about Work Woman than I am about Love
Woman, I think you'll notice that. I grope around when I talk about Love
Woman.
I should also say that I mainly can only talk about my
own experience here when I describe the two of them: you will need to come
up with your own versions.
Work Woman: driving competence, the woman warrior
What I call Work Woman is intellectual and focused and
very clear and judgmental. Ambitious. Interested. She has strategy, focus,
articulation, drive, a goal. She is interested in power and success, expertise,
command, effect. She has things to do. She overrides the upwelling moment
in favor of an intention, a willed act. When I'm her, there's a feeling
of effort right here: like a thumb pressing on the bit of forehead between
my eyebrows.
Work Woman is cultural: she has formed herself in the social
world, often the institutional world: school, business, politics, many but
not all kinds of art.
Is Work Woman male? In the old masculinist philosophies
'male' and 'female' tend to be used to describe any kind of polarized description.
Jung (1875-1961) talked about animus in women, and thought of animus as
a kind of masculinity. So did Emma Jung.
We could say Work Woman male-ish, but even that gives away
too much. The contrast I'm talking about might be nothing to do with gender;
it might exist in the same way in men as in women.
'Animus possession'
At the same time it is definitely true that Work Woman
can be too interested in impressing men and/or competing with them. Jung
and Emma Jung talked about animus possession, by which they meant cut-off
intellection, ungrounded abstract generalization, derivative intellectual
mediocrity, shallow judgmentalism. I've seen animus-possession as a sort
of compulsive intellection without traction, done instead of feeling. I
know it in myself and in other women too. It's the sort of inferior thinking
function Jung ascribes to women. But let's not forget that this kind of
tractionless thinking is very common in men look at all the guys disputing
about theological points or flying saucers, or immersing themselves in the
fine points of model trains and WWII bombers: dogmatic men, crank men, doctrinal
men. Animus-possession indeed.
Jung had no feminist vocabulary. What if we say, instead
of animus possession, internalized patriarchy. Then an animus-possessed
woman would be one who is not paying attention to the way her education
or theory or working conditions are misogynistic, actively attacking her.
She just blindly tries to go along with everything and succeed. She seems
masculine because she is cut off the way patriarchal men are. Her thinking
and acting isn't happening in her own interests, or in those of other women.
It isn't happening from her own ground. But in our own century, in which
there is the beginning of a formed lineage of women's intellectual culture,
Work Woman can be a feminist who consciously distinguishes her point of
view from that of men. The thinking of this kind of mature Work Woman is
not male thinking because it is not thinking that is conducted against her
own interests.
Is Work Woman 'mind' as opposed to 'body'?
I see my mind the locus of control,
the rational, the masculine, the correct, the reasonable; my body is the
feminine, the unpredictable, the unexpected, that which must be controlled.
It is hilarious for me to see these words coming out on the page in this
way
By 'mind' in the above passage, I meant
that sense of self or observer that seems to be inside the physical boundaries
of this body, who sometimes shares common desires with the body and sometimes
shares opposing desires.
Sort of, but we need to remember mind is something a body
does. Will is something a body does. A goal is something a body does. Work
woman overrides the felt moment, and so she overrides much of what is happening
in body, but she is a bodily structure. She does what she does by means
of body. She is a bodily skill.
Work Woman's BITE
Work Woman also is not purely intellectual.
realization that if I don't push myself
through this stage this time I WILL NOT MOVE on in my life.
I really am the ONLY one who can change
this pattern of behavior.
It is now obvious to me that I need
empowerment. I lack (am impoverished for) the kind of validation in my
life that strengthens my identity. I need to take on a challenge, an endeavor
whose achievement will increase my personal confidence and bring social
respect for who I am.
Launching a project, competing, fighting to take a big
chunk out of a market, even deciding on an MA project they all require
a certain BITE. A willingness to say, Here I am and I'm going to do what
I want and I am going to do it whether you like it or not.
"I am tight" - Work Woman unhappy
I found everything that Gilligan talked
about, the dissociation from the body and the knowing and the pleasure
It is a particularly tormenting anguish
to have put myself in charge of my happiness (as I know intellectually
that's the right answer) but then to not allow myself happiness until I
jump through the hoops of someone else's standards taken on as my own.
A perfect body, a perfect love, a perfect showcase for my talents.
I feel shiny inside. teary and bright.
