Going Too Far (52 page)

But for the quintessential definition we must finally go to Dr. Johnson's wry and condemnatory essay in which he coined the name for the metaphysical poets. He didn't like them (Donne, Cleveland, and Cowley especially) for all the right reasons—which is to say that his definitions were most piercingly accurate precisely when most limited by his own brazenly affirmed prejudices. The standard practice of these poets, he huffed, was to create situations in which “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.”
¹⁷
He
used as an example of this violent yoking Donne's memorable image of “stiff twin compasses” to describe two lovers separated by geographical distance but still joined in spiritual and emotional unity.
¹⁸
Donne's astonishing image needs no defense any longer from anyone. We can concentrate therefore on Dr. Johnson's phrase—one which seems to me a strikingly appropriate metaphor for metaphysical feminism.

If by heterogeneous ideas we admit ambivalence, complexity, and the dialectic (philosophical and material); and if we understand “violence” to mean risked force, a defiance of stasis, a hazarding, a gamble with the greatest of stakes;
and
if by “yoked” we comprehend commitment held in balance by a discipline self-imposed—then we have in effect our own formula alchemized from the dear dross of Dr. Johnson.

The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together
—such as struggle with the person one loves. Such as
contradiction
(the very element the proto-Marxist ideologue fears and would eliminate as quickly as possible). Such as these two at-first-glance utterly opposed concepts might be yoked together by the sheer
violence
of our desire:

(1) The idea of any meaning out there in the universe

(2) The idea of any freedom here for women

Normally the first statement would bring us up short at that old chestnut “If God is God he is not good; if God is good he is not God.” But the violence of our desire regarding the second statement speeds us past, through, and into a self-created feminist metaphysic where there simply is no “out there” any longer. Because all that is out there is in here, and always was and always shall be, born of one's own actions renewingly, mystically, perpetually.

Microphotography of a blastula dividing in the womb divulges to our eyes a pattern and process identical to that enacted for us by interstellar radio waves “photographing” the expansion of a galaxy
. This is a living metaphysically poetic image.
¹⁹
It is the third possibility.

The polarizing simplification that rejects the third way is impossible with metaphysical feminism. Impossible to drop out and “navel-gaze” (which a muddled general definition of metaphysical thought might allow, but which our clarified analogy to the seventeenth-century poets does not permit). Impossible because the fantastic is rooted in the miracle of reality and flowers continuously within it. Equally impossible
to settle for that reality alone, that “equal pay for equal work,” when this damnably intrusive
passionate thinking
keeps leading us onward and inward.
²⁰
It is only a fitting contradiction, then, that we encounter in John Donne and the other metaphysical poets of seventeenth-century England one excellent model for an approach to our own feminist metaphysic.

“
The ancient Church knew not, Heaven knows not yet
:

And where, what lawes of Poetry admit
,

Lawes of Religion have at least the same
,

Imortall Maide, I might invoke thy name …

Thou art the Proclamation; and I am

The Trumpet, at whose voice the people came.”
²¹

III: SPIRITUALITY

I
OFFER YOU
a feminist
koan
of my own devising:

Liberation and oppression can look much the same. Being unable to discern the difference between them—this is the meaning of oppression. (So much for at least one of the two definitions.) Or is this the ultimate definition of both?

In which case we might call it “grace.”

But in which case?

Not the least devastating gesture of patriarchal power has been to cast the cosmos itself—the life force, energy, matter, and miracle—into the form of a male god. Feminists have already observed that this has had a less than salutary effect on women. We could spend fifty volumes delineating the destruction done in the names of such gods, and we can also look around us. At this writing, Christian armies and Moslem forces in Lebanon are slaughtering each other
and
civilians (for which read: women and children and the aged) in the streets of Beirut, even as Catholic and Protestant antagonists draft grammar-school children to snipe at one another across the blood-scummed cobblestones of Londonderry in Northern Ireland. Both of these “religious wars” are misnomers in the political sense, but in a deeper sense they are perfectly named,
since both are about the contest between the two great modern patriarchal religions: capitalism and communism. For it is not only the Judeo-Christian tradition which has shored up the patriarchy for five thousand years; it is every male-conceived and -dominated faith.

I confess to a particular antipathy for the Catholic Church, despite my loyalty to good theater wherever it can be found, and my longstanding passion for Gregorian chant.
²²
I don't mean to let the rest of Christianity (or my own religion of origin from which I am so apostate, Judaism) off the hook easily. But it
is
hard to overlook or forget nine million women burned as witches over a period of three hundred years by Christianity, and largely by the Catholic Church.
²³
Even today, in Catholic South and Latin America, illegal abortion and childbirth compete for the highest cause of death among women. In the United States, the church is financing Birch-Society-led campaigns to undo the moderate progress women have made in gaining self-determination over our own bodies. So much blood spilled on the cathedral steps, because that perfect microcosm of patriarchy—that hierarchy of octogenarian celibate males running around in drag—still thinks it can rule on the lives and bodies of millions of women, whatever our ages.

Which should not, I grant, keep us from justly condemning the gray, co-optative mask of modern Protestantism (clamped over the self-righteous expressions of Luther and Knox); the virulent woman-hatred in Fundamentalist Christianity; the woman-fear and woman-loathing rampant in Judaism to this day (as if the scars of that religion's matriarchal origin and its overthrow were still not eradicated from the Jewish collective unconscious); the female-as-temptress or the female-as-nonentity in, respectively, the exoteric and esoteric sophistries of Buddhist, Zen, or Western existential thought; the vitriol spewed on women for centuries in Moslem cultures.
²⁴

Very well. We do not exist or, since this is the choice, we are the devil's gateway, we are evil. What else, we may ask, is new? And for every female mystic who has somehow managed through her own genius, like Teresa, to reach her transcendence even through the labyrinth of patriarchal means—millions of us have stared with horror at the disbelievable reality of our own ankles stockinged in flame, have peeled open the parchment of our lips that the world might read the scream stuck in that throat. What else can we hear but that unspent scream—even if they did have anything to say to us now?

