Changing
Lise Weil
From In Search of Pure Lust
stunned at the suddenly possible shifts of meaning
for which we must find words or burn
Olga Broumas, “Artemis”
The rectangular shape of his book of knowledge, bending…
Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature
for which we must find words or burn
Olga Broumas, “Artemis”
The rectangular shape of his book of knowledge, bending…
Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature
. . . In the fall of ‘78, the fall after Kaye and I broke up, I dropped out of grad school to join a women’s writing program in upstate New York. I’d seen an ad for it in The Lesbian Connection and applied soon after. An acceptance letter arrived around the time Kaye and I began househunting in Boston. It was surprisingly long and detailed, assessing my strengths as a writer based on the sample I’d sent them and the chance I stood--a good one, it stressed—of parlaying those strengths into publishable work. I chose to see the letter as a test of our love, beside which the prospect of artistic success simply paled, and wrote back to decline, saying I’d had a change of plans. Perversely, though, the praise in that letter, and the welcoming tone, would ring in my ears whenever Kaye and I were touring apartments or discussing living arrangements. And, just as perversely, once the field was open again and I was free to say yes to the program, having no good alternative, all I yearned for was what I had just thrown away: the chance to live with her, day in and day out. To wake up with her in the morning and go to sleep with her at night.
I wrote back to the director to say I was coming, though without enthusiasm. I saw the program as my consolation. I had lost my chance at true love but, like Proust and Joyce, maybe now I would redeem my losses through writing. In August I drove up to find myself an apartment, staying in a catpiss-soaked room in the country home of the co-director.
Janet was talking on the phone, swatting flies and fixing coffee when I walked in. Books and papers had taken over the kitchen counters. In between phone calls she regaled me with stories of her previous life as a suburban housewife, her love affairs with a horsewoman and a famous lesbian writer, and a vicious lesbian poet party she’d just attended in New York. A-propos of a writing manuscript which spilled across her kitchen table and which she rose early to work on, typing steadily all morning long, she explained she was telling her side of the story of her affair with the famous writer—who’d been Visiting Faculty there the year before and had dumped her shortly thereafter. A kind of redemption, I supposed, but not the sort I’d had in mind.
A student from the previous year came by the next day to show me around the village, which was charming in an upstate New York kind of way, the main street lined with handsome Georgian rowhouses. We stopped at a little house on a side street. I didn’t realize till we were inside, and the student said her name, “Bella,” that I was being introduced to the director, the one who’d written the letter. She was kneeling by an upended armchair in the living room removing a thick layer of doghair, something she continued to do throughout our conversation.
Bella wore old sweatpants and a paint-splattered T-shirt. “Sorry I’m not more presentable,” she said in a strong Brooklyn accent, shaking my hand without rising from the floor. It was obvious she wasn’t sorry at all. On an endtable beside her lay two packs of cigarettes, Carletons and Marlboros. “I alternate,” she explained as she caught me glancing at them. Comfortable, I thought, what a comfortable person. The effect she had on me, strangely, was to speed me up. I began firing questions at her: how did this program get started? Whose idea was it? What sort of people were attracted to it?
Like her efforts to remove the doghair, Bella’s responses to my questions were unhurried and methodical. “We didn’t feel women were being served by the creative writing department at the university. Our voices tend to get drowned out…When people ask: why split women off from men I always say: don’t ask me, ask history….”
I was too busy taking in her face to catch everything she said. Mostly the eyes: the deep creases on either side, the light they gave off, and what I read in them—reserves of both mischief and wisdom. When she looked up from the chair, as she finally did, she seemed to lock my gaze in hers. “I liked your application,” she said. It was a tacit acknowledgement that something important had already transpired between us.
“Thank you,” I said dumbly.
“You’ll be glad you decided to come,” she continued. I had the feeling she knew everything: why I’d reneged, why I’d come around, even the fact that coming around hadn’t exactly been my decision. When I drove home that evening, having put down a deposit on a room in a boarding house on the main street, I considered for the first time that perhaps Kaye had done me a favor by bailing.
