by Robin Morgan
Entropy and growth. At this writing I have turned thirty-five years old. Certain ground beneath my feet, certain corridors of my psychic life, are so familiar I can move along them unconsciously, not even groping or feeling my way: My writing, the primary rock, the reason for tolerating this glorious, senseless existence at all; Kenneth, his writing, his capacity for change, all his deaths and his resurrections; Blake, growing older and more aware every day of the unutterable beauty and unspeakable cruelty of living and loving with consciousness; a few—very few—beloved friends; certain works of art—the Bach B Minor Mass and Lear, Middlemarch and The Women at Point Sur and The Trial; the challenge of Anne Bradstreet and Albert Camus and Christina Rossetti and Andrew Marvell and Mary Cassatt and Maurice Ravel and Emily Brontë; the examples of Elizabeth Tudor, of George Sand, Saint Teresa, Nina Simone, Emmeline Pankhurst, Martha Graham, Hetshapsut, and Louise Labé. So much more, so many more.
If one further surprisingly obvious discovery lay in wait for me beneath the cynicism encountered in these past few years, it surely is my own capacity for a peculiar, arrogant humility. Arrogant because it is based on a new-found pride in what I have done, where I have come from and where I go, what I am and even more what I am becoming. And humble because, despite the intentionally ironic title of this book, it is simply not possible to go far enough. I am continually reminded of this, even while I reach to steady myself from a dizziness at the vast space imperceptibly traveled. It is that space ultimately which counts, not the distance one thinks one has covered. It is that space across which one never dares sufficiently go too far, but across which, if one is fortunate, one might perhaps venture a few faltering steps.
1 Ronald Reagan’s hybrid character, for example, is no coincidence. He is the logical apparition conjured up by a public taught to trust the worth of celebrity and mistrust the work of cerebration. (Thespian Nation, indeed.) It’s not his fault that he is no more qualified to be called a public servant than he was to be called an actor.
LETTER FROM A WAR
The following letter, like those in Part I of this book, was written with no eye to publication. It was a spontaneous outpouring in the middle of a spring night, penned from a small town in Midwest America to another woman in a similar small town. The recipient of the letter, Jane Alpert, was—and still is, at the writing of this prefatory note—in prison, serving a term for militant anti-war actions during the sixties. She had been a fugitive from the law for four years, during which time she courageously declared her “conversion” to radical feminism in an open letter from the underground. In 1974 she surfaced, prepared to serve a prison term in order to function openly in the service of her feminist politics and freely as the writer she wished to become. We had been friends years earlier, at Rat, before her period of fugitivity; it seemed that we had gone through so many similar changes in our very different ways.
The reference in this letter to “Sam” pertains to Samuel Melville, Jane’s lover, who in 1969 was arrested on the same charge as she, sentenced, and killed in the Attica prison uprising, in 1971. The reference to Kenneth’s being muzzled for his political beliefs was meant as an indictment against those who found his newer work too threatening to publish—as it dealt with a man’s struggle to transform himself through love, to comprehend and rise to what feminism asked of him. The mention of Ti-Grace Atkinson’s “denunciation” of Alpert refers to the former’s attempt to cast a cloud over Jane’s motives for surrender. The Left had been foreseeably unenchanted with Jane’s criticism of it, and with her dedication to feminist politics—but the Feminist Movement was strong in its defense and support of a woman whose honor was unquestionable and whose commitment to feminism was obvious. At one point, Atkinson, apparently isolated from feminist consciousness, declared in effect that women should be led by Weathermen and acknowledge a total identification with the men at Attica—or else be drummed out of the human race. This was meant as a special cut to Jane, who had lost Sam at Attica, but who had nevertheless some years later drawn the courage from her new-found feminist consciousness to analyze their relationship in retrospect. She found it virulently sexist—and she said so publicly.