I think that in this dim light coming from somewhere, I think maybe it
is coming from me. I was thinking today about how sometimes I don't feel
things like others do and I wonder what is the matter with me. Why am I
not moved like this person. Why do I feel nothing? It occurred to me that
I am moved. I am feeling. I am probably moved to tears - on the inside
but my restrictions, I hinder myself. I get uncomfortable when people express
too much emotion because I myself am uncomfortable expressing emotion.
I am tight.
I do this I lose the fluidity, the
honesty, the life, and not to mention it is a stiflingly long process to
attempt to write in a dishonest voice
the tension between the "I"
voice that speaks from human emotional experience, and a voice that overrides
what we know and feel and experience, that tells us what we should see
and feel and know
Love Woman: "beautiful and hidden, her shoulders
delicate and strong"
I sat on my worn couch, and stared
through the iron bars on the window. I smoked cigarettes and watched as
black bird after black bird took to the tree outside my window. The branches
were heavy with them, huge black birds cawing and talking to one another.
There was a young woman in a purple veil walking in the garden across the
street. She was beautiful and hidden, her shoulders delicate and strong.
She was watching the birds also.
Who is Love Woman? A lot of aspects, not well sorted:
The blushing girl feeling everything around her.
Innocent instinct - raw body as in mad love, sexual
dilation, getting pregnant, giving birth, falling in love with one's children.
The crisis of hormonal takeover, the chemistries of being seized by instinct.
What wildness means then: fear, hope, adoration, self division, instability,
uncontrol. Beauty, terror, hope, joy, pain, excruciating uncertainty.
The goddess. Rapturous Aphrodite. Seduction voluntary
and involuntary.
The oh so foolish one.
The longing to shamelessly adore. The catastrophic inconvenience
of that longing.
The moments when we do unguardedly adore. Those moments
we always want back.
The silent. The nonverbal. The silence of absorption.
Love eyes. Steeping in color.
Elfshining woman, water woman.
The senses vivid. Images, music.
Was seeing the ocean her?
The dark woman who sings with me.
Something about the interior of earth, bright and dark.
The Lady of the Beasts. The beast in the lady. The ravenous
womb that feeds us kindly and then grinds us up and spits us out. The womb
in us that blazes up with such ferocious intention to conceive it gets
us pregnant when that's the last thing we think we want.
You see how she is a very different rhythm.
These desires for him are the most
base of urges.
It is beyond reason; it is beyond the
calculated values that we have so carefully crafted. It is tender, it is
epic, and it is without apology. It is utterly unreasonable and unspeakably
delicious.
I can barely be in a three foot radius
of him without every nerve lighting on fire. I can look at these urges
and say, "They are perfectly ordinary, absolutely biological. I am
of child bearing age; he is the technical alpha male of our clan. These
urges are no mystery, no magic. It is purely physical, absolutely explainable."
She has the terrifying possibility of getting turned on
by unsafety, by violence, by strangers, by bad things.
My body responded with arousal. I got
off the plane and came home to Cathy and was afraid to hug her because
I was afraid of my body. I never saw this connection before: I was afraid of my body.
All kinds of suppressed or undeveloped or unacknowledged
knowledge.
Somehow a source of health, because she is rooted in the
early and in openness.
When people get sentimental about her they may want to
call her a virgin. Not so much. When she's preyed upon she can be too complicit.
She can be royally furious, a hell-cat.
Love Woman as soul
She's like Jung's anima that he names as the soul
in men.
My Guardian spirit in the shape of
a soul stirring beauty.
A young woman with dark and rather
disordered hair and eyes who spoke more beauty than earth inherits came
up to me in a familiar way and leaning her witching face over my shoulder
spoke in a witching voice and cherishing smiles, sentences that I cannot
recollect.
John Clare's journal October 13, 1832
But she's our soul too. It's not surprising that
this should be so, because, in early love, women are as profoundly imprinted
by a woman as men are; images of love women are utterly captivating to us.
In our dreams they have the same relation to feeling and instinct as in
men's.
Eurydice the vanishing one, vanishing into the unconscious.
Eurydice the longed for. Eurydice the poet's muse, the
lyrical.
A touchy creature, easily hurt. She flees. Beneath the
mountain, beneath the sea.
Sometimes she seems to be the underworld itself.
Some deep deep root into early love, when we could need
our mother without shame and drank her in with perfect satisfaction.