By the time I returned six weeks later and we were all assembled around the seminar table for our first class, however, I was awash in sadness. Twelve women, none of them is Kaye. We go around the table telling our stories. What brought us here. I feel shy as I have never before felt in my life—is it Bella? Some of us are nervously tugging at cigarettes, others chew gum. Penny, a big blonde woman from Oklahoma whose father works on an oil rig, sports a bandanna and talks tough. “It’s been a long haul,” she says in an Oklahoma drawl. Jeanne from Cincinnati, a dyed blonde with a tragic look, says this is a big gamble and she sure hopes it’ll pay off. Bibi, a long-haired punk with sleeves cut out of her shirt hails from Woburn Mass “where it smells bad,” says she’s just psyched to be here, punching the air with her fist. Marla with long blonde hair and a sultry Peggy Lee voice says after years of standing back from the heat she’s finally jumping into the fire. I mumble something about being a refugee from graduate school.
The woman beside me, Jane, whom I’ve pegged for a suburban housewife, holds up her thumb which has a bandaid on it and says the powermower just took a slice off it. Everyone waits for her to continue but she doesn’t. General laughter. For the first time the tension—the air has been thick with it—eases.
Bella has us each pick a Tarot card, then write down what it seems to be saying to us. I pick “Temperance” but even after five minutes of listening I hear only the furious scratching of pens on either side. Finally I give up and describe the figure on the card and the pitcher of water he’s pouring from. Pass when it’s my turn to read. I fare no better in the other exercises she assigns to us. The others, meanwhile, turn out to have formidable talents. Bibi is a whiz at describing an orange through the senses. Marla free-associates in four languages including Serbo-Croatian. Penny’s every sentence is marked by working class grit and sinew. Jane the suburban housewife is a comic genius.
At the end of the day Bella says she is “energized.” She talks of the hopes she has for all of us. What we stand to gain, singly and collectively, in these months of writing together and studying together; there will be courses in women’s poetry and fiction as well as writing. Bella wants us to understand that our focus on women writers is not just about righting a historical imbalance, though of course it is that. The writers we’ll be looking at are all in some way trying to make connections, to make whole. They reject fragmentation, alienated vision. Writing at the edge of the void. And so does she, she says.
“The abyss seems to be the major preoccupation of most male writers today. Here’s what I say we do with the abyss,” and here she modulates to Jewish mother mode, laying the Brooklyn accent on thick: “fill it with water, chicken bones, some garlic, a little salt. Bring it to a boil, let it simmer for a few hundred years. Then feed it to all the hungry people in the world.” Jane is writing this down in her notebook, grinning. Several of us applaud. I’m cheering inside, where wheels are turning very fast. “Fragmentation. Alienated vision” would apply to almost all the modern writers we read in grad school. If not to the attitude of my professors. Until this moment it didn’t occur to me any other attitude was possible.
We’re about to break up when Penny raises her hand. “All this talk about vision and I can’t even see to the other side of the room for all the smoke.” There’s a moment of shocked silence. How dare she? The smokers reluctantly put out their butts. In my indignation, I, who’ve said almost nothing till now, stand up and proclaim loudly that I’ve spent much of the last ten years of my life in Ivy League classrooms and today is the first day for as long as I can remember that learning actually made sense to me. Bella nods in my direction then suggests we take a vote on the smoking in the next class.
In the first weeks the tension in the seminar room steadily mounts. Jane—who it turns out lives in Syracuse with her girlfriend—has been blocked; one day she breaks through, has a vision by the lake, with wild geese honking overhead, comes home and writes all night long, covering pages and pages. She reads some of it to us in class the next day: it’s fresh and funny and alive. Bella looks pleased; she gets us talking about voices—the ones that call to us. How can we heed them? Why don’t we listen? “There are reasons why we don’t,” Penny says. Her jaw’s been clenched, she’s chewing gum really hard. “Some of them are damn good ones too.”
Colleen, an older woman with hair pulled back in a bandanna, who like me has been mostly silent, says she regularly burns what she writes because she’s afraid of being locked up. Bella nods, knowingly. Marla throws a cup against the wall. Jane ducks under the table. Bibi screams. The smokers—who were outvoted at our second meeting—begin to exit the room, cigarettes already poised between fingers and lips. “Of course it’s scary,” Bella shouts. “Who ever said it wasn’t scary?”
