Going Too Far (36 page)

“Dead,” he gasped, “of laughter! They have eluded us,” he droned. The people marveled.

The other version goes that they both disappeared on one or the other's broom, and still circle the moon on dark nights, like two amused Sonja Henies coasting the sky.

There are three morals to this story—fragments of a conversation overheard one night by village idiots who could comprehend no meaning in these words:

Whisper One
:

All your betrayals of me, my dear
,

are somehow payments against what we both fear

and never speak of: mine
.

Whisper Two
:

Friendship is mutual

blackmail elevated to the level of love
.

Whisper Three
:

We may as well trust each other
.

They're going to try to burn us, anyway
.

1974

¹
See Kirkpatrick Sale's book, SDS, Random House, New York, 1973.

P
ART FIVE

Beyond the Seventh Veil: Recent Writings

PART V:

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Five years of traveling, lecturing, and giving poetry readings taught me much about my country and my movement, and not a little about myself. For one thing, I learned that the unavoidable course required by nature—entropy—and the inescapable process entailed in any serious politics or aesthetics—growth—are inseparable, congruent, and diametrically opposed. Which is a sobering realization
.

At the first, it was not only the physical, emotional, and intellectual “high” communicated by women which gave me such intense pleasure. It was also admittedly the glamor of travel, an activity which I had done to death in my theatrical working-childhood, but one which the intervening years had glossed over with nostalgic romance. All those airplanes! All that toy food served with toy-sized plastic knives and forks by competent human-size flight attendants who were treated by most passengers as toy women! All those podiums and phallic lavalier microphones! All those motels and hotels and all that room service! All those local communes hostessed by feminists! All those receptions at which one was in turn lionized, criticized, deified, and crucified
.

Except that, after a year of such questionable exoticisms, life began to appear a deadly round of airports echoing flight announcements, of deserted terminals at
11:00
P.M.
or
6:00
A.M.
,
of Holiday Inns and Ramada Inns and Travelodges and local motels, these last also often used by Big Men On Campus to celebrate their successful campaign against some other young woman who was finally “going too far,” whose emotions they were callously manipulating and whose reputation they were light-heartedly corroding. Life became never being able to sit at my desk for more than three days at a time without having to pack again. Life became long-distance phone calls with my husband and child, calls squeezed in after the afternoon guest-seminar and before the evening lecture, while I hunched over a room-service sandwich in my motel room and nursed a container of rapidly cooling tea for my ever-present cold. Life was trying to pack one small bag for a February trip which would span Canada and Arizona; life was revising
old poems and trying to draft new ones on seat-back tray-tables in every airborne vehicle from a 747 to a two-seater helicopter; it was a chronic stiff neck from dozing off in trains and buses and waiting rooms and ladies' rooms and backstage green rooms
.

Life was also learning that the at-first temptingly homey stay at the local feminist commune was to be avoided, if possible, and without giving offense, since, with a few rare and memorable exceptions, it usually meant some or all of the following: (1) Being kept awake through the night for the “intimate, exclusive lecture”—the unstated but equivalent price of room and board (after which the local sisters went to bed and their bleary guest lurched off to the airport for another round of same); (2) Being fed some gaggingly healthy gummy brown rice with a puddle of soy sauce thereon and a limp cabbage leaf thereunder, this repast suitably accompanied either by surprisingly abundant cans of beer (which I happen not to drink) or more likely by teensy cups of lukewarm tea which had the color of herbal shampoo but, I am certain, less flavor; (3) Feeling compelled to insist on washing up after dinner, because after all one did not wish to appear like a horrible New-York-type-star-leader who let other women wait on her forgodsake, and consequently doing dishes for ten people
after
having lectured and
before
the all-night private pump-her-for-information rap; (4) Finding that if one
were
permitted, reluctantly, a few hours of sleep, this relaxation was supposed to take place in a sleeping bag on the floor. To complain and be a rotten sport was out of the question. To reject these sisters, hurt the feelings of women who were, after all, genuinely and flatteringly hungry for whatever one had to share with them, women who really were trying to treat their guest as best they knew how—this rejection was also unthinkable. One grinned, talked, rasped cheerfully hoarse, sucked cough drops until one's tongue glistened chartreuse, washed chopsticks, actually learned to enjoy it all—and tried to sleep on the plane
.

Later, to be sure, one rediscovered the miraculous luxury of privacy at hotels, except that such accommodations were rarely paid for by the school, and were cumulatively costly. In time, too, they began to appear hallucinatingly identical. The smell of plastic philodendrons in certain motel lobbies, particularly at dawn, when one is waiting half comatose for the town's sole taxi, operated by the town's sole surly taxi driver, to convey one to the single-runway airport which lacks even a coffee machine—that gangrenous fake green smell shall hover in my nostrils, I think, at my dying, especially if I have led a wicked life. As will return, in my worst nightmares, the apparition of those iridescently orange cabbage roses with which it seemed most of the motel-room walls were papered, the design carried through coyly in the bedspread fabric. Since the boreal air conditioner rarely could be turned off and
an extra blanket was nowhere to be found, the luckless inhabitant would appropriate the bedspread as additional covering—only to find, once tucked in, that its matching pattern made her feel as if she had become subsumed into the wall and was now peeping out through a rip in the paper
.