Isn't the desire for relationships
of simplicity an innocent desire, a young desire? Don't we (also) all want
that? Isn't the desire to love and be loved by a young woman a desire to
be what we were when our mother was a young woman and a beautiful beneficence?
Infant innocence, "a cool palm
of shadow rested a moment on cheeks warm from sleep."
A crush on a femme: early love, early fear
The ambiguity of the femme role among lesbians and het
friends: our vulnerability to that image and our anger at its power. It's
primal. It's a fast chute into early love.
When I started to have sex with women
in my early thirties I touched into a level of lust never imagined before.
It was also a level of comprehensive danger. Women could hurt me much more
than men could. Women can demolish
me.
-
I also had a series of nightmares that
Cathy (my ex, my best friend) was leaving me.
I concluded that in these dreams Cathy
represented my open heartedness and/or the part of myself that loves me,
that I felt I had almost lost and was terrified of losing for good.
-
Back in the water, we didn't need words.
It was just completely perfect with only small words back and forth. Small
little touches and small little words. Sounds that weren't even words.
Back and forth. The night sounds we were surrounded by; it spoke for us.
Your intensity frightens me some. In
my life, there are many intensities, but there aren't many calm, quiet
intensities like you. I want to nuzzle into you. Because you are always
warm and your smell comforts me. You've seen me. In light not many others
have.
I am writing this, and I feel like
my words are small stones sinking to the bottom. Have you closed your windows?
Please write and tell me you are still there. If you are.
All the things that I am drawn to in
my life, I am afraid of right now. The sensation of longing - it pushes
everything else off the table. There's something else too. You woke me
up. I'm awake and my day to day alarms me. As if I am wearing lead boots
or something. When I'm awake, I'm aware of myself wearing lead boots. Everything
seems to happen in slow motion, and I get impatient.
ease into what I truly want for myself
I won't be safe if I do that. I'll be alone, and I won't find my people
selfish a waste of time I'm just going
to get hurt. I don't know how, and I am too tired I'll have nothing to
show for it. I'll struggle.
In fairyland: enchanted and suspicious
ability to trust what they felt and
to say what they saw
as if the human emotional world were
transparent
feelings of joy and hope and ecstasy
joy of fantasy
imagined my mermaid being touched by
wings
A charmed life uses the five senses
all the time. It feels words, and sees sound, and touches taste. It wells
up with tears and laughter and ecstasy daily, if not from moment to moment.
It watches a tree and sees growth. It lies on a bed of moss and hears the
ants whispering. It lives in a jar of fireflies. Someplace: convent, castle,
railroad station, and boathouse, schoolhouse, brothel, at 14,000 feet or
underwater. In things of dragon and nymph, snow and rain, peonies and lilacs,
orange raspberries and champagne, bread and cheese, thorns and sharp grasses,
crickets, opium and jazz
I guess enchantment is about indulgence,
luxury, sin?, addiction?, escape.
fairies to Blake were "natural"
and "creative" joys
previously fairies had demonic energies
and powers
something very uncomfortable about
the faery proclivity self-absorbent, fanciful, ornate, sticky with excess
this is bothering me
REALLY. Is it worthy?
I need to find a point of entry into
this subject, or else leave it. Is it really fairy that is intriguing me,
or is it the means of escape and of belief in the muse (as sometimes manifested
through fantasy) as savior?
Interested in the raw
I am uninterested in the tiny winged
guiding light, I am interested in the raw.
inspiration, challenge, love, fear
The time I am interested in is dark,
lush, deep crimson and mahogany, uninhibited
darkly mischievous and perversely erotic
vivid and sinister
a "grotesquerie of the erotic"
associated with the battle against
the age of reason and its offspring, neoclassicism
Love Woman is worried about her mother
When we're adorable little girls and then again when we're
lush adolescents we can get into powerful but covert competition with our
mothers. When we're little our girlness has a loving freedom her womanness
has given up. When we're adolescents we gain sexual power that is at her
expense, because her star is going down as ours is rising. Freud emphasizes
the root of this competition of mother and daughter in early childhood,
but the competition really comes to a crisis when we get bodies that interest
people.
If we start by saying somewhat neutrally that at adolescence
girls begin to be anxious about their bodies (and express this anxiety in
various ways, shopping, eating disorders, etc), and that this anxiety is
in some unconscious way connected with their mothers, maybe we can then
take a step toward the much more threatening realization of intense conflict:
as women we want to triumph over our mother and as the children we continue
to be we want above all to continue in her care.
