Going Too Far (37 page)

The mid-seventies saw yet another major development in the Women's Movement, the birth of what we might call women's culture. This trend, in tone as celebratory and in cost as excruciating as labor contractions, is explored in the last essays of this section, for it is as a feminist and an artist that I rejoice in the embrace of art and politics
—
and it is as an artist and a feminist that I am unnerved at the betimes lewd quality of that embrace
.

W. B.
Yeats wrote, “All things can tempt me from this craft of verse,” as he schizophrenically endured one magnetic pull toward his art and another toward his vision of a transformed Ireland. There
must be, for the artist who refuses to hide in the ivory tower
or
to serve as a door-mat propagandist, some wholly new approach, some synthesis, some rejection of these narrow extremes. Can the feminist artist create this space? Is she uniquely in a position to do so, since as a woman it has been more difficult for her all along—to be an artist, to be political, to
be?
Can her life-act of rebellion contain in itself the disparate
forms
of rebellion as well as clues to their harmony? Time and herstory will tell us. A terrible duty is born. But the last section of this book of personal documents is a reaching toward that goal. It contains writings which have not been published before, which were conceived away from (and sometimes in reaction against) the podium, and written behind all the rhetoric
.

I could tremble, if I let myself, that the reader who has generously accompanied me this far might feel betrayed by or at least unprepared for some of the pieces in this last section. It is even possible, though less likely, that a rare reader in an excess of misinterpretation might suspect that I have finally made good a warning in one of my poems: “And I will speak … more and more in crazy gibberish you cannot understand
…”
That this is neither my intention nor my hope will be clear to those who comprehend the imperative of going beyond the confessional style to the analytical, beyond the philosophical to the poetic, beyond the aesthetic to the ecstatic. Or, to put it more plainly, these last essays are merely about the manner in which feminism can be defined as daring to constitute that forbidden junction of those three subjects all well-brought-up members of Western civilization were told never to discuss in polite company: sex, politics, and religion. Women face the difficulty of inventing the gesture through which we grasp our reality and thereby simultaneously invent ourselves. It is a life-and-death dance, and in this sense we are truly a new kind of movement. I have tried, in the later pieces in this section, to refuse a certain self-indulgent vulnerability in myself the refuge of mere confession without attempted conclusions. If my gestures in this endeavor appear unfamiliar or awkward, I am genuinely sorry
—
which is hardly meant as an apology but rather as an expression of real sorrow that we have been kept from making such gestures, or recognizing them, for so long. The dance is, after all, that progression of movements from gravity toward grace, in the midst of which, and almost by chance, the dancer finds herself discarding one veil of superfluous skin after another. That she is offered great rewards for this act—entire realms of material power and even the dedication of human sacrifice—is a consideration beneath contempt. Likewise, the certainty that she will be called upon to pay for this act with her own life is an eventuality unworthy of diverting her attention
.

Entropy and growth. At this writing I have turned thirty-five years old. Certain ground beneath my feet, certain corridors of my
psychic life, are so familiar I can move along them unconsciously, not even groping or feeling my way: My writing, the primary rock, the reason for tolerating this glorious, senseless existence at all; Kenneth, his writing, his capacity for change, all his deaths and his resurrections; Blake, growing older and more aware every day of the unutterable beauty and unspeakable cruelty of living and loving with consciousness; a few
—
very few
—
beloved friends; certain works of art—the Bach
B Minor Mass
and
Lear, Middlemarch
and
The Women at Point Sur
and
The Trial;
the challenge of Anne Bradstreet and Albert Camus and Christina Rossetti and Andrew Marvell and Mary Cassatt and Maurice Ravel and Emily Brontë; the examples of Elizabeth Tudor, of George Sand, Saint Teresa, Nina Simone, Emmeline Pankhurst, Martha Graham, Hetshapsut, and Louise Labé. So much more, so many more
.