Each week one of us presents her work. These are the moments of highest stress. Janet the co-director is more merciful with us than I would have expected from the way she spoke of her ex-lovers. She offers precise criticisms and suggestions, e.g.: “You don’t have enough control of your voice yet; your humor’s cutting the wrong way.” The rest of us flail about, offering conflicting responses to the work. Heads keep turning towards Bella, looking for a sign. Are we on the mark? Usually she holds out till the very end and when she does weigh in everyone gets very still. It’s never just about the work. She tells Bibi she might be able to write something truthful if she could just stop worrying about her image. She tells Penny to lighten up. Even Jane gets worked over: “Have you ever tried writing something that isn’t funny? Humor can be a cop-out.” Sometimes instead of critiquing the work Bella critiques our responses. Why are they always technical instead of emotional. Why aren’t we engaging with our whole selves, why do we leave all the hard work to her?
After class there are griping sessions at Albert’s, the family-style restaurant on the main street. Bibi feels she’s been dumped on; Jody who’s a psychologist feels there needs to be professional back-up if you’re going to attack people personally the way Bella does. “Did you feel personally attacked?” I say to Jane. “Absolutely not,” she says. “I didn’t come here to get stroked.” Jody says that’s missing the point; Bella’s opening a Pandora’s box and it’s just not professional. I ask her has she read what Woolf has to say about the professions in Three Guineas. Realizing I probably sound like an academic snob. Jody ignores this comment. “I’m just afraid some of us are not going to survive this year intact,” she says. Well, I think, maybe the wheat needs to be separated from the chaff.
An alumna of the program—there are lots of them still around—has a second-floor railroad apartment with high ceilings in an old building on the main street and one night a week it becomes a speakeasy for all the girls in town. At the end of our first week everyone gathers there for drinks and smokes and dancing on the hardwood floors. Already attractions are forming. Jody, who shares a sweet cottage in the village with her girlfriend, is having a very intense exchange in the corner with Jeanne, the girlfriend nowhere in sight. Bibi and Janet are dancing up a storm; later I see Bibi put her arm around Janet’s waist. Brazen, I think, but Janet doesn’t pull away. Bella arrives with a long lanky blonde woman, young, with wire-rimmed glasses. I realize now I’ve seen the two of them walking in town, arm-in-arm. They sit down together on a couch and Bella puts her hand on the young woman’s thigh and later circles her neck with her arm.
The next day there’s a briefing session at Albert’s, over beer and fried chicken and shrimp baskets; information has been passed on by local alums. Janet’s a big flirt but she usually doesn’t follow through. Bella’s another story. That blonde woman is Brooke, they’re an item. Brooke was a student here two years ago, that’s when it started. The short dark woman with the camera who was so friendly to everyone and took pictures is Miriam, Bella’s life partner. They’ve been together a long time. Neither of them believes in monogamy.
Penny is staying in the same boarding house as I am. On our walks to and from campus, we have long discussions about Bella and the other students. Despite the way she challenges Bella in class, Penny admires her and like me feels privileged to be here. Neither of us has any tolerance for the carping and whining at Albert’s. I begin to be fond of Penny. We spend more and more time in each other’s rooms. Talking at first, then, after a week goes by and at her initative, kissing. I’ve told Penny about Kaye, she understands I’m not ready for more than this. But it’s nice to have someone to be with here.
“Pay attention to what they tell you to forget,” wrote the poet Muriel Rukeyser, who was Visiting Faculty here last year and whom Bella often invokes in class. When I think back now to how everything changed for me that year at the Center, those words seem to sum it all up. The problem with grad school, I was coming to understand, was not the mind. It was what the mind had been asked to do—and what it had been asked to ignore. Here at the Center we were reclaiming intuition and magic as vital sources of knowledge. We were waking up to nature. We were tuning into our bodies, our senses. We were learning to put thinking in the service of ourselves, of our own questions. It was all the pieces coming together for the first time. It was coming to see how fragmented my life had been before. It was overthrowing all the male authorities who had ever ruled in my head.
Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature and Adrienne Rich’s Dream of a Common Language, each in its own way a deconstruction of the male paradigm of knowledge, had both been published that year, and were passed feverishly from hand to hand throughout the fall. They kept us company in our subversions. Still today when I read passages from Woman and Nature I see the rolling hills of upstate New York and those rushing streams, I hear those honking geese. . .