The other minor characters are Leftist activists Jane and I had known in the past—Rosa and Tricia and “Chowder,” this last my version of the rather soupy pseudonym used by one pathetically anti-feminist woman. I fear that all three women could be counted on to reflect the feelings expressed by the young man at a Boston rally toward the war’s end who, it was reported to me, exhorted the crowd not to “drift away from the Left” but to “carry the nostalgia we all feel for the war that brought us together further into other organizing opportunities.” The italics are mine but the sentiments, seriously, were his. As for Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, the former anti-war crusaders are at this writing campaigning for the jobs of U.S. Senator and U.S. Senator’s wife, respectively.
This letter is in a sense out of context, in that Jane has been a presence in many of my poems—and there are other letters between us. But those are for another book, at another time. I include this one letter now because in it, without particularly intending to do so, I summarized for myself most truly what the grief of Vietnam has meant to me as a woman, and what that grief—which had so indelibly scarred the sixties and which was now ostensibly over—would continue and continue and continue to mean, to a woman.
Travelodge
Galesburg, Illinois
29 April 1975
DEAR JANE:
You see from the stationery where I am, just back a little while ago from a seminar-then-faculty-dinner-then-poetry-reading-then-rap-session-then-drink-with-faculty-wives.
And while undressing and unpacking I turned on the little black-and-white television set, to encounter a night-long special broadcast on the surrender of Saigon and the NLF entry into the city. It is over now, Harry Reasoner reports. Over now, he says.
And all the expectable films are shown—the old ones, like shards of horror fossilized on film: that soldier setting fire to a thatched hut with his Zippo lighter; that pistol going off against the temple of the plaid-shirted young Viet Cong, full-face into the camera as his skull fragments; the cadaver heads of aged grandmothers bent over baby bodies; the bare-breasted corpses of young women sprawled by roadsides; the children, the children—numb-faced, lost forever, peddling chocolate or cocaine or themselves in the streets.
And the new films, also expectable: the triumphant grins worn by soldiers riding tanks into Saigon; the frantic clawing hordes of terrified South Vietnamese trying to follow their former U.S. employers out, clogging the airstrips, hanging on plane wings, swarming around helicopters; the bar-girls welcoming a new set of conquerors with the same smiles, empty eyes above set lips; the children filmed in emergency orphan camps, already being taught to sing new songs that convey the message of a new political education—the children, waving a different flag now, but in the same uniform rhythm.
And I’m sitting on the bed in this tacky little room with a dingy mustard-colored rug and fluorescent bulbs overhead and a freight train chugging by somewhere off in the Illinois countryside around this small college town, and I’m tired from having flown and spoken and read and talked with women for hours and I’m thinking of you and I’m weeping like a fool.
The newscasters speak at length about guilt, national guilt—how we as a nation must feel it, or how we must not feel it, what lessons are to be learned from the 500,000 American soldiers dead or crippled (their torn bodies now being displayed across the flickering screen). I feel no guilt. For once I feel as guiltless as I am powerless. It is not guilt that makes me sob ridiculously, my voice loud and ludicrous in an empty room. Oh, and I know well the lesson they could learn—if they would.
No, I weep for us, dear Jane, for this tragedy which at once so disfigured and transfigured our lives that I write this from my portable prison of required survival, to you in your fixed prison of required endurance. Because we were changed forever by the decade they
now calmly analyze. We came out of it, we cried out our protest and committed our actions and risked our lives and sanities and sacred honor and then continued, daring, even further. In a way, we, as women, are alone escaped to tell.
I’m weeping at the cost, I know. The bloody cost, the bloody pain, always and forever. I’m weeping for Sam, tonight, I know. I’m weeping for the fatuous celebration going on at this moment in the Hayden-Fonda house or in Chowder’s apartment. I’m weeping for the baby-lifted orphans abducted into a nation of Disney and Christian names. I’m weeping for the bar-girls and their race-mixed children, unwanted by America and Vietnam; for the peasants who still have no voice in their own destiny; for the blinded amputee GI who spits out bitterly, “We should’ve stayed and atom-bombed ’em”; for the cadre women busing into the South, to take charge of child-camps and to organize the governmental bureaucracies with brisk secretarial precision. I’m weeping because our own struggle is so infinitely complex and enormous in its scope that you and I will never live to enter our metaphorical Saigon in triumph—which is too petty a goal for desiring, anyway. I’m weeping because the very air in this stuffy room rings with the screams, moans, pleas, gasps, and silences of a billion intricate miseries and needs and deaths. I’m weeping because earlier this evening a middle-aged faculty wife broke down in my arms and cried out her desire to learn to love freedom as much as she loved her husband and children, at least enough so that she could wrestle with them to achieve it together with them.
