lines from rachel blau deplessis' "for the etruscans." bold emphases mine.
Thinking smugly, "She shouldn't be working on Woolf." 1964. "Doesn't she know that she'd better not work on a woman?" Why was I lucky to know this. What was the threat? Dickinson? Marginality? Nin? I bought Nin's book, I threw it out. What! Didn't want it, might confront
myself. 1979. The general feeling (of the dream) was that I was free of the testers. However, I was entirely obligated to take and pass their test. My relationship to the testers is--? 1965. My big ambition, my hemmed and nervous space. Her uncompromising, oracular poems. Her fluid, decisive writing. Her dream life, surfacing. Not even to read this? to read with contempt? "This is a Blossom of the Brain--/A small--italic Seed" (Dickinson, no.945).
What is going on here? 1968. Is the female aesthetic simply an (1978) enabling myth? Fish on one foot, hook on the other, angling for ourselves. Woolf: catching "something about the body."2 Crash. MOM! WHAT! "You never buy what I like! Only what YOU like! (Fig Newtons.)
****
A golden bough. The torch is passed on. His son clutches his hand, his crippled father clings to his back, three male generations leave the burning city. The wife, lost. Got lost in burning. No one knows what happened to her, when they became Romans.
She became the Etruscans?
Sheepish, I am sheepish and embarrassed to mention this
that for me it was always the herding. The herding, the bonding, the way you can speak their language but also have a different language or different needs so hard to say this. Always: I have heard this story from many sources--they bond and clump outside your door and never "ask you to lunch" or they talk and be wonderful, lambent, but when you walk up "they turn away" or "they turn on you, teasing, making sexual jokes"
/
To translate ourselves from our disguises. The enthralled sexuality, the knife-edge brilliance, the intellectual dowdiness, evasions, embarrassments, imprecisions, deferments, smug primness with which there is no dialogue. Combativeness straight into malice. Invisibility, visibility, crossing the legs, uncrossing them. Knights in shining amour. Daddy to the rescue. "Imposing" sex on the situation. "Not imposing" "sex" on the "situation." "Doesn't she know she'd better not work on a woman?" She'd better now work on a woman.
/
How to be? How to be-have?...The temptation of Eve was fruit, of Mary, lambs. Thinking that they followed you to school.
/
It is, after all, always the meaning, the reading of difference that matters, and meaning is culturally engendered and sustained. Not to consider the body as some absolute (milk, blood, breasts, clitoris) for no "body" is unmediated. Not body but the "body" of psychosocial fabrications of difference. Or again, of sameness. Or again, of their relation. The contexts in which are formed and reinforced gendered human beings, produced in the family, in institutions of gender development, in the forms of sexual preference, in the division of labor by gender, especially the structure of infant care, in the class and conditions of the families in which we are psychologically born, and in the social maintenance of the sexes through life's stages and in any historical era.5 And as such, these differing experiences do surely produce (some) different consciousnesses, different cultural expressions, different relations to realms of symbols and symbol users. Different "language," metaphorical; different uses of the grammatical and expressive resources of language (verb parts, questions, intonation, pronouns).
And therefore there is female aesthetic, but not a female aesthetic, not one single constellation of strategies.
/
A specal aptitude for cryptography. The only ones barred from the riddle. Ha ha. His gallantry is hardest to bear. Not to think about the riddle is to remain the riddle. To break with what I have been told I am, and I am able to?...The Etruscan language can be heard, if one chooses to mouth it, but not comprehended. Pondering is not to be expected, so why bother?
What happens at the historical moment when the voiceless and powerless seek to unravel their riddle? (For Caliban to seize his voice, reject the magician of civilization in Césaire's writing of Shakespeare's Tempest.) ANS.: We are cutting into the deep heart, the deepest heart of cultural compacts. They have already lost our allegiance. Something is finished.
/
I dreamed I was an artist; my medium was cottage cheese.
/
All the animals, and I knew they were thirsty. They were mine, and were very thirsty. I had to give them
Something I call an emotional texture, a structural expression of mutuality. Writers know their text as a form of intimacy, of personal contact, whether conversations with the reader or with the self. Letters, journals, voices are sources for this element,
expressing the porousness and nonhierarchic stances of intimate conversation in both structure and function. Like Orlando, like Griffin's Voices, like The Golden Notebook, these may be antiphonal, many-voiced works, beguilingly, passionately subjective, seeing emotional commitment as an adventure. (As our form of adventure?)11
"What a secret language we talk, Undertones, overtones, nuances, abstractions, synbols. Then we return to Henry with an incandescence which frightens him."12
"addressing the reader, