Women’s bodies are usually soft if they’re healthy, at least in some places, and if softness is equated to a moral failing, and virtue to a low-body-fat hardness of surface, then that’s another way in which to be a woman is to be wrong, one that people starve their way out of. Roxane Gay wrote in her book Hunger that “we should not take up space. We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men. . . . And most women know this, that we are supposed to disappear, but it’s something that needs to be said, loudly, over and over again, so that we can resist surrendering to what is expected of us.”
Maybe starvation is how you apologize for existing, or slip toward nonexistence, but I was not trying to make myself thin. I was already there, and I ate, but food wasn’t one of the main things I was hungry for. I was hungry for love, but that was so strange and foreign and terrifying a phenomenon I approached it obliquely and described it with euphemisms and fled from some versions and failed to recognize others. I was hungry for stories, books, music, for power, and for a life that was truly mine, hungry to become, to make myself, to distance myself as far as possible from where I was in my teens, to keep going until I arrived someplace that felt better.
Later in my twenties, an older man I was seeing said, “Baby, you’re driven,” and in that age when I threw out sharp replies without thinking, I said all too accurately, “And you’re parked.” I was driven, to redeem my existence by achievement, to keep going until I reached a better place (and when I did, the habit was too ingrained for me to slow down), to make something, to stop being what I was and become something else, to meet all the demands placed on me, and of course to meet everyone else’s needs first or instead. There was real joy in the creative and intellectual life, but also a withdrawal from all the other realms of life. I was like an army that had retreated to its last citadel, which in my case was my mind.
That physical diminution has its equivalents in how we live and move and act and speak or withdraw from doing so. Lacy M. Johnson writes of a relationship so controlling that, when she left him, the man built a padded room in which to rape and murder her and from which she escaped after the former and before the latter: “I tried diminishing myself in such a way that I wouldn’t provoke him, wouldn’t anger him, tried to bend myself according to his pleasure so that he would like everything I did and said and thought. It didn’t matter, because no matter what I did, it was never enough. I kept at it anyway, until there was almost nothing left of me, of the person I had been. And that person I became, who was barely a person of her own, is the version of me he liked best.”
Femininity at its most brutally conventional is a perpetual disappearing act, an erasure and a silencing to make more room for men, one in which your existence is considered an aggression and your nonexistence a form of gracious compliance. It’s built into the culture in so many ways. Your mother’s maiden name is often requested as the answer to a security question by banks and credit card companies, because it’s assumed her original name is secret, erased, lost as she took on the name of a husband. It’s no longer universal for women to give up their names but still rare to pass them on if they’re married, one of the ways women vanish or never appear.
So much was so absent that its absence was rarely noted, the lack built into the current arrangements and the possibility that things could be otherwise. Many lists of the missing have been augmented in my lifetime; we still fail to perceive voices, assumptions, positions that we will recognize in times to come. We often say silenced, which presumes someone attempted to speak, or we say disappeared, which presumes that the person, place, or thing first appeared. But there are so many things that were never murmured, never showed up, were not allowed to enter rather than forced to exit. And there are people who showed up and spoke up who were not seen or heard; they were not silent, not invisible, but their testimony fell on deaf ears, their presence was not noted.
When I was young, human beings were routinely described as mankind, and mankind could be described as a singular man, and he, and even men in liberation movements—Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin—fell back on this language, because the absence of women was so absent from our imaginations that few noted that it even could, let alone should, be otherwise. The 1950s brought books like The Family of Man and LIFE’s Picture History of Western Man; the 1960s a conference and book titled Man the Hunter that all but wrote women out of evolutionary history; by the 1970s we got a long BBC series about The Ascent of Man. The current online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary notes, “Man was considered until the 20th cent. to include women by implication, though referring primarily to males. It is now frequently understood to exclude women.”
This had real consequences. They are endless but a few come to mind: heart attacks were described by how they affected men, so that women’s symptoms were less likely to be recognized and treated, a situation from which many women died; crash test dummies replicated male bodies, meaning that vehicular safety design favored male survival, and women died at higher rates. The Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971 presumed that the behavior of young men at an elite university could be universalized to stand for that of all humanity, and William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, about a group of younger British schoolboys, was also often cited as an example of how humans behave. If men were everyone, then women were no one.
When I was young, nearly everyone who held power and made news was male, and pro sports, TV sports, meant men’s sports, and many newspapers had a women’s section about domesticity and style and shopping that implied that everything else—the news section, the sports pages, the business section—were men’s sections. Public life was for men, and women were consigned to private life, and wife beating was described as a private business though it was legally a crime and crimes were the public’s business and the law’s. Andrea Dworkin, whose radical feminism was shaped in part by an early marriage to a murderously violent man, said, “I remember the pure and consuming madness of being invisible and unreal, and every blow making me more invisible and more unreal, as the worst desperation I have ever known.”
It is so normal for places to be named after men (mostly white men) and not women that I didn’t notice it until, in 2015, I made a map renaming places after women and realized I’d grown up in a country where almost everything named after a person—mountains, rivers, towns, bridges, buildings, states, parks—was named after a man, and nearly all the statues were of men. Women were allegorical figures—liberty and justice—but not actual people. A landscape full of places named after women and statues of women might have encouraged me and other girls in profound ways. The names of women were absent, and these absences were absent from our imaginations. It was no wonder we were supposed to be so slender as to shade into nonexistence.
4
I carried other weight. I had and still sometimes have a sense of dread that held down my sense of hope and possibility, a sinking feeling that was a real sensation of heaviness in the chest, as though my heart were encased in lead, as though I were on some planet whose gravity made every step a struggle and the lifting of limbs an onerous exercise and going out among other people an exhausting prospect.
It was a feeling in the present that arose from a vision of a future that was no future, one with no way forward, from a conviction that what is terrible will always be terrible, that now is a flat, featureless plain that goes on forever, with no forests relieving it, no mountains rising from it, no doorways inviting you out of it—the dread that nothing will change that somehow coexists with the dread that something terrible is going to happen, that what is joyous cannot be trusted, and what is feared is lying in wait for you. If there’s a gravity to this feeling, there’s also a geography, that low place in the earth that we call a depression. It seemed to be made out of logic and a real assessment of the situation, but it was weather, and it would disperse like clouds, and gather again like clouds.
If later
on I wrote about hope, it was to pass along the ladders of logic and narratives with which I got myself out of these low places I know well.
I had since childhood imagined interrogations in which lacking the right answers was punished, sometimes unto death, interrogations that must have gotten something of their format from quiz shows seen in early childhood as well as the mockery that comes or came with getting something wrong in school or at the dinner table. I set myself exams and races and tests—if I saw a blue car before the bus came, if a bird flew by before I arrived, if I reached the middle of the crosswalk before the first person in the crowd on the other side of the street—like variations on the children’s game of “step on a crack/break your mother’s back.” I set a lot of imaginary parameters that would determine unrelated outcomes; it was an anxious reflex, a distraction, perhaps sometimes a reassurance when the bird flew by, when I got to the far side of the bridge before I let out my breath.
In quiz shows, people are mostly rewarded for knowing obscure things or picking the right thing, but also those who fail are cast into some outer darkness of exile. For this to become a nightmare you just have to imagine that, say, the arbitrary, heavy-handed punitiveness of your parents, or the mockery of your peers, or the violence in the news is attached to these scurries after information that puts you in the safe and rewarding spot of being right.
This seemed, in my mind, to have something to do with Chinese emperors, perhaps from accounts of the old Chinese civil service exams that required extensive memorization. I suppose one of the reasons I squirreled away information was anxiety about this infernal inquisition and the possibility that if you knew the names of the pieces of armor, that if you knew the etymologies of words, the cast of the Wars of the Roses, the routes of pilgrimages, that if you knew which swans are mute and which are black and that eohippus means the dawn horse that is the diminutive ancestor of modern horses—a useless amulet of information I’ve carried around without using since I was a child—that knowledge could protect you from a punitive, incoherent universe.
Perhaps it can, in another way, not by warding off your enemies but by leading to the recognition of patterns and meanings and friends who share your eclectic interests or by making friends of your curiosity and what it finds. After all, Aladdin opens a cave with the right word. And sometimes ideas and sentences and facts are your friends in themselves.
I read, I daydreamed, I wandered the city so ardently in part because it was a means of wandering in my thoughts, and my thoughts were runaways, constantly taking me away in the midst of the conversation, the meal, the class, the work, the play, the dance, the party. They were a place I wanted to be, thinking, musing, analyzing, imagining, hoping, tracing connections, integrating new ideas, but they grabbed me and ran with me from the situations at hand over and over. I disappeared in the middle of conversations, sometimes because I was bored but just as often because someone said something so interesting that my mind chased after the idea they offered and lost track of the rest of what they said. I lived in a long reverie for years, went days without much interruption to it, which was one of the gifts of solitude.
I dreamed of flying over and over. In one dream in 1987 I fled a violent man on railroad tracks and then remembered that I could metamorphose and became an owl with a moth’s dusty wings. When the man lunged for me and grabbed my feet, I flew low over the water to drag him through it in the hopes of shaking him off. But mostly they weren’t violent dreams, just dreams of being alone, above it all, in the stratosphere, lonely and free. Perhaps being free of the weight of depression and expectation. Of the weight of a body. Of the weight of animosity.
The beauty of those places I soared over is with me still, and in all my dreams as in my waking life was a love of place, a sense that places were embodiments of emotions, were anchors, were companions of a sort, even protectors or parents. Once at the Pacific, I thought to myself Everything is my mother but my mother, and I recognized how the ocean had been a mother offering power, constancy, and solace. Many years later when I began rowing a scull, I realized that out in the water, I was out of reach of men and dogs, and that, as well as the beauties of water, made it serene, dreamy, the eighteen-foot span of my oars being as close to having wings as I could come.