It's older women who enforce clitordectomy.
Our mothers create us and then they drop us. One way or
another.
There's a darkness here, powerful and confounding.
V. O maimed Eurydice: Love Woman as
dissociated structure
came with steps halting from her wound
Ovid Metamorphoses
dissociation our ability to separate
ourselves from parts of ourselves, to create a split within ourselves so
that we can know and also not know what we know, feel and yet not feel
our feelings
Gilligan Birth of pleasure
I tried to go into my body, and I was
slammed, at a visceral level, with how much sadness and longing I found
inside. It's a black pool of pain.
When we are traumatized, the body doesn't
feel like a safe place. It feels like a dangerous place.
-
dream in which I looked at myself in
the mirror and instead of seeing my face saw the face of a character for
whom passionate relationship is a priority. I said to my reflection, "Who
are you?" And I (or my reflection) started screaming in a scratchy
voice, "I hate you, I hate you, I hate you".
-
pleasure once associated with
vitality, with love, with light, and with life becomes the marker
of the bad woman.
Why Love Woman goes underground
Her mother will drop her if she wins.
She is fascinating but disrespected. Her image is used
to sell beer.
Men adore her, prey on her, hate her if they're thwarted.
In places they fear her so much they require her to be veiled. In places
they fear her so much they require her to impersonate herself in whorish
fashion, rather than being real and a self.
Her desires can humiliate her, bring her to calamity if
they're allowed.
She is vulnerable to unspeakable abuse.
Ordinary dissociated desire
School Woman acts to suppress Love
Woman, and I think that can tend to happen where school/work/social success
is concerned.
Aren't there contradictions built into evolved bodies?
We can badly want true values that are incompatible with each other. Wanting
to be compellingly attractive and wanting to be safe. Wanting to have kids
and wanting to stay free. Wanting sexual adventure and wanting security.
Love Woman is in the middle of these contradictions.
Evolution works for the species not the individual. We
are structured by evolution to want and do things that aren't necessarily
in our own interest, and at the same time we are also able to think vigorously
about what IS in our own interest. For example, females are evolved to get
pregnant early and often. We override that for excellent reasons, and it
may be that the WAY we override it is by making some of our evolved structure
unconscious.
The New York Times weekend magazine (January 25
2009 p28) had a piece on female desire that reported an experiment in which
groups of men and women were investigated to see what turned them on and
whether they know they are turned on when a physiological measure says they
are. The experimental subjects were shown video of het sex, male-male, female-female,
bonobos, a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a nude woman exercising,
and an unaroused nude man walking on a beach. Subjects reported whether
they thought they were aroused by pushing buttons, and at the same time
genital bloodflow was being measured.
Men gay or straight, even male to female trans, were found
to be aroused categorically ie same or opposite sex, depending on
their orientation; they were not aroused seeing the bonobos; and their report
of whether they were aroused or not correlated with whatever the physiological
measure said.
Women, though, were aroused across categories (ie by all
the scenarios except the unaroused nude man), AND their subjective report,
especially in straight women, was completely uncorrelated with what vaginal
bloodflow said.
The researcher called this a split between women's bodies
and minds, and suggested there are maybe two "truly separate, if inscrutably
overlapping, desire systems, the physiological and the subjective,"
a "difference between reflexive sexual readiness and desire."
If we don't accept a body/self split, what to make of these
results? Some variation of alternative systems, one of which is nonconscious.
Maybe something about an evolved tendency in women to dissociate desire
they have pragmatic or trained reasons to disapprove a practical tendency
to dissociate Love Woman's inconvenient desire?
When Love Woman is a dissociated structure, she might be
being held unconscious in any of the physiological ways I described earlier.
she is ravenous, she is sexual, she
is me and I am terrified.
The capture and chaining of a beautiful,
free, and feminine girl-woman played out in my fantasy life the drama of
her (my) capture and containment rejected, judged, chained and punished
she is what I fear, what I see as outside
myself, and what I judge, but also because she has become intertwined with
my true dark side
Love Woman and Work Woman disaffected
When Love Woman is dissociated, what are some of the ways
their relation plays out? Here are three possibilities.
1. Outright suppression
Orpheus comes out of the underworld
a singer, but Euridice dies back into the underworld.
Work Woman conscious, aspects of Love Woman nonconscious.
(Or vice versa.) It's like the moon at the waning or waxing half: both sides
are always there but one half is in the dark, visible only if you look well.