If one further surprisingly obvious discovery lay in wait for me beneath the cynicism encountered in these past few years, it surely is my own capacity for a peculiar, arrogant humility. Arrogant because it is based on a new-found pride in what I have done, where I have come from and where I go, what I am and even more what I am becoming. And humble because, despite the intentionally ironic title of this book, it is simply not possible to go far
enough.
I am continually reminded of this, even while I reach to steady myself from a dizziness at the vast space imperceptibly traveled. It is that space ultimately which counts, not the distance one
thinks
one has covered. It is that space across which one never dares sufficiently go too far, but across which, if one is fortunate, one might perhaps venture a few faltering steps
.

¹
Ronald Reagan's hybrid character, for example, is no coincidence. He is the logical apparition conjured up by a public taught to trust the worth of celebrity and mistrust the work of cerebration. (Thespian Nation, indeed.) It's not his fault that he is no more qualified to be called a public servant than he was to be called an actor.

LETTER FROM A WAR

The following letter, like those in Part I of this book, was written with no eye to publication. It was a spontaneous outpouring in the middle of a spring night, penned from a small town in Midwest America to another woman in a similar small town. The recipient of the letter, Jane Alpert, was—and still is, at the writing of this prefatory note—in prison, serving a term for militant anti-war actions during the sixties. She had been a fugitive from the law for four years, during which time she courageously declared her “conversion” to radical feminism in an open letter from the underground. In 1974 she surfaced, prepared to serve a prison term in order to function openly in the service of her feminist politics and freely as the writer she wished to become. We had been friends years earlier, at
Rat
, before her period of fugitivity; it seemed that we had gone through so many similar changes in our very different ways.

The reference in this letter to “Sam” pertains to Samuel Melville, Jane's lover, who in 1969 was arrested on the same charge as she, sentenced, and killed in the Attica prison uprising, in 1971. The reference to Kenneth's being muzzled for his political beliefs was meant as an indictment against those who found his newer work too threatening to publish—as it dealt with a man's struggle to transform himself through love, to comprehend and rise to what feminism asked of him. The mention of Ti-Grace Atkinson's “denunciation” of Alpert refers to the former's attempt to cast a cloud over Jane's motives for surrender. The Left had been foreseeably unenchanted with Jane's criticism of it, and with her dedication to feminist politics—but the Feminist Movement was strong in its defense and support of a woman whose honor was unquestionable and whose commitment to feminism was obvious. At one point, Atkinson, apparently isolated from feminist consciousness, declared in effect that women should be led by Weathermen and acknowledge a total identification with the men at Attica—or else be drummed out of the human race. This was meant as a special cut to Jane, who had lost Sam at Attica, but who had nevertheless some years later drawn the courage from her new-found
feminist consciousness to analyze their relationship in retrospect. She found it virulently sexist—and she said so publicly.

The other minor characters are Leftist activists Jane and I had known in the past—Rosa and Tricia and “Chowder,” this last my version of the rather soupy pseudonym used by one pathetically anti-feminist woman. I fear that all three women could be counted on to reflect the feelings expressed by the young man at a Boston rally toward the war's end who, it was reported to me, exhorted the crowd not to “drift away from the Left” but to “carry
the nostalgia
we
all feel for the war that brought us together
further into
other organizing opportunities
.” The italics are mine but the sentiments, seriously, were his. As for Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, the former anti-war crusaders are at this writing campaigning for the jobs of U.S. Senator and U.S. Senator's wife, respectively.

This letter is in a sense out of context, in that Jane has been a presence in many of my poems—and there are other letters between us. But those are for another book, at another time. I include this one letter now because in it, without particularly intending to do so, I summarized for myself most truly what the grief of Vietnam has meant to me as a woman, and what that grief—which had so indelibly scarred the sixties and which was now ostensibly over—would continue and continue and continue to mean, to a woman.

Travelodge

Galesburg, Illinois

29
April
1975

D
EAR
J
ANE
:

You see from the stationery where I am, just back a little while ago from a seminar-then-faculty-dinner-then-poetry-reading-then-rap-session-then-drink-with-faculty-wives.