I wrote back to the director to say I was coming, though without enthusiasm. I saw the program as my consolation. I had lost my chance at true love but, like Proust and Joyce, maybe now I would redeem my losses through writing. In August I drove up to find myself an apartment, staying in a catpiss-soaked room in the country home of the co-director.
Janet was talking on the phone, swatting flies and fixing coffee when I walked in. Books and papers had taken over the kitchen counters. In between phone calls she regaled me with stories of her previous life as a suburban housewife, her love affairs with a horsewoman and a famous lesbian writer, and a vicious lesbian poet party she’d just attended in New York. A-propos of a writing manuscript which spilled across her kitchen table and which she rose early to work on, typing steadily all morning long, she explained she was telling her side of the story of her affair with the famous writer—who’d been Visiting Faculty there the year before and had dumped her shortly thereafter. A kind of redemption, I supposed, but not the sort I’d had in mind.
A student from the previous year came by the next day to show me around the village, which was charming in an upstate New York kind of way, the main street lined with handsome Georgian rowhouses. We stopped at a little house on a side street. I didn’t realize till we were inside, and the student said her name, “Bella,” that I was being introduced to the director, the one who’d written the letter. She was kneeling by an upended armchair in the living room removing a thick layer of doghair, something she continued to do throughout our conversation.
Bella wore old sweatpants and a paint-splattered T-shirt. “Sorry I’m not more presentable,” she said in a strong Brooklyn accent, shaking my hand without rising from the floor. It was obvious she wasn’t sorry at all. On an endtable beside her lay two packs of cigarettes, Carletons and Marlboros. “I alternate,” she explained as she caught me glancing at them. Comfortable, I thought, what a comfortable person. The effect she had on me, strangely, was to speed me up. I began firing questions at her: how did this program get started? Whose idea was it? What sort of people were attracted to it?
Like her efforts to remove the doghair, Bella’s responses to my questions were unhurried and methodical. “We didn’t feel women were being served by the creative writing department at the university. Our voices tend to get drowned out…When people ask: why split women off from men I always say: don’t ask me, ask history….”
I was too busy taking in her face to catch everything she said. Mostly the eyes: the deep creases on either side, the light they gave off, and what I read in them—reserves of both mischief and wisdom. When she looked up from the chair, as she finally did, she seemed to lock my gaze in hers. “I liked your application,” she said. It was a tacit acknowledgement that something important had already transpired between us.
“Thank you,” I said dumbly.
“You’ll be glad you decided to come,” she continued. I had the feeling she knew everything: why I’d reneged, why I’d come around, even the fact that coming around hadn’t exactly been my decision. When I drove home that evening, having put down a deposit on a room in a boarding house on the main street, I considered for the first time that perhaps Kaye had done me a favor by bailing.
By the time I returned six weeks later and we were all assembled around the seminar table for our first class, however, I was awash in sadness. Twelve women, none of them is Kaye. We go around the table telling our stories. What brought us here. I feel shy as I have never before felt in my life—is it Bella? Some of us are nervously tugging at cigarettes, others chew gum. Penny, a big blonde woman from Oklahoma whose father works on an oil rig, sports a bandanna and talks tough. “It’s been a long haul,” she says in an Oklahoma drawl. Jeanne from Cincinnati, a dyed blonde with a tragic look, says this is a big gamble and she sure hopes it’ll pay off. Bibi, a long-haired punk with sleeves cut out of her shirt hails from Woburn Mass “where it smells bad,” says she’s just psyched to be here, punching the air with her fist. Marla with long blonde hair and a sultry Peggy Lee voice says after years of standing back from the heat she’s finally jumping into the fire. I mumble something about being a refugee from graduate school.
The woman beside me, Jane, whom I’ve pegged for a suburban housewife, holds up her thumb which has a bandaid on it and says the powermower just took a slice off it. Everyone waits for her to continue but she doesn’t. General laughter. For the first time the tension—the air has been thick with it—eases.