Students in whom Work Woman is mostly suppressed might
be full of feeling but lack organization, focus, ambition. If they are artists
they might lack technical care, theoretical knowledge and drive.
Students in whom Love Woman is mostly suppressed might
be good with scholarly apparatus but lack a felt personal viewpoint so both
their work and their human connections feel dry. In artists the work might
be theoretical rather than sensory.
Some of the things that can happen when one or the other
is mostly suppressed, are:
Projection for instance
a friend or lover or daughter or movie star or artist is seen as being (one's
own suppressed) Love Woman.
Symbolization a suppressed
Love Woman is allowed to feel only in art or poetry or religion or mythic
stories
the self that took the veil, and left
the world somehow beautiful as it flits with its lantern restlessly up
and down the dark corridors
we often turn to loving images
Subversion like
getting pregnant 'accidentally' or blowing an interview for Work Woman's
kind of job.
2. Alternation/segregation
Bliss to Executive: During the workday,
you have full reign. In the evenings and on weekends, I have full reign.
In this exchange Bliss and Executive have come to an arrangement
like a traditional marriage. Executive works outside the home and Bliss
is the domestic partner. That can seem to work: they don't understand each
other but they stay out of each other's way.
This strategy falls apart when there are large decisions
that affect the whole life. Deadlock. Indecision. Vacillation. What one
decides the other undecides.
I am not able to reconcile two very
important and different concepts that have to do with who I am.
3. Ordinary unhappy roommates
They're both around but in a disorganized unacknowledged
way. In dialogue they misunderstand each other, resent each other, vilify
each other to various degrees - 'self-hate' that peculiar commonplace.
Love Woman may be diffident, defiant, whiney, miserable.
Work Woman may be overbearing, boring, stymied, callous.
Love Woman may be exploited by Work Woman, particularly
in artists.
Love Woman may be gutless, unable to stand her ground
even in what most concerns her.
Some kinds of instance:
Work Woman complaining of Love Woman:
You're never happy, I've worked hard
for you, you're going on a tangent, settle down, you're going to ruin everything,
you're crazy, look how successful I am, you're weak and don't have anything
to offer, come to terms, you'll only get hurt.
Love Woman complaining of Work Woman:
an authoritative and dismissive voice
that interjected "This is dumb. Dumb! Stop this! What's the point
in this?"
This voice tells me it's not all about
me and I sound like it is.
When this voice comes out, I often
find I also start to feel agitated and sick.
angry at being ignored, lonely, and
felt left behind
The anger I found, and still find at
times, I now see having its home in that sadness and sense of loss. It
is an anger that wants to be rescued, saved, cherished, loved and protected.
It took me only minutes to fill an
entire page with a list of things I was angry about.
Work Woman speaks and Love Woman isn't impressed:
Executive: I do need to be assured
that certain of the values important to me will continue to be of importance
in the endeavors we tackle. In particular, they are that 1. my search for
truth be integral to the project, 2. we work within an ideological framework
that has meaning, 3. my expectations of quality be supported, and 4. the
work itself make a positive difference in the lives of others.
Bliss: Executive's words seemed more
stale, old and not as believable. When I read [his] words I feel the passion
in [his] need for challenges, but because of [his] fear, the words aren't
as powerful.
Love Woman here is right about the pompous tone but what
Work Woman wants can be more useful to her than she's admitting.
I'm scared when I get in a situation
that would allow me to have an intellectual discussion. I lose my confidence.
I compare myself to others whom I admire
but I really don't want to compete.
An overbearing Work Woman freaking out:
It makes me so fucking mad. Mad at
myself for being sub-par. Underdeveloped, stifled, empty.
I don't want to produce un-sophisticated
art. I don't want to struggle through the next however many years producing
crap. I want to be my best. NOW. I mean to say, I love growth, and I'm
appreciating learning more year after year, and learning that I know absolutely
nothing about anything. But I don't want the production (the artistic manifestations)
to be evident of this. I don't want anyone to have proof of my lack of
sophistication.
I m supposed to be allowing myself
a voice the one that disappeared with childhood. I want that voice. But
can I not express it as an aged wisdom? Can't I be the best? And why is
it OK to produce, between now and wisdom, crap. And why do I think I'll
ever produce anything but crap? Should I even be bothering? And how embarrassing,
the thought that I'll display my work, and others will look at it, and
see right through it see that I've no wisdom.