And while undressing and unpacking I turned on the little black-and-white television set, to encounter a night-long special broadcast on the surrender of Saigon and the NLF entry into the city.
It is over now
, Harry Reasoner reports.
Over now
, he says.

And all the expectable films are shown—the old ones, like shards of horror fossilized on film: that soldier setting fire to a thatched hut with his Zippo lighter; that pistol going off against the temple of the plaid-shirted young Viet Cong, full-face into the camera as his skull fragments; the cadaver heads of aged grandmothers bent over baby bodies; the bare-breasted corpses of young women sprawled by roadsides; the children, the children—numb-faced, lost forever, peddling chocolate or cocaine or themselves in the streets.

And the new films, also expectable: the triumphant grins worn by soldiers riding tanks into Saigon; the frantic clawing hordes of terrified South Vietnamese trying to follow their former U.S. employers out, clogging the airstrips, hanging on plane wings, swarming around helicopters; the bar-girls welcoming a new set of conquerors with the same smiles, empty eyes above set lips; the children filmed in emergency orphan camps, already being taught to sing new songs that convey the message of a new political education—the children, waving a different flag now, but in the same uniform rhythm.

And I'm sitting on the bed in this tacky little room with a dingy mustard-colored rug and fluorescent bulbs overhead and a freight train chugging by somewhere off in the Illinois countryside around this small college town, and I'm tired from having flown and spoken and read and talked with women for hours and I'm thinking of you and I'm weeping like a fool.

The newscasters speak at length about guilt, national guilt—how we as a nation
must
feel it, or how we must
not
feel it, what lessons are to be learned from the 500,000 American soldiers dead or crippled (their torn bodies now being displayed across the flickering screen). I feel no guilt. For once I feel as guiltless as I am powerless. It is not guilt that makes me sob ridiculously, my voice loud and ludicrous in an empty room. Oh, and I know well the lesson they could learn—if they would.

No, I weep for us, dear Jane, for this tragedy which at once so disfigured and transfigured our lives that I write this from my portable prison of required survival, to you in your fixed prison of required endurance. Because we were changed forever by the decade they now calmly analyze. We came out of it, we cried out our protest and committed our actions and risked our lives and sanities and sacred honor
and then continued
, daring, even further. In a way, we, as women, are alone escaped to tell.

I'm weeping at the cost, I know. The bloody cost, the bloody pain, always and forever. I'm weeping for Sam, tonight, I know. I'm weeping for the fatuous celebration going on at this moment in the Hayden-Fonda house or in Chowder's apartment. I'm weeping for the baby-lifted orphans abducted into a nation of Disney and Christian names. I'm weeping for the bar-girls and their race-mixed children, unwanted by America
and
Vietnam; for the peasants who
still
have no voice in their own destiny; for the blinded amputee GI who spits out bitterly, “We should've stayed and atom-bombed 'em”; for the cadre women busing into the South, to take charge of child-camps and to organize the governmental bureaucracies with brisk secretarial precision. I'm weeping because our own struggle is so infinitely complex and enormous in its scope that you and I will never live to enter
our
metaphorical Saigon in triumph—which is too petty a goal for desiring, anyway. I'm weeping because the very air in this stuffy room rings with the screams, moans, pleas, gasps, and silences of a billion intricate miseries and needs and deaths. I'm weeping because earlier this evening a middle-aged faculty wife broke down in my arms and cried out her desire to learn to love freedom as much as she loved her husband and children, at least enough so that she could wrestle
with
them to achieve it
together
with them.

I'm weeping because Rosa or Tricia or any of their friends would seriously think you and I are indifferent to what is happening tonight; because they see no link between that Galesburg housewife and these television films; because they don't understand how much more we understand. For I cannot celebrate simplistically when I am mourning. I cannot rejoice to see one rigid regime replace another, however much I once devoutly wished for this. I cannot feel relief when I know that nothing, really, has changed, nothing really is over—merely in faulty translation. I cannot even ignore all these familiar films, turn off the set, force myself to sleep so that I can teach an 8:00
A.M.
class and then catch a plane. Because I am grieving.