There was in addition the educational experience of being a woman traveling alone. This subject requires a book in itself, which I yet may write, if I can quell the retching sensation that rises in my throat when I think of reliving those experiences in order to write at length about them: the hotel elevator at
2:00
A.M.
filled with potbellied, boozy, balding, cigar-chomping conventioneers—and me, replete with feminist buttons, returning from a late
C-R
session. There was the veritable parade of discharged soldiers flying the last lap home from Vietnam, to be met by wives, mothers, and girlfriends all unaware of how earlier, on the plane, their loyally awaited man had maneuvered the seat next to a single woman and then, despite discouragement, had launched into bragging about his exploits, sexual and military, in “Nam.” But there was also an unexpectedly quick trust and friendliness among the traveling women strangers, particularly where children were involved; oh, the whole vocabularies exchanged in a simple offer to hold her baby while the mother wipes the takeoff throw-up from the front of his three-year-old sister!

I learned, too, that our current system of campaigning by public officials is not only as gross a ritual as I'd always thought, but an appallingly dangerous tradition as well, and least of all from the threat most articulated: assassination. Rather, the danger lies in one's seeing too many faces, shaking too many hands, facing too many audiences, answering too many of the same questions, repeating too often what may once have been sincerely meant statements but which are reduced inevitably to platitudes. The danger is in watching complexities “of necessity” simplified (not enough time, not enough space, not enough attention), then oversimplified, then debased into the very kind of nonthought one fancied one was opposing. The degree of cynicism in this Gresham's law school is horribly unavoidable, as is the exhaustion, the spiritual embitterment, the emotional megalomania (since one tries to use this meaningless aimed-at-the-celebrity “love” to fill that life's personal loneliness), and the self-disgust at having let oneself be trapped in such a squirrel cage. Whoever has gone this round is unfit, for at
least
five years after, to hold public office. By that time some sense of the individual and of reality may have returned. (I hasten to add that I saw, met, spoke to and at and with only a fraction of what our so-called political leaders—those who wield power over our daily lives—face.) This process is a vile, corruptive one. It slackens the spirit and evokes contempt for the very people on whose behalf one is purportedly acting;
they begin to appear as a faceless and manipulating mass. And one begins to feel like an equally faceless and manipulable demagogue
.

I ought to have feared this hypocrisy, ought to have recognized or rather remembered it from the almost twenty years of my life spent in the theater. But there is honor, at least, in that profession
—
one's very job is to appear to be something other than who and what one really is; one's skill, in fact, is bent toward that end. This is hardly comparable to the political candidate
(or
radical organizer
)
who claims to be her own self but learns not to expose authentic aspects of that self for fear of losing the attention or affection of the constituency. Because in our society the political message does depend to a lamentable degree on
who
delivers it, and how.
¹
The actor's pretense is a translucent art, and is therefore decent. The politician's pretense is an opaque charade, a deliberate deception
.

There were times when my own life seemed to curve back on itself and mockingly return me to the same progression of stages, cameras, and mikes I had fought so hard to escape as an adolescent. What child's talent my family once had seen fit to exploit became an adult's skill which my cause now saw fit to conscript
. Plus ça change…,
I would mutter, in my crabbier moments. Yet the responsibility for one's life choice ultimately is one's own—that is, after sexism, racism, and the other cage-bars of existence have set the boundaries within which that choice can be made, although sometimes it can be made bravely enough to bend the bars, or render them irrelevant
.

During this siege of disillusion, I learned that the forging of a public face, seemingly so necessary for the political activist (whether a senatorial candidate or an outside agitator) and perhaps even useful to the interpretive artist, can be quite destructive to the creative artist. How can it be otherwise, when one's replies perforce become shortened, self-protective, and superficial in a question-and-answer session: it is neither the time nor place to be particularly confidential (although I found myself trying, and in consequence often sustained internal emotional bleeding). Yet the real answers, and more importantly the questions themselves, self-asked, are the stuff of the artist, in whose context the time and place are unimportant, and for whom length, self-exposure, and depth are all assumed prerequisites, givens. I chose this latter course a long time ago, and in 1975 I renewed that vow, never again to be quite so successfully diverted from these “orders.”

But then that year saw the mid-decade shift in so many different ways. The war, that pustulating sore in the soul of America, had ended. Vietnam “fell” to those who lived there—the Vietnamese. The first piece of writing in this section, “Letter from a War,” speaks to the trauma of that trauma's close. The seventies were, because of or despite this episode, turning on an inward-directed course: self-discovery, self-analysis, an approximation if not a return to the psychological world view so popular in the fifties. It is as if external political action must appear for the moment less necessary or possible or too frightening or exhausting—then people will reencounter the personal. But the motivation is too often retreat instead of risk, and sometimes it's just too late—one has lost the whole world and not gained one's soul, since the internal political action (and knowledge) has been repressed into nonexistence, even at the expense of that external politics for whose urgent sake it was supposedly sacrificed in the first place. What a pity, and how senseless, anyway, is this dichotomy! It sends so many straight from the street demonstration to the dropout farm, from the rhetoric of the central committee
(or
of the Nixon White House
)
to the jargon of the latest guru
(or
of new-found fundamentalist Christianity
).
This is change?

Is it merely pride, then, which makes me feel that the Women's Movement has weathered such a shift admirably well? And is that because we are founded on a belief that the personal
is
political, the insistence on a breakdown of patriarchal distinctions, neat categories, and linear thought? I hope so. I do notice that women seem bent on learning as much as possible about ourselves, each other, children, men, the world—and that most of us are no more willing to sacrifice internal psychological truths than we are to genuflect before the shrine of The One Truth According to Saint Freud. The essays on sado-masochistic fantasies and on paranoia in this section of
Going Too Far
describe a continuing attempt on my part to synchronize that same interior landscape with exterior “reality” and thus discover a synthesis which can teach us something about each, and about the third thing they constitute, anew, together
.