VI. What needs to happen here?
They need to love each other and work it out.
Work Woman is alarmed by Love Woman's immaturity. That
is: Work Woman is herself immature. Work Woman is afraid of collapsing into
Love woman but that's because she doesn't have much experience of responsibility,
of supporting someone vulnerable. She will be less frightened if she does
that faithfully for a while.
There is an important difference between becoming Love
Woman and being her facilitator or collaborator.
To become mature, Work Woman has to adopt goodwill. She
needs to assume that Love Woman makes sense, that she is what she is for
good reasons, and then she needs to LEARN her. Track her, find out where
she is, what she wants. Accept that maybe she's too young to make sophisticated
work or choose lovers wisely, but think how to help her get there from where
she is now.
This is the part where Work Woman needs to be a hero: brave,
clear, strategic, steadfast whatever it takes to find Love Woman in
the underworld.
Work Woman has to be curious she has to be
willing to know and generous.
Feminism helps.
Meantime Love Woman has to be real: she has to be whatever
she is, so she can be found. She has to give Work Woman the whole truth
about herself.
She has to stop co-operating with oppression. She has to
give up subversive tricks, seductive wiles, backroom deals. She has to give
up addictive dodges and romantic delusions. She has to come clean with herself.
Working with their relation
There probably isn't any quick way, but there are ways
over time. It's about gradually rebuilding your own structure so that whatever
has been segregated can rejoin.
There are methods, and they can work in school as well
as in the rest of life.
> Differentiating Love Woman and Work Woman
- Notice physical differences face, motion, handwriting
- Watch for couples of women in dreams how are they
interacting?
- Analyze ambivalence and indecision into its opposing
voices
> Advocating both, allowing and observing
I am not taking sides in this argument.
I wish you both well.
In their mature forms neither is inherently purer or smarter
or more necessary. Both need to be thoroughly heard, allowed to be whatever
they are.
At the same time you need to not exactly identify as either
of them. It's a tricky balance. You need to be being them and simultaneously
monitoring them.
At first Love Woman acts up, and Work Woman does what she
usually does, which is try to shut Love Woman up. You can watch that happening.
> Finding Love Woman if she's lost
(To find Work Woman, stop pretending to be helpless
just stop. Stop saying "I don't know." Say, what do I know, here?
What do I think, here? What do I hate about this?)
- In dreams notice a female best friend, a younger sister,
a goddess, a rival. What are they up to?
- Notice what kind of women you get crushes on
- Watch who you're jealous of, obsessed with.
- Allow and study yearning rather than crushing it
- Stop doing whatever you're doing to suppress her
-
- I asked my teacher where to find feeling and she said
quite crisply "What are you doing to turn it off? Stop doing those
things."
- Might be drugs, reading, eating, TV, work, exercise,
even meditation.
Chair dialogues
Chair dialogues are a strong technique from Gestalt therapy
you have two actual physical chairs and you move between them speaking
as your different selves, for instance your child and adult selves, or
Love Woman and Work Woman. This is more effective than just writing dialogue,
because the characters can as if look at each other and the whole body
is more involved; you can more clearly feel the body-differences between
them.
Chair dialogues can be used for negotiation: "I want
this and I'm willing to give this."
It can help to have an outside person (if skillful) observing
the dialogue to nudge it if it blanks and to contain both people when their
interchange gets hostile.
> Holding the tension
I want to give the struggle credit.
I want to take the struggle and acknowledge it. Be happy for it. Love it.
Care for it. Enjoy and learn and live it. Struggle is so beautiful. If
I could only step outside of myself, at will, at watch, with open eyes,
at the beauty of the struggle. If only I could approach it, mindfully,
always, and appreciate it.
The Jungians say: go further into the fire. When there
is a conflict, increase it: hold both the conflicting parts as intensely
as possible, and try to hold them at the same time rather than alternating
them.
You can hold the conflict without acting it out, but you
can also hold it in circumstance and action.
> Giving the marriage a life in the world
The home of the seemingly opposite two voices is one excited
body. The fate of the two is one fate; when Work Woman succeeds in getting
more power, Love Woman has more energy too. When Love Woman is released
to speak her truth Work Woman has themes and tasks that have a future.
Do I want to speak and show what I
know and see? Or do I pretend to be an object of desire and only give what
I've told myself they only want to see? The answer is obvious, but it's
taken me years to arrive at it. I spent the whole of last semester taking
off masks. Now all I want to do is claim what I know and see.