Bella has us each pick a Tarot card, then write down what it seems to be saying to us. I pick “Temperance” but even after five minutes of listening I hear only the furious scratching of pens on either side. Finally I give up and describe the figure on the card and the pitcher of water he’s pouring from. Pass when it’s my turn to read. I fare no better in the other exercises she assigns to us. The others, meanwhile, turn out to have formidable talents. Bibi is a whiz at describing an orange through the senses. Marla free-associates in four languages including Serbo-Croatian. Penny’s every sentence is marked by working class grit and sinew. Jane the suburban housewife is a comic genius.
At the end of the day Bella says she is “energized.” She talks of the hopes she has for all of us. What we stand to gain, singly and collectively, in these months of writing together and studying together; there will be courses in women’s poetry and fiction as well as writing. Bella wants us to understand that our focus on women writers is not just about righting a historical imbalance, though of course it is that. The writers we’ll be looking at are all in some way trying to make connections, to make whole. They reject fragmentation, alienated vision. Writing at the edge of the void. And so does she, she says.
“The abyss seems to be the major preoccupation of most male writers today. Here’s what I say we do with the abyss,” and here she modulates to Jewish mother mode, laying the Brooklyn accent on thick: “fill it with water, chicken bones, some garlic, a little salt. Bring it to a boil, let it simmer for a few hundred years. Then feed it to all the hungry people in the world.” Jane is writing this down in her notebook, grinning. Several of us applaud. I’m cheering inside, where wheels are turning very fast. “Fragmentation. Alienated vision” would apply to almost all the modern writers we read in grad school. If not to the attitude of my professors. Until this moment it didn’t occur to me any other attitude was possible.
We’re about to break up when Penny raises her hand. “All this talk about vision and I can’t even see to the other side of the room for all the smoke.” There’s a moment of shocked silence. How dare she? The smokers reluctantly put out their butts. In my indignation, I, who’ve said almost nothing till now, stand up and proclaim loudly that I’ve spent much of the last ten years of my life in Ivy League classrooms and today is the first day for as long as I can remember that learning actually made sense to me. Bella nods in my direction then suggests we take a vote on the smoking in the next class.
In the first weeks the tension in the seminar room steadily mounts. Jane—who it turns out lives in Syracuse with her girlfriend—has been blocked; one day she breaks through, has a vision by the lake, with wild geese honking overhead, comes home and writes all night long, covering pages and pages. She reads some of it to us in class the next day: it’s fresh and funny and alive. Bella looks pleased; she gets us talking about voices—the ones that call to us. How can we heed them? Why don’t we listen? “There are reasons why we don’t,” Penny says. Her jaw’s been clenched, she’s chewing gum really hard. “Some of them are damn good ones too.”
Colleen, an older woman with hair pulled back in a bandanna, who like me has been mostly silent, says she regularly burns what she writes because she’s afraid of being locked up. Bella nods, knowingly. Marla throws a cup against the wall. Jane ducks under the table. Bibi screams. The smokers—who were outvoted at our second meeting—begin to exit the room, cigarettes already poised between fingers and lips. “Of course it’s scary,” Bella shouts. “Who ever said it wasn’t scary?”
Each week one of us presents her work. These are the moments of highest stress. Janet the co-director is more merciful with us than I would have expected from the way she spoke of her ex-lovers. She offers precise criticisms and suggestions, e.g.: “You don’t have enough control of your voice yet; your humor’s cutting the wrong way.” The rest of us flail about, offering conflicting responses to the work. Heads keep turning towards Bella, looking for a sign. Are we on the mark? Usually she holds out till the very end and when she does weigh in everyone gets very still. It’s never just about the work. She tells Bibi she might be able to write something truthful if she could just stop worrying about her image. She tells Penny to lighten up. Even Jane gets worked over: “Have you ever tried writing something that isn’t funny? Humor can be a cop-out.” Sometimes instead of critiquing the work Bella critiques our responses. Why are they always technical instead of emotional. Why aren’t we engaging with our whole selves, why do we leave all the hard work to her?
After class there are griping sessions at Albert’s, the family-style restaurant on the main street. Bibi feels she’s been dumped on; Jody who’s a psychologist feels there needs to be professional back-up if you’re going to attack people personally the way Bella does. “Did you feel personally attacked?” I say to Jane. “Absolutely not,” she says. “I didn’t come here to get stroked.” Jody says that’s missing the point; Bella’s opening a Pandora’s box and it’s just not professional. I ask her has she read what Woolf has to say about the professions in Three Guineas. Realizing I probably sound like an academic snob. Jody ignores this comment. “I’m just afraid some of us are not going to survive this year intact,” she says. Well, I think, maybe the wheat needs to be separated from the chaff.