I’m weeping because Rosa or Tricia or any of their friends would seriously think you and I are indifferent to what is happening tonight; because they see no link between that Galesburg housewife and these television films; because they don’t understand how much more we understand. For I cannot celebrate simplistically when I am mourning. I cannot rejoice to see one rigid regime replace another, however much I once devoutly wished for this. I cannot feel relief when I know that nothing, really, has changed, nothing really is over—merely in faulty translation. I cannot even ignore all these familiar films, turn off the set, force myself to sleep so that I can teach an 8:00 A.M. class and then catch a plane. Because I am grieving.
The class is on “The History of Women.” I wonder what exists in the universe that would not come under that heading. Or should we merely retitle it “Suffering and Endurance 101”? As we balance rice sacks on one hip and a baby on the other, dodging shells in a city gone mad? As we plan a Wiccean Beltane Sabbat ritual in the teeth of a culture which worships despair? As we dare write poems with the ink of our blood? As we mourn men we have loved or love—one killed for his politics, and one slowly, mercilessly muzzled for his politics? As we answer letters to prison from women we’ve never seen, or read poems aloud to women we’ll never see again—a fragile but real thread of communication spun throughout what can appear even to oneself as dutiful or, worse, hypocritical gestures? As we pen desperate midnight letters from Galesburg, Illinois, to Muncy, Pennsylvania?
“We are Attica,” rants Ti-Grace in her denunciation of you—choosing an all-male conclave for her identification. Poor soul, that she cannot realize you and I know better than that. For we are Vietnam.
And Auschwitz. And Cologne. And Hiroshima. And Como—where one thousand witches were burnt in a single day. And Harlem. And Galesburg. And China. And South Africa. And Williamsport. And the open seas where the great whales are slaughtered, spuming red geysers. And the dying forests, where the eggs we lay in our birds’ nests have thin pesticide-rotted shells. We are this whole agonized weeping grieving heaving anguished furious mad-with-pain planet crying out against the insupportable burden we have borne for so long.
Revolution, triumph, winning—too small, too minuscule, such words. We must rediscover the older, larger words: life, creativity, love. And, simply, change. Somehow.
You are much with me tonight, in this vulgar little room, in the immensity of this vision, where we are both weeping together, as if the tears of women could save a world.
My love,
Robin
THE POLITICS OF SADO-MASOCHISTIC FANTASIES
The apocryphal story goes like this: At one of the earliest conferences of this feminist wave, during the late 1960’s, a curious confrontation-and-avoidance maneuver was executed in the workshop on sexuality. About eighty women were gathered together in the room, and the discussion had been open, supportive, warm, and truly consciousness-raising. During a lull, one woman ventured in a quavering voice, “I wonder, uh, could we maybe discuss—I mean, it’s odd, as feminists, I know, but, uh … well, I, um, sometimes have these sexual fantasies which are kind of, uh, masochistic—and … I, well, wondered if anyone else here had that experience. Uh … maybe they could just raise their hands if they did, or … maybe we could figure out what it meant, uh, I mean …” She trailed off. A thundering hush ensued. Then, slowly, every woman in the room, one by one, raised her hand. This pantomine, performed in complete silence, was followed by yet another more prolonged stillness, which in turn was broken by some hearty comment on an unrelated subject. Everyone’s relief was palpable. The subject of fantasies—particularly such fantasies—was dropped, and rarely has been picked up again in the Women’s Movement until now.