My desire to move into the world from
a new place of courage and love
so delicate and strong at the same
time so filled with change that my chest feels like it's going to burst.
all points of loving seem to be converging
Two large ways you can do it:
1. Take on the moral work of a difficult love.
It is a task isn't it?
Love Woman will want to fall into addictive fantasy and
Work Woman will want to sneer and walk away. It takes a lot of consciousness
and energy and psychological sorting - for both - to stay with it. They
are learning to be effective rather than helpless in love, so as to be able
to be effective without having to ditch love.
In these kinds of conflict your thread out of the labyrinth
is always commitment to truth. You have to want truth more than you want
the lover or your own evasion or your own buzz.
It's maybe the hardest and most interesting thing you can
do, because you have to work with everything childish, deluded or cynical
in yourself.
2. (Carefully) let her subvert you at work
You can also take on a job Work Woman wants and Love Woman
is bored and alienated by, and then commit to letting Love Woman be present
in it, change it to suit her too. For instance bringing Love Woman's interests
and loyalties into professional contexts such as academic departments or
government office. (Bringing them into the thesis.)
This one needs courage from both. There will be strong
resistance from especially older men and from other women who themselves
have dissociated Love Woman.
Then Love Woman will feel she is incapable, Work Woman
will be terrified of being discredited.
Sometimes, I know what I need to ask,
but I'm afraid to put it into words or give it voice. Which usually makes
me ask, "Why am I afraid?"
This fear of holding my own questions
and methodologies against the context of how others do this kind of work
is tremendously intimidating to me. I know that my experience, my questions,
my methodologies are equally as valid, but the habit of looking to external
authority for direction and approval is so deeply ingrained in me that
I struggle to convince myself that my "real questions" are as
important (perhaps even more so) as what I am told I am supposed to be
asking.
it totally shocked me that I could
do this work and have it be "real" and meaningful outside of
an academic context. That I myself have the ability to decide what is meaningful
and helpful in this world the jump in my heart rate tells me this notion
is revolutionary for me.
how will I know the difference between
when what I produce is good and right and when I am cutting corners? Especially
with no external authority to tell me that I'm good enough?
For it to work as a mutual project, Love Woman will have
to speak up and Work Woman will have to strategize carefully to protect
her from derogation. She will have to strategize shrewdly.
Where the collaboration unfolds well, Work Woman can get
an edge because she's in touch with Love Woman values everyone desires,
even if they're not conscious of them.
Sophistication and vulnerability are
not necessarily at odds. Look at some of the best artists and writers:
look how vulnerably they allow themselves be Love Woman, and look how authoritative
they are.
They are impressive because they're
the real thing. They are giving the real thing; they are not bluffing.
Writing with love woman
If I follow this voice down, if I pull
it out like unraveling a thread, I hear and feel a place in me that hurts,
that knows that no matter how deeply I am connected with the universe and
connected with power, that I can be overpowered, overwhelmed. I am of the
nature to have power. I am also of the nature to be overpowered.
-
We are observed. We dance. We dance
skilflully, adventurously. We take large steps. We follow one another exactly.
I am both initiating and following. We move in any direction. Eventually
we run out. We misinterpret, stop, laugh.
> Write slowly and refuse clichés
Don't write to say what you already know, write to discover
what you know what she knows. What she feels.
I write in a journal because the process
of looking at something again helps me know more than I did the first time.
It feels as if there has been someone silent who was present and observing
and feeling at the time, but not exactly conscious. When I write in my
journal she is able to say what she knows, which interests me a lot.
This kind of writing feels like listening.
> Consider her interests
And now look how much I've written,
and it's because I'm writing of feeling and love. Love woman is not off
dreaming of what it would be like to sleep with or kiss this man or that
she's present, exceedingly present, alert, engaged, contributing. She's
behind Work Woman at the computer, arm draped behind her back, peering
over her shoulder, smiling, reading each line that work woman writes, saying,
yes, that's it, I like that, mmmmm.
And so maybe this is the image that
I need to invoke, of this loving moment of harmony between work woman and
love woman, a very feminine union, at a very feminine task. This image
perhaps will keep me in line with what is important, love, and will provide
the assistance of love woman in the doing of the work.
trying to really focus on whether I
love a paragraph, note how real it feels, or whether it contains hiding.
It's been fun and freeing to throw out the parts that don't feel real.
I'm looking forward to continuing this
summer in a relaxed way, just sinking into the sections and staying true
to what I really feel I need and want to write about. In this way, the
thesis writing itself has been a descent into following pleasure and my
heart.
> Who writes, who revises
I would free-write for a while and then go back and clean
up spelling, thoughts, etc.
Something about what happens to voice in revision. Who
is it that revises? When it's Work Woman, she has a way of ruining Love
Woman's voice. When you free-write and then go back and clean it up you
are probably letting Work Woman censor Love Woman. Watch out for that.
It is okay to develop two voices that are distinct in cadence,
lexicon, and all. You can even keep what you have to say as a dialogue.
Or when you do a revision go back another time and revise
the revision so you get back some of the warmth of the original. Make a
version that comes from both.
> Teaching love woman to write
- Will you say more?
- Complete withdrawal by teaching writing.
-
- Teach love woman to write?
- YES.
-
- Work woman should teach her to write.
- Yes.
-
- That would reconcile them.
- Yes.
-
- She has many wrong ideas.
- Yes.
-
- Work for what is real in her.
- Yes.
-
- Is there something particular she needs
to learn?
- To grow slowly.
-
- She can't write yet.
- Yes.
-
- Will you tell me where she should start.
- With withdrawal.
-
- Is it truly necessary to control her?
- Yes.
- And what else?
- Perfected work. Control her and love
her and work with her impeccably.
-
- Must she always be controlled?
- Not that she must mature to write,
one has to help her grow.
-
- What is the writer's centre?
- Love Woman.
-
- Does meditation take me into her?
- Listening does.
-
- There, I feel my heart now. Grateful.
It has to do with listening. Speaking through. Coming from the side, beside.
Tremor. It is the fine beautiful one. Her head is open at the top like
a window.
Work Woman's topic, but whose voice is this?
I think my critical intelligence is
an army of ants. There is great power in it, and I know it will stop at
nothing short of truth.
My critical intelligence is strong,
and very determined to be clear, objective, questioning, and curious. It
will not digest another's words without testing them, questioning them,
looking at as many angles as possible.
My army isn't really killing it. My
army is my ally. I'm redirecting it. There is another perspective here.
I'm trying to find it.
Just to speak my truth articulately.
I had a lot of valid questions, and I articulated them well. My critical
intelligence was clear, modest, and curious.
I said, this path isn't for me anymore.
And I got quiet. But the quiet is also about listening. About listening
to what other words are living inside, waiting to be spoken. About sensing
when it is okay to speak and trusting my words, my questions, and my me-ness.
I need to trust that what I feel is
true for me. It takes courage to be human. It takes compassion to be human.
Maybe there is pleasure in simply being
a human being, and I am in the process of discovery.
Being human requires courage and compassion.
Being human requires courage and compassion. Okay, okay, I get it! That
is what the silence is wishing to say, that is what the death wishes to
say, and that is what the pain wishes to say. Being human requires courage
and compassion.
Love Woman gave her pictures
I noticed certain kinds of radiance
around the edges of objects and I began to see the primary colors. I found
the image in the light on the paper. I loved what was emerging, but they
were sometimes just a single figure, in a room or in a landscape, and very
often the figure would be pointing, pointing to the next drawing, in a
way. So they led me along, and they gradually got more complex. They were
the only things I've done in my life that actually happened to me.
They are about a kind of contact I've
made inside myself, which seemed to be connected with something outside.
It seemed to be a kind of union with certain things. It's as though I've
brought together all the things I really like, in the form of drawing.
Joyce Wieland
VII. Eurydice's voice
- I wrote about my desire for him, and
it was like walking from one climate to another.
- Further from the shore than you are
close to it. This is what it is like to write about desire.
-
- But you you are here. You stood
there in that open door in the center of the room, that freestanding threshold
that is always close by me. That place I go to speak and not be seen. You
saw me through that doorway, and you came in.
- This place, where I remember our recent
future, where I anticipate impending past. Where I slowly explore you,
and offer myself as a terrain of tension and yielding. Where we consume
our vulnerability, where we are famous for each other.
- -
-
- I am
- what I asked for
- I'm speaking
- I speak like this
-
- I choose words, more words, to cure
the tameness, not the wildness.
-
- I give you myself protect me and you'll
have a later
- protect me, change, but defend me
-
- they hate you, they make fun of me
actually
- I'm right that I won't change
- I may seem insufferable to you, I
want to live in true thoughts
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