So we left their churches, and are still leaving. And the birth of what has been called female spirituality is a new phenomenon in the Women's Movement.
²⁵
This has given me much personal joy—and at present it is worrying me sick. Because once again spirituality is becoming confused with religion—thus going nowhere near far enough. An anthropomorphized god has merely been replaced with a “gynemorphized” god, after all.

Earlier in this book I noted how, in the original WITCH group in the sixties (due to intellectual laziness and activist frenzy), we never quite got around to doing the research we meant to do. But by 1970 I had embarked on that research, later to compare notes with other women who were reading and working in the same area. Consequently
when, in 1973, I affirmed myself publicly as a witch,
²⁶
I did not mean it lightly. Still, I should not have been surprised when, at a press conference twenty minutes later, three other well-known feminists declared themselves instant witches. An act of solidarity? I wanted to believe so despite my own feelings of discomfort, which told me that I had been misunderstood and trivialized on the spot. Those initial misgivings were borne out in the following months and years, at times making me regret that I had ever discussed publicly my private beliefs.

It is of course very likely that feminists would have discovered matriarchal religion and particularly the importance of the Craft in that tradition all by themselves, quite without my having “popularized” this within the Women's Movement. Serious students of the origins of feminist culture had already begun investigating this subject. Nonetheless, I feel an itch of responsibility every time I hear of some new vulgarity perpetrated on the Craft in the name of “politics” or “life-style”—or on women in the name of the Craft. It's true that I feel an even greater pride when encountering women who are willing to juggle all the contradictions so complicatedly present in this area, but for each woman who seems desirous of doing some homework on such a subject, there appear to be two others who see the Craft as a “femology” or an excuse to smoke some grass, juice up, and lie around bare-breasted for six or eight hours under a gibbous moon. Recently, I came across a booklet written by a woman purporting to be both a feminist and a witch. The egotistical occult games repelled me. The booklet proposed that women might heal themselves of possibly malignant tumors by drinking certain herb teas and burning special candles (conveniently on sale at the author's shop). Still other herb teas, another page suggested, were a fine “natural” means of birth control. We can skip over the hundred less hazard-provoking inaccuracies in the pamphlet; we are still left with the author's stupendous lack of concern for responsible feminist politics, let alone for the serious medicinal tradition of the Craft. Least of all for
women's lives
.

To paraphrase Elizabeth Tudor, I have no wish to open windows into women's souls, but I do feel the need and the right to define my own terms for myself. What I have meant by a commitment to and affirmation of the Craft of the Wise is
synthetical
and, again, complicated. Nor is this the place to describe in detail what that involves. But I will say that I am an atheist who prays most commonly and devotedly through art. I am an initiated Wiccean priestess, true, but what that means to me and what it means to you, dear reader, may indeed be astral planes apart. I tend to be rude sometimes to those people who
dare not leave home in the morning without consulting their astrological charts, but I read a mean tarot—since the poetic symbolism resonating from its archetypes is pleasurable to me. I am intensely opposed to the notion of reincarnation, finding it an irritating, exhausting thought when I don't see it as a plainly silly one. (Have you ever noticed how everyone was either Cleopatra or Napoleon in their former incarnation—never Cleopatra's chamber-pot slave or Napoleon's foot soldier?) If, on the other hand, you view reincarnation as a
metaphor
for that mystically cellular transition in which the dancers DNA and RNA immortally twine themselves, then perhaps we can discuss it further. I identify strongly with the rich psychological and poetic symbolism of matriarchal religions, and with the experiential truths I, as a daughter and a mother, recognize. Again, these involve contradictions.

Is the only way to freshen thought, to clear out the eager misunderstanders and instant co-opters, to defend language from the violation visited daily on it—
silence?
Silence directed not only toward the patriarchy (which thought occurred to some of us long ago) but even more radically—toward women?

Yet I would sing. Is silence the only way to be
unsettling
to myself, and to those whom I would reach through our mutual vices and devices? How to make you realize the imperative of this moment? How to stretch out a hand and whisper, yes, here, step out over the edge, the drop is only magnetized toward your own density's grave center.

May your insurrection and your resurrection be the same.

The form, the fabric itself, is changing. If we could be aware of the cacophony in our silence, and the reverse. If we could be conscious of the simultaneity: as intolerable torture and as literal saving grace. If we could be aware, for more than a second at a time, for more than the flash before we fall asleep …

IV: JOURNAL ENTRY

2
August
1974

4:00 a.m
.

A
WAKE FROM
another nightmare. The moon is full and it is the second day of my period. The time when women in lunatic asylums become uncontrollable, even now, in the twentieth century.

Today I learned that Elizabeth Gould Davis had shot herself, “dead of self-inflicted gunshot wounds.” All day it was the first of August. Still I have written nothing, nothing in months. Seeking the grail of my art through the dragons of everyday living.

For months K. has been in his own despair. This time neither
of us seems to have caused the other's depression; the world is sufficient motivation. I think of “King Zero.”
²⁷

All month Blake has been sad, cranky about going to summer school half-days, missing us. All day Hektor has been vomiting periodically, from having licked his paws after walking over freshly varnished floors.

We try to talk with one another, K. and I. We pay extra attention to Blake: songs, special treats, long conversations. We cuddle Hektor and fill his water bowl with fresh milk.