There are, to be sure, various books recently published on the fantasy lives of women. These books range from the pseudo-scientific to the soft-core-porn in their approach. Here we can encounter the virulently anti-feminist thought of such Freudians as Marie Robinson, whose book The Power of Sexual Surrender is to women what a tome called Why You Know You Love It on the Plantation would be to blacks or one titled How to Be Happy in Line to the Showers would be to Jews. Here too we may gag at that fake sexual-liberation approach so popular with men in the sixties—with its parallel implication that if you are “turned off” by something (anything) or someone (anyone) you are a hung-up prude. These books usually are non-written by a person claiming to be female who bears a name which consists of one supposedly titillating initial. The double-whammy of Marie Robinson and “J” (not to mention “O”) has spun more than one woman into vertigo. In sum, the new crop of books on female fantasies seem to be lecturing us that (1) all women are masochistic anyway, ergo it’s in your nature so don’t fight it and if that makes you somehow uncomfortable it shouldn’t, or, (2) “anything goes” and if you don’t like it you should. Do you sense in this a rather consistent message of Whatever It Is, It’s Your Fault, Lady? Ah.
The point is that salacious descriptions of made-for-the-market fantasies, or patronizing psychiatric analyses of the same, or hip pressure to get with it and “be groovy” are not, any of them, helpful approaches to the woman who wishes to understand her condition, her feelings, her desires (or who simply cherishes her own sense of good taste). Feminism is about precisely such understanding, and this can be gained only through slow and hazardous work by ourselves, the ultimate experts on ourselves—aided perhaps by that rare leap of consciousness that can make the connections through myth, art, revelation.
The following essay is an attempt to begin such work on this interestingly ignored subject. Because of its content and the requirements of personal honesty in writing about it, this is possibly the article included here which could tempt me to fear the greatest embarrassment, despite my having already dealt with the subject matter more than once in my poetry. But then psychology, sexuality, dreams—these are more at home in a work of art than in a work of political analysis; what is nude in a poem seems so naked in prose. Again, the feminist imperative is to surmount the barrier between those forms; hence, my adopted device of the parable.
One can still sense the forbidden quality of the topic in the careful omission of it from most discussion in the Women’s Movement. This is doubtless because despite the, I have learned, widespread shared occurrence of such fantasies among feminists, we all wince at what appears to be the inconsistency: “What? A feminist, a fighter for women’s rights and power—a feminist having fantasies of being dominated, humiliated, forced in
to submission? Intolerable.” I can hear the male voices even now, finding in our search for understanding merely a confirmation of their worst stereotype: “I knew all these feminists needed was a good rape. Women need to be struck regularly, like gongs. All women love the cave-man approach, no matter what they pretend.” This was one predictable if sickening reaction to such a line as “Every woman adores a Fascist”—despite the very point that Plath was making. Irony’s ultimate irony may lie in its capacity for making itself invisible.
One should not care about the reactions of such willfully brutal and clodpated persons, of course. Yet the certainty that they wait like spectators in the arena drooling over their ices and settling down on their cushions is unsettling for those who, no matter how well trained for the encounter, emerge to confront and wrestle with newly uncaged beasts. Most absurd of all is the notion that one is engaged in such an encounter for—oh hilarious thought—their entertainment. But too much consideration already has been given to such an audience. It is time they were forgotten. The spark glowing like an impatient insight in the eye of the wild adversary throws everything else into shadow. It is here that one must begin.
I: THE BACKGROUND
I BEGAN WORK on this subject—sado-masochistic fantasies—before I knew such a name for it. I was less than ten years old, but intelligent, curious, and self-respectful enough to be irritated by feeling a vague sexual stimulation at the thought of someone dominating me. I do know that by the time I was thirteen or so, I was consciously trying to combat such thoughts—not because I thought them “perverted” (yet) but because it perplexed me that what worked in fantasy was so different from reality. I knew already that when, in real life, anyone had power over me (as all adults do over all children) I liked it not at all; I also knew that if anyone laid a punishing hand on me (exceedingly rare in my family) I hated their guts and found it utterly unexciting. So what in hell was this fantasy stuff I was getting off on? I had an active masturbation life as a child and a fittingly wide repertoire of fantasies to go along with it—but the set and costume changes all revolved around the same plot. By early adolescence, then, I set myself the task of trying to understand this. Naturally, I had no way of knowing that I was not alone in both my tendency and my search for an understanding of it. It would be many years before I would have an inkling that this experience was shared at all—let alone so widely, and even among my feminist peers.