But long before that, I flew. Even in the dreams my logical mind wrestled with how this was possible, anxious that it be possible. In one dream I had learned to align myself with the earth’s magnetic fields, in another I drew my strategy from a sentence I had read describing how the great dancer Nijinsky seemed to hover in the air a split second longer than gravity made possible, and I too was airborne for that kind of interval in a theater. I was in a world where levitation was normal but I tried to exceed the bounds and go higher. I tasted the cold of the upper stratosphere. Or I streamed across green landscapes.
Sometimes I flew to prove that I could. I was the girlfriend of the poet John Keats and I demonstrated I could fly among blackberry bushes whose fruit the size of street lamps suggested I was, we were, the size of songbirds. Other times I flew across the rooftops of the city and the view was dazzling, as was the sense of having all that space under you, like the sense of all that water when you swim in clear lakes. It was the beautiful spacious side of loneliness.
I wondered what this flying meant. Sometimes it seemed to be dreams’ impatience, a jump cut from here to there without filling in the space between. Sometimes it was escape. Sometimes it was a talent, and like talents sometimes do, it set me apart, usually literally, since I tended to fly alone, to be the only one who could fly, though sometimes I showed other people how to do it or carried them along.
It was an experience of not belonging to the ordinary world and not being bound to it. I thought sometimes that it might be about writing, about being a writer, and now I wonder why I didn’t think of it as reading, as that constant, chronic activity that had taken up so much of my waking hours since I’d learned to read, as being in a book, in a story, in the lives of others and invented worlds and not my own, unbounded by my own body and my own life and my own time and place.
I could fly, though now I wonder if the problem was how to come to earth.
Freely at Night
1
One day in 2011, I got a Facebook friend request from someone I’d been in college with when I was seventeen and stayed in touch with for a few years after, someone I cherished then as a person I could trust and talk to, perhaps because of who he was or because of who I imagined he was, or how I filled up what I didn’t know about him with what I needed. I accepted the request with enthusiasm and curiosity about what the years we’d been out of touch had brought and who he might be. He replied that my political views were abhorrent, but that he would like to send me copies of the letters I’d written him. Once I found out he was conservative, things that had seemed mysterious or exotic about him when he was young suddenly made sense. I didn’t find out more about him, but I did find out from him more about me.
A manila envelope came through the mail slot a few weeks later. I had a little queasiness about meeting that teenager directly, and so I waited several years to open it. In the photocopies of letters written on lined yellow legal pads in a small neat handwriting that is no longer mine I met a person who didn’t know how to speak. By that I mean several things. The young writer I met there didn’t know how to speak from the heart, though I could be affectionate. But also, she was a jumble of quotations and allusions and foreign phrases and circumlocutions, of archness and pretense and avoidance and confusion, an attempt to use language that kept her so busy that hardly anything got said, or major events were mentioned in passing in sentences busy doing other things that didn’t matter. She had collected a lot of words, phrases, syntaxes, tones and was trying them out, like someone at the very first stages of playing an instrument, with squawks and clangs. She was speaking in various voices because she didn’t yet know what voice was hers, or rather she had not yet ma
de one.
There was one startling passage in all the verbiage. I’d written about the eighteenth-birthday party I’d thrown my younger brother not quite a year after I’d moved into the apartment. A lot of chocolate frosting had been smeared around on a lot of people, and there was talcum powder on the stereo and towels soaked with champagne in the tub, I mentioned proudly. And then the letter went on to list essays I was trying to write, though it would be a couple of years before I published anything.
I mentioned a “long essay to work it out for myself—about my penchant for long solitary walks at night, the danger involved (I’ve given it up. I was nearly assaulted a few weeks ago) and how it affects my attitude toward feminism—of what value are the advances made in the last decades when one’s physical freedom has become so severely jeopardized. Most urban women, you know, live as though in a war zone. . . . There’s a price to pay either way—a year and a half of living dangerously has warped my mind. This essay is going to be a mammoth prose poem, an analysis of (or at least a hymn to) the nature of the night itself.”
That essay was never quite written, though I often afterward wrote in praise of darkness, sometimes trying to reverse the metaphors in which good is light or white and black and darkness are evil, with their problematic racial overtones, and I eventually wrote a book called Hope in the Dark. Years after this letter, my time in the desert taught me to love shade, shadows, and night as a reprieve from the burning heat and light of day. And four years after that ambitious proposition to write about gender and night, I wrote for the first time about violence against women and the ways that thwarted and limited our access to public space and freedom of movement and equality in any and all arenas and then I wrote about it again and again.
Recollections of My Nonexistence Page 7
