Now, you may recall that in the Dark Ages abortion was not legal. It was a crime, and not a minor one.
The princess’s parents were not criminal types. They were the kind of people who obey the speed limit, and pay taxes and parking-ticket fines, and return borrowed books. I mean they were honest. They were neither square nor unsophisticated, they were not “religious,” but they were intensely moral people, with a love of kindness and decency, and a strong respect for the law. And yet now, without hesitation, they resolved to break the law, to conspire to commit a felony. And they did so in the reasoned and deeply felt conviction that it was right, that indeed it was their responsibility, to do so.
The princess herself questioned the decision, not on legal grounds, of course, but ethically. She cried some more and said, “I’m being cowardly. I’m being dishonest. I’m evading the consequence of my own action.”
Her father said, “That’s right. You are. That cowardice, dishonesty, evasion, is a lesser sin than the crass irresponsibility of sacrificing your training, your talent, and the children you will want to have, in order to have one nobody wants to have.”
He was a Victorian, you see, and a bit of a Puritan. He hated waste and wastefulness.
So the princess and her parents tried to find out how to get an abortion—and they got a little panicky, because they didn’t know anybody who knew. The gynecologist got huffy when asked for a reference. “I don’t handle A.B.’s,” he said. After all, his license to a lucrative practice was at stake; he could have gone to jail; you can’t blame him. It was an old family friend, a child psychologist, who finally found the right contact, the criminal connection. She made an appointment for “an examination.”
They were really slick, that outfit. Dr. So-and-So. Nice office on the Lower East Side, polite smiling receptionist, Esquire and National Geographic on the waiting-room tables. Their reputation was “the highest-class abortionists in New York City,” and it was probably deserved. They charged more for an abortion than most working families made in a year. This was no dirty backroom business. It was clean. It was class. They never said the word “abortion,” not even that cute euphemism “A.B.” The doctor offered to restore the hymen. “It’s easy,” he said. “No extra charge.” The princess did not wish to be rebuilt like a Buick and said, “No. Get on with it.” And they did. Did a fine job, I’m sure. As the princess left that office she passed a girl coming in, a college girl with red eyes and fear in her face, and she wanted to stop and say, “It’s O.K., it’s not so bad, don’t be afraid,” but she was afraid to. And she went back uptown in a taxi with her mother, both of them crying, partly out of grief, partly out of relief. “The endless sorrow …”
The princess went back to college to finish her degree. From time to time she would see the prince lurking and scuttling around behind the ivy on the buildings. I’m sure he has lived happily ever after. As for the princess, she got her B.A. a few months after she got her A.B., and then went on to graduate school, and then got married, and was a writer, and got pregnant by choice four times. One pregnancy ended in spontaneous abortion, miscarriage, in the third month; three pregnancies ended in live normal birth. She had three desired and beloved children, none of whom would have been born if her first pregnancy had gone to term.
If any birth is better than no birth, and more births are better than fewer births, as the “Right-to-Life” people insist, then they should approve of my abortion, which resulted in three babies instead of one. A curious but logical method of achieving their goal! But the preservation of life seems to be rather a slogan than a genuine goal of the anti-abortion forces; what they want is control. Control over behavior: power over women. Women in the anti-choice movement want to share in male power over women, and do so by denying their own womanhood, their own rights and responsibilities.
If there is a moral to my tale, it’s something like this. In spite of everything the little princess had been taught by the male-supremacist elements of her society, by high-school scandals about why Sallie dropped out of school in March, by novels extolling motherhood as woman’s sole function, by the gynecologist’s furtiveness, by the existence of a law declaring abortion to be a crime, by the sleek extortionism of the abortionist—despite all those messages repeating ABORTION IS WRONG!—when the terror was past, she pondered it all, and she thought, “I have done the right thing.”
What was wrong was not knowing how to prevent getting pregnant. What was wrong was my ignorance. To legislate that ignorance, that’s the crime. I’m ashamed, she thought, for letting bigots keep me ignorant, and for acting willfully in my ignorance, and for falling in love with a weak, selfish man. I am deeply ashamed. But I’m not guilty. Where does guilt come in? I did what I had to do so that I could do the work I was put here to do. I will do that work. That’s what it’s all about. It’s about taking responsibility.
So I thought at the time, not very clearly. That I can think more clearly about it now, and talk about it, to you and to others, is entirely due to the moral courage and strength of women and men who have been working these thirty years for the rights and dignity and freedom of women, including the right to abortion. They set me free, and I am here to thank them, and to promise solidarity.
Why did I tell you this tale, which is only too familiar? Well, I called myself a princess in it, partly for the joke, and partly because my parents were indeed royal, where it counts, in the soul; but also to keep reminding myself and you that I was privileged. I had “the best abortion in New York City.” What was it like, in the Dark Ages when abortion was a crime, for the girl whose dad couldn’t borrow the cash, as my dad could? What was it like for the girl who couldn’t even tell her dad, because he’d go crazy with shame and rage? Who couldn’t tell her mother? Who had to go alone to that filthy room and put herself body and soul into the hands of a professional criminal?—because that’s what every doctor who did an abortion was, whether he was an extortionist or an idealist. You know what it was like for her. You know and I know; that’s why we’re here. We are not going back to the Dark Ages. We are not going to let anybody in this country have that kind of power over any girl or woman. There are great powers, outside the government and in it, trying to legislate the return of darkness. We are not great powers. But we are the light. Nobody can put us out. May all of you shine very bright and steady, today and always.
