Going Too Far (48 page)

                                    
of

                                       
fresh

                                          
pepper

I adore to grate myself
.

ERATO
(
Opening her eyes wide and taking a deep breath
) I. Can. Tell. You. Euterpe. For. Certain. It's. Pain. (
Then she explodes in laughter, the contagion running through the rest of the helpless Muses.
Tears course down their cheeks and they strive in vain to recover their solemnity
)

TERPSICHORE
(
gasping
) Thalia, you're a ham. Incurable.

EUTERPE
(
wiping her eyes
) I do think, Thalia, that you might try to be a bit more charitable. Look, you've made our Poet exceedingly uncomfortable.

THALIA
Only a false love lies, Euterpe. You know that. My love for the Daughters would carve away their laziness with the sharp blade of humor. And as for
her
(THALIA
peers down at
THE POET
,
who is indeed looking discomfited, albeit amused), she
isn't uncomfortable
enough
. If she were secretly chortling at my little efforts before, perhaps she'll laugh out loud at my last offering. It is my Big Cheese poem—a rallying cry to all women to take to their noses, put their barricades to the wheel, stand fast at the shoulder, and raise high the grindstone. It is too long for recital here (or anywhere) but I shall read you a sample fragment. The poem is called:

“Muenster”

Listen
.

I said
listen.

LISTEN,
DAMMIT!

Ah, sister
.

There they are, around us, all

the biggest cheeses
:

cheddar, parmesan, romano
,

see?
—
there's cream, and cream-with-chive

and oh dear goddess there's the big

oppressor stinky cheeses: gorgonzola
,

stilton, roquefort, danish blue, and liederkranz
:

my sisters, hear me

we are marching

        
they will crumb before us

we are winning

         
they will melt before us

sisters listen hear me say it;

let us say it openly, without shame, and together
.

I

  
am

    
a muenster
.

I am

    
a muenster
.

I am a muenster
.

And I am loud
.

(THALIA
finishes with a flourish of melodrama, and
THE MUSES
,
despite themselves, applaud her heartily. The feeling of shamefaced
good will has even extended itself to
THE POET
,
who, chagrined and chastened, has ceased smirking at others, laughed openly at herself, and once again settled down to record the meeting
—
or what she can manage to catch of it
)

MELPOMENE
I know you better than most, Thalia, and I love you for what you dare see and sing. I too have watched the Daughters hunger for their own culture, for too many centuries. Now that that hunger can be fed, I worry in a different way. I know it is a voracious hunger; they are at present so starved as to be indiscriminate. They can make themselves ill by gorging and then turn away from such fare entirely, nauseated at the thought of art and culture when they have glutted themselves on whatever was offered them. And in the meanwhile, what of the cooks, the artists? When faced with famished people does one fuss over correcting the seasonings? The temptation—and the pressure—not to is considerable. Yet one must, even if this means watching other cooks offer unbalanced menus and bad nutrition to be gulped down eagerly by those whom one would rather see fed well, sustained. One must wait and create nothing less than the best one is capable of—and those standards rise like a further challenge from within onself, never from the crowd.

EUTERPE
To reevaluate everything! What an enormous task lies before the Daughters! I wonder, for instance, what would a wholly new feminist humor be? What do you think, Thalia?

THALIA
I am evolving through them, as are you, Euterpe. I cannot tell yet. But I do know that laughter itself has almost always necessitated a retreat into the self. If I wish to laugh at something in X's situation I must separate myself from it (objectify it) and then I may see the humor. If I empathize, much less give myself to a spiritual exercise into her reality, I lose all sense of humor.

ERATO
Is laughter then born of alienation?

THALIA
Some might say it is born of worse—hostility and aggression. But I believe there is another possibility, a laughter born of recognition, of surprised similarity, of identification. A defenseless laughter, lovely, loving, and new.
(THALIA
turns to
MELPOMENE
and addresses her with a humility we have never seen in the brash
THALIA)
Yet all of these would still comprise the laughter of humor; not, of course, of joy. (
THALIA
'
S eyes fill with tears and her smile is like a beacon through their dazzle
) Joy has nothing to do with alienation and is quite beyond such a tepid emotion as empathy. Joy is born actually of a sense of tragedy, and the laughter that rings from joy knows that nothing funny exists.

(MELPOMENE
has risen to her feet and moved slowly toward
THALIA
during the above speech. Now she throws back her head, the dark veil of her hair streaming out behind her, and from her bared throat issues a soundless laughter so terrible that all
THE MUSES
but one cover their ears to escape it, and avert their gaze from her face. Only
THALIA
,
rapt at the sight of her sister glistening through thalian tears, leans closer to listen. Below
,
THE POET
shudders again, and darts a glance over her shoulder; then, her known world seems for an interminable second to splinter into a vast space as if her skull had just burst through a narrow corridor into light such as she had never dreamt. The spheres sing at her with the familiar buzz of a cat's purr and everything seems arriving and departing at once, coming too near and going too far and
THE POET
suddenly flings up her arms and stares above her at her own dark garret rafters and she sees them
, she can see them,
for one moment in her brief eternity they show themselves to her as clearly as her own handprint: Tragedy and Comedy, identical twins, laughing and weeping each in the other's arm
.

THE POET
,
stunned, falls to the floor, unconscious
.
TERPSICHORE
floats down to her and, while softly speaking to
THE POET
and her own Muse Sisters, raises
THE POET
,
slowly awakens her, and moves her gradually and gracefully back to her desk
)

TERPSICHORE
My Daughter Martha Graham has spoken of the divine fallacy, by which she says she means that which is eternal, the continuation of the spirit. She notes that although the Brontë's lived in the “period of the pointed foot,” they kept up their relationship with death. The divine fallacy means the joyous error, as well; that which fools call ugly, un-pretty art. I think of the Native American blanket into which the woman maker deliberately weaves a conscious mistake, to let the soul out. The result would otherwise be static, dead. “The one thing perfection lacks is the struggle to achieve it. This is perfection's thirst for consciousness.” Blake must have meant this when he wrote “Energy is eternal delight.” Movement, not stasis. The reach, not the grasping.

POLYMNIA
Is this not the quality all governments fear in the artist? The Central Committee has always tried to bully the artist, and the Board of Directors has always tried to buy her. The former attempt is simply naïve: the artist is involved in what to her (or him) is an effort to tell some portion of a difficult truth, to relate some detail of an intricate vision—and this will never jibe with any party line. The latter approach, while cleverer because it attacks self-preservation, is also co-opted ultimately by its own co-optation: in buying and selling the artist, the Board cannot stop some fragment of the artist's message getting through, however encoded, and this too is disseminated, creating in turn and in time the genuine “market” for the authentic “product”—to use the Board's terms.

CALLIOPE
Either way, as long as there exists a human spirit, there will be artists blessedly doomed to express it—despite the campaigns of all governments to order and categorize even, or especially, that part of it which cannot be expressed.

CLIO
      Marx himself knew this, you know, and unlike so many of his followers, he respected it. In “The Writer's Profession,” he wrote: “The
writer in no way regards his (
sic
) works as a
means
. They are ends in themselves; so little are they a means for him and others that, when necessary, he sacrifices his existence to theirs and, like the preacher of religion, takes as his principle: Obey God more than men …” I refer you, Sisters, to
Literature and Art: Selections from Their Writings
, by Marx and Engels, International Publishers, New York, 1947, page 63.

URANIA
Clio dear, no one finds the thoroughness of your scholarship more laudable than I, but sometimes I fear you overdo.

EUTERPE
I want to return to something we spoke of earlier, in passing. Objectification. It's such a scorned word among the Daughters who are feminists—and for excellent reasons which we all now know. But in the context of art? I wonder. I wonder if there are not some moments when the political and artistic sensibilities do not
at heart
antagonize. I say at heart because we know and already have spoken of the superficial way in which patriarchal thought has divided the two, to the detriment of both. I have a particular reason for this concern.

URANIA
I think all art is in some way intense objectification. To attempt distilling the “reality” of something into art is to set it apart, study it from all possible angles with what Keats called negative capability, make it one's own (or part of one's own) vision—

POLYMNIA
 —or become part of
its
vision—

URANIA
 —yes indeed, and to scrap some segments of it and totally invent others, all this in the process of molding the vehicle to give reality a new reality which simply did not exist before. There is no being faithful to some appearance of truth that others claim to see, only to the truth the artist cannot avoid seeing.

CLIO
      This should not mean, by the way, that the artist is therefore given license to trample over the sensibilities of others—although patriarchy has deliberately misread it this way, at least in the cases of Gauguin, Beethoven, legions of others, mostly men.

EUTERPE
So we are agreed then that to insist art represent reality is absurd. To insist that art
not
represent reality is equally ridiculous: both attitudes muzzle and thus destroy art.

THALIA
And think of what they do to reality.

ERATO
Real relationships, occurrences, emotions—these are hardly ignoble for being real; that is their beauty and their power. But they are still only the pegs on which the poem hangs, the triggers that fire the play, the skeletons which must be clothed with the novel's flesh. They are grains of sand in which the artist cannot help but see the universe entire.

URANIA
This is why the artist usually assumes that the (sometimes willful, sometimes all unconscious) distortions in her depiction of any real
relationship are at least as valid as any other view of it—including the other person's or even some third “objective” view. Now if that is classic objectification and a political sin, then art has just been purged from the revolution.

CALLIOPE
Wait. Perhaps it
is
objectification, and art alone has a right to it, since art alone does it with no motive to impress or oppress, but only with an intent to hazard being
subjective
about something (therefore
objectifying
it) in order to break open a new view of it.

CLIO
      Being subjective always runs this risk. Men have said to feminists, to our own Poet below, “When you talk about men as a class you objectify
me
.” Thus, at one move, they deny their own initiating act of self-
and
other-objectification, and deny her her self-defense—the validity of her
subjectivity
(only one validity among many, I grant, but one not to be denied).

TERPSICHORE
Mostly, I think, the artist objectifies herself, himself. The process from life into the page or canvas or song or mime or block of marble implies
a standing back from it
, a critical viewing of it—

ERATO
 —and at the same moment an involuntary love for it that drives forth the act of creation and recreation.

THALIA
Emotion
anticipated
in tranquillity?

POLYMNIA
It's possible, my dear. Our Poet down there “objectifies” herself in her poems. And then she sometimes discovers that the portrayal in the poem is more honest than she could have admitted to her realistic self. How many times she has written the prophetic poem she could not herself fully comprehend at the time of its writing!