An alumna of the program—there are lots of them still around—has a second-floor railroad apartment with high ceilings in an old building on the main street and one night a week it becomes a speakeasy for all the girls in town. At the end of our first week everyone gathers there for drinks and smokes and dancing on the hardwood floors. Already attractions are forming. Jody, who shares a sweet cottage in the village with her girlfriend, is having a very intense exchange in the corner with Jeanne, the girlfriend nowhere in sight. Bibi and Janet are dancing up a storm; later I see Bibi put her arm around Janet’s waist. Brazen, I think, but Janet doesn’t pull away. Bella arrives with a long lanky blonde woman, young, with wire-rimmed glasses. I realize now I’ve seen the two of them walking in town, arm-in-arm. They sit down together on a couch and Bella puts her hand on the young woman’s thigh and later circles her neck with her arm.
The next day there’s a briefing session at Albert’s, over beer and fried chicken and shrimp baskets; information has been passed on by local alums. Janet’s a big flirt but she usually doesn’t follow through. Bella’s another story. That blonde woman is Brooke, they’re an item. Brooke was a student here two years ago, that’s when it started. The short dark woman with the camera who was so friendly to everyone and took pictures is Miriam, Bella’s life partner. They’ve been together a long time. Neither of them believes in monogamy.
Penny is staying in the same boarding house as I am. On our walks to and from campus, we have long discussions about Bella and the other students. Despite the way she challenges Bella in class, Penny admires her and like me feels privileged to be here. Neither of us has any tolerance for the carping and whining at Albert’s. I begin to be fond of Penny. We spend more and more time in each other’s rooms. Talking at first, then, after a week goes by and at her initative, kissing. I’ve told Penny about Kaye, she understands I’m not ready for more than this. But it’s nice to have someone to be with here.
“Pay attention to what they tell you to forget,” wrote the poet Muriel Rukeyser, who was Visiting Faculty here last year and whom Bella often invokes in class. When I think back now to how everything changed for me that year at the Center, those words seem to sum it all up. The problem with grad school, I was coming to understand, was not the mind. It was what the mind had been asked to do—and what it had been asked to ignore. Here at the Center we were reclaiming intuition and magic as vital sources of knowledge. We were waking up to nature. We were tuning into our bodies, our senses. We were learning to put thinking in the service of ourselves, of our own questions. It was all the pieces coming together for the first time. It was coming to see how fragmented my life had been before. It was overthrowing all the male authorities who had ever ruled in my head.
Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature and Adrienne Rich’s Dream of a Common Language, each in its own way a deconstruction of the male paradigm of knowledge, had both been published that year, and were passed feverishly from hand to hand throughout the fall. They kept us company in our subversions. Still today when I read passages from Woman and Nature I see the rolling hills of upstate New York and those rushing streams, I hear those honking geese. . .
Working notes
The above is an excerpt from my memoir-in-progress, In Search of Pure Lust. When asked what feminism is to me I find I am always thrown back to the past, what it was to me; the several versions of it served up today, at least in popular culture, tend to be so individualized as to rob the word of meaning (Miley Cyrus?? Sheryl Sandberg and “leaning in”???). So I find myself instead thinking back to then, the time of my own awakening, which happened in the late ‘70s. How it was not separable from the opening up of my whole body to women, and also to nature. How it entailed a total subversion of male systems of meaning. How I was, we were, awakening to the possibility that what we had been told to ignore was everything that mattered most. And that we would now begin, eyes open, together, to live in reality. . .for real.
The grad program I had dropped out of to attend this women’s writing center was in Comparative Literature at Brown University. I had been writing clever little papers that pleased the profs but that felt to me like exercises in absurdity. Though the writers I loved were all in the 20th century, I was laboring over papers on de Laclos, Richardson, and Defoe—the 18th century having been recommended to me as a good place to stake my claim to expertise. Meanwhile I had embarked on my first lesbian relationship and begun to seriously question all the assumptions I had made about what my life would look like. Books that might have supported such questioning were off the Comp Lit radar. Our set books list, with the exception of Jane Austen, was 100% dead white males. In short there was a pretty absolute disconnect between my bodily experience and my grad school career. To arrive in a place where my instinctual life actually mattered, where what I saw and heard and felt was valued, in fact was regarded as the starting point for the work we were all there to do. . .this was a homecoming of the first order. It’s difficult to convey how alive with possibility the world began to feel. (Which is why instead of an essay I decided to submit this narrative account: the next best thing to being there.)
It was a blissful utopian moment which contained the seeds of its own undoing. One result of wanting to undo millenia of patriarchal oppression was an embrace of sexual freedom that sometimes bordered on lawlessness and that we revelled in until we began to notice the trail of victims. Quite a few of us were getting hurt. It was not AIDS but still it took a huge toll. As the astute reader may have guessed, I went on to become lovers with “Bella,” the director of the writing program. In the beginning it was heady, fiery, rapturous—and ultimately it was disastrous for me and my writing. There would be other forms of abuse of power and privilege both enabled by and ultimately exploding the myth of sisterhood. Over time, the insights we’d garnered from paying attention to our experience often hardened into ideologies which we then used to bludgeon each other over the head. It was a grand experiment and the casualties were commensurate with its grandeur. But what I took from that moment, as I assume did many others who lived it, was something that could never be taken away. We had had a taste of what it was like to live as physical beings whose bodies mattered and whose knowing was not separate from those bodies. Call it “gnosis” if you like. It was a kind of knowing that was not taking place at universities. It was a pearl of great price.
I believe it was thanks to that knowing that we were able to touch in so deeply to the insanity of the patriarchal institutions that had shaped us: medical, industrial, military, religious, academic. The vision was big and it was wholistic; this was true of all of the writers that were foundational in my feminist education—Mary Daly, Susan Griffin, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Gena Corea, Barbara Mor. We were making connections between sexism, racism, classicism, ageism, militarism, and the destruction of the earth. Our teachable moments were Three Mile Island, Bhopal, Chernobyl. As we saw it, these were the logical conclusion to a state of law/mind/rule that had prevailed for thousands of years, a legacy of the first Western philosophers, theologians and scientists, all white men who felt themselves to be separate from and superior to both nature and women, whose thinking reflected this separation. Under this state, (we called it “patriarchy”) what chance did the earth and her creatures stand? Already thirty years ago we were sounding the alarm and sounding it loud.
With new digital technologies, young people have become more and more divorced from the sources that fed us back in the ‘70s and ‘80s. I doubt that Google discussion groups can ever duplicate those circles of women listening in to their scarred, wayward, mysterious, revelatory bodies—circles that birthed the Second Wave. I honestly don’t know what sorts of awakenings are happening today for young women just coming to consciousness about the degraded world that’s been handed to them and the reasons for that degradation, or where they can share and build on these awakenings. These days I’m most likely to find the rage and outrage that fueled our feminist struggles in the writings and talks of environmentalists—men as well as women. My own activist practice lately has been working to save the last free-flowing rivers in northern Quebec from proposed megadams (that would supply mining companies with cheap electricity), which feels like feminist work to me.
Another important feminist practice has been mentoring students in embodiment studies, a popular focus area in the master’s program where I teach. Students doing this work, who are mostly but not all women, are consciously liberating themselves from myriad forms of male authority, whether in the arena of psychology, epistemology, or literary form. Probing the origins and effects of trauma, seeking ways to reclaim sealed-off memory and knowledge, validating emotional and sensory intelligence, forging a more intimate relationship with their own body and the larger earth body, and discovering or creating a writing form that uniquely suits their project—these are all aspects of the work of integration that is central to embodiment studies and that I consider to be deeply feminist in nature and origin.
The grad program I had dropped out of to attend this women’s writing center was in Comparative Literature at Brown University. I had been writing clever little papers that pleased the profs but that felt to me like exercises in absurdity. Though the writers I loved were all in the 20th century, I was laboring over papers on de Laclos, Richardson, and Defoe—the 18th century having been recommended to me as a good place to stake my claim to expertise. Meanwhile I had embarked on my first lesbian relationship and begun to seriously question all the assumptions I had made about what my life would look like. Books that might have supported such questioning were off the Comp Lit radar. Our set books list, with the exception of Jane Austen, was 100% dead white males. In short there was a pretty absolute disconnect between my bodily experience and my grad school career. To arrive in a place where my instinctual life actually mattered, where what I saw and heard and felt was valued, in fact was regarded as the starting point for the work we were all there to do. . .this was a homecoming of the first order. It’s difficult to convey how alive with possibility the world began to feel. (Which is why instead of an essay I decided to submit this narrative account: the next best thing to being there.)
It was a blissful utopian moment which contained the seeds of its own undoing. One result of wanting to undo millenia of patriarchal oppression was an embrace of sexual freedom that sometimes bordered on lawlessness and that we revelled in until we began to notice the trail of victims. Quite a few of us were getting hurt. It was not AIDS but still it took a huge toll. As the astute reader may have guessed, I went on to become lovers with “Bella,” the director of the writing program. In the beginning it was heady, fiery, rapturous—and ultimately it was disastrous for me and my writing. There would be other forms of abuse of power and privilege both enabled by and ultimately exploding the myth of sisterhood. Over time, the insights we’d garnered from paying attention to our experience often hardened into ideologies which we then used to bludgeon each other over the head. It was a grand experiment and the casualties were commensurate with its grandeur. But what I took from that moment, as I assume did many others who lived it, was something that could never be taken away. We had had a taste of what it was like to live as physical beings whose bodies mattered and whose knowing was not separate from those bodies. Call it “gnosis” if you like. It was a kind of knowing that was not taking place at universities. It was a pearl of great price.
I believe it was thanks to that knowing that we were able to touch in so deeply to the insanity of the patriarchal institutions that had shaped us: medical, industrial, military, religious, academic. The vision was big and it was wholistic; this was true of all of the writers that were foundational in my feminist education—Mary Daly, Susan Griffin, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Gena Corea, Barbara Mor. We were making connections between sexism, racism, classicism, ageism, militarism, and the destruction of the earth. Our teachable moments were Three Mile Island, Bhopal, Chernobyl. As we saw it, these were the logical conclusion to a state of law/mind/rule that had prevailed for thousands of years, a legacy of the first Western philosophers, theologians and scientists, all white men who felt themselves to be separate from and superior to both nature and women, whose thinking reflected this separation. Under this state, (we called it “patriarchy”) what chance did the earth and her creatures stand? Already thirty years ago we were sounding the alarm and sounding it loud.
With new digital technologies, young people have become more and more divorced from the sources that fed us back in the ‘70s and ‘80s. I doubt that Google discussion groups can ever duplicate those circles of women listening in to their scarred, wayward, mysterious, revelatory bodies—circles that birthed the Second Wave. I honestly don’t know what sorts of awakenings are happening today for young women just coming to consciousness about the degraded world that’s been handed to them and the reasons for that degradation, or where they can share and build on these awakenings. These days I’m most likely to find the rage and outrage that fueled our feminist struggles in the writings and talks of environmentalists—men as well as women. My own activist practice lately has been working to save the last free-flowing rivers in northern Quebec from proposed megadams (that would supply mining companies with cheap electricity), which feels like feminist work to me.
Another important feminist practice has been mentoring students in embodiment studies, a popular focus area in the master’s program where I teach. Students doing this work, who are mostly but not all women, are consciously liberating themselves from myriad forms of male authority, whether in the arena of psychology, epistemology, or literary form. Probing the origins and effects of trauma, seeking ways to reclaim sealed-off memory and knowledge, validating emotional and sensory intelligence, forging a more intimate relationship with their own body and the larger earth body, and discovering or creating a writing form that uniquely suits their project—these are all aspects of the work of integration that is central to embodiment studies and that I consider to be deeply feminist in nature and origin.
About the author
Lise Weil was founding editor of Trivia: A Journal of Ideas, which she edited between 1982 and 1991. She was editor of Trivia: Voices of Feminism between 2004 and 2011. Her memoir, In Search of Pure Lust, is inching toward completion. She lives in Montreal and teaches in Goddard College’s Individualized Master’s program.