A NON-EUCLIDEAN VIEW OF CALIFORNIA AS A COLD PLACE TO BE
(1982)
Robert C. Elliott died in 1981 in the very noon of his scholarship, just after completing his book The Literary Persona. He was the truest of teachers, the kindest of friends. This paper was prepared to be read as the first in a series of lectures at his college of the University of California, San Diego, honoring his memory.
We use the French word lecture, “reading,” to mean reading and speaking aloud, a performance; the French call such a performance not a lecture but a conférence. The distinction is interesting. Reading is a silent collaboration of reader and writer, apart; lecturing, a noisy collaboration of lecturer and audience, together. The peculiar patchwork form of this paper is my attempt to make it a “conference,” a performable work, a piece for voices. The time and place, a warm April night in La Jolla in 1982, are past, and the warm and noisy audience must be replaced by the gentle reader; but the first voice is still that of Bob Elliott.
In The Shape of Utopia, speaking of our modern distrust of utopia, he said,
If the word is to be redeemed, it will have to be by someone who has followed utopia into the abyss which yawns behind the Grand Inquisitors vision, and who then has clambered out on the other side.1
That is my starting point, that startling image; and my motto is:
Usà puyew usu wapiw!
We shall be returning to both, never fear; what I am about here is returning.
In the first chapter of The Shape of Utopia, Bob points out that in the great participatory festivals such as Saturnalia, Mardi Gras, or Christmas, the age of peace and equalit
y, the Golden Age, may be lived in an interval set apart for it, a time outside of daily time. But to bring perfect communitas into the structure of ordinary society would be a job only Zeus could handle; or, “if one does not believe in Zeus’s good will, or even in his existence,” says Bob, it becomes a job for the mind of man.
Utopia is the application of man’s reason and his will to the myth [of the Golden Age], man’s effort to work out imaginatively what happens—or might happen—when the primal longings embodied in the myth confront the principle of reality. In this effort man no longer merely dreams of a divine state in some remote time: he assumes the role of creator.2
Now, the Golden Age, or Dream Time, is remote only from the rational mind. It is not accessible to euclidean reason; but on the evidence of all myth and mysticism, and the assurance of every participatory religion, it is, to those with the gift or discipline to perceive it, right here, right now. Whereas it is of the very essence of the rational or Jovian utopia that it is not here and not now. It is made by the reaction of will and reason against, away from, the here-and-now, and it is, as More said in naming it, nowhere. It is pure structure without content; pure model; goal. That is its virtue. Utopia is uninhabitable. As soon as we reach it, it ceases to be utopia. As evidence of this sad but ineluctable fact, may I point out that we in this room, here and now, are inhabiting utopia.
I was told as a child, and like to believe, that California was named “The Golden State” not just for the stuff Sutter found but for the wild poppies on its hills and the wild oats of summer. To the Spanish and Mexicans I gather it was the boondocks; but to the Anglos it has been a true utopia: the Golden Age made accessible by willpower, the wild paradise to be tamed by reason; the place where you go free of the old bonds and cramps, leaving behind your farm and your galoshes, casting aside your rheumatism and your inhibitions, taking up a new “life style” in a not-here-not-now where everybody gets rich quick in the movies or finds the meaning of life or anyhow gets a good tan hang-gliding. And the wild oats and the poppies still come up pure gold in cracks in the cement that we have poured over utopia.
In “assuming the role of creator,” we seek what Lao Tzu calls “the profit of what is not,” rather than participating in what is. To reconstruct the world, to rebuild or rationalize it, is to run the risk of losing or destroying what in fact is.
After all, California was not empty when the Anglos came. Despite the efforts of the missionaries, it was still the most heavily populated region in North America.
What the Whites perceived as a wilderness to be “tamed” was in fact better known to human beings than it has ever been since: known and named. Every hill, every valley, creek, canyon, gulch, gully, draw, point, cliff, bluff, beach, bend, good-sized boulder, and tree of any character had its name, its place in the order of things. An order was perceived, of which the invaders were entirely ignorant. Each of those names named, not a goal, not a place to get to, but a place where one is: a center of the world. There were centers of the world all over California. One of them is a bluff on the Klamath River. Its name was Katimin. The bluff is still there, but it has no name, and the center of the world is not there. The six directions can meet only in lived time, in the place people call home, the seventh direction, the center.
But we leave home, shouting Avanti! and Westward Ho!, driven by our godlike reason, which chafes at the limited, intractable, unreasonable present, and yearns to free itself from the fetters of the past.
“People are always shouting they want to create a better future,” says Milan Kundera, in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
It’s not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.3
And at the end of the book he talks to the interviewer about forgetting: forgetting is
the great private problem of man: death as the loss of the self. But what is this self? It is the sum of everything we remember. Thus, what terrifies us about death is not the loss of the future but the loss of the past.4
And so, Kundera says, when a big power wants to deprive a smaller one of its national identity, of its self-consciousness, it uses what he calls the “method of organized forgetting.”
And when a future-oriented culture impinges upon a present-centered one, the method becomes a compulsion. Things are forgotten wholesale. What are the names “Costanoan,” “Wappo”? They are what the Spanish called the people around the Bay Area and in the Napa Valley, but what those people called themselves we do not know: the names were forgotten even before the people were wiped out. There was no past. Tabula rasa.
One of our finest methods of organized forgetting is called discovery. Julius Caesar exemplifies the technique with characteristic elegance in his Gallic Wars. “It was not certain that Britain existed,” he says, “until I went there.”
To whom was it not certain? But what the heathen know doesn’t count. Only if godlike Caesar sees it can Britannia rule the waves.
Only if a European discovered or invented it could America exist. At least Columbus had the wit, in his madness, to mistake Venezuela for the outskirts of Paradise. But he remarked on the availability of cheap slave labor in Paradise.
The first chapter of California: An Interpretive History, by Professor Walton Bean, contains this paragraph:
The survival of a Stone Age culture in California was not the result of any hereditary biological limitations on the potential of the Indians as a “race.” They had been geographically and culturally isolated. The vast expanse of oceans, mountains, and deserts had sheltered California from foreign stimulation as well as from foreign conquest …
(being isolated from contact and protected from conquest are, you will have noticed, characteristics of utopia),
… and even within California the Indian groups were so settled that they had little contact with each other. On the positive side, there was something to be said for their culture just as it was…. The California Indians had made a successful adaptation to their environment and they had learned to live without destroying each other.5
Professor Bean’s excellent book is superior to many of its kind in the area of my particular interest: the first chapter. Chapter One of the American history—South or North America, national or regional—is usually short. Unusually short. In it, the “tribes” that “occupied” the area are mentioned and perhaps anecdotally described. In Chapter Two, a European “discovers” the area; and with a gasp of relief the historian plunges into a narration of the conquest, often referred to as settlement or colonization, and the acts of the conquerors. Since history has traditionally been defined by historians as the written record, this imbalance is inevitable. And in a larger sense it is legitimate; for the non-urban peoples of the Americas had no history, properly speaking, and therefore are visible only to the anthropologist, not to the historian, except as they entered into White history.
The imbalance is unavoidable, legitimate, and also, I believe, very dangerous. It expresses too conveniently the conquerors’ wish to deny the value of the cultures they destroyed, and dehumanize the people they killed. It partakes too much of the method of organized forgetting. To call this “the New World”—there’s a Caesarian birth!
The words “holocaust” and “genocide” are fashionable now; but not often are they applied to American history. We were not told in school in Berkeley that the history of California had the final solution for its first chapter. We were told that the Indians “gave way” before the “march of progress.”
In the introduction to The Wishing Bone Cycle, Howard A. Norman says:
The Swampy Cree have a conceptual term which I’ve heard used to describe the thinking of a porcupine as he backs into a rock crevice:
Usà puyew usu wapiw.
“He goes backward, looks forward.” The porcupine consciously goes backwa
rd in order to speculate safely on the future, allowing him to look out at his enemy or the new day. To the Cree, it’s an instructive act of self-preservation.6
The opening formula for a Cree story is “an invitation to listen, followed by the phrase, ‘I go backward, look forward, as the porcupine does.’ ”7
In order to speculate safely on an inhabitable future, perhaps we would do well to find a rock crevice and go backward. In order to find our roots, perhaps we should look for them where roots are usually found. At least the Spirit of Place is a more benign one than the exclusive and aggressive Spirit of Race, the mysticism of blood that has cost so much blood. With all our self-consciousness, we have very little sense of where we live, where we are right here right now. If we did, we wouldn’t muck it up the way we do. If we did, our literature would celebrate it. If we did, our religion might be participatory. If we did—if we really lived here, now, in this present—we might have some sense of our future as a people. We might know where the center of the world is.
… Ideally, at its loftiest and most pure, the utopia aspires to (if it has never reached) the condition of the idyll as Schiller describes it—that mode of poetry which would lead man, not back to Arcadia, but forward to Elysium, to a state of society in which man would be at peace with himself and the external world.8
The California Indians had made a successful adaptation to their environment and they had learned to live without destroying each other.9
It was Arcadia, of course; it was not Elysium. I heed Victor Turner’s warning not to confuse archaic or primitive societies with the true communitas, “which is a dimension of all societies, past and present.”10 I am not proposing a return to the Stone Age. My intent is not reactionary, nor even conservative, but simply subversive. It seems that the utopian imagination is trapped, like capitalism and industrialism and the human population, in a one-way future consisting only of growth. All I’m trying to do is figure how to put a pig on the tracks.
Dancing at the Edge of the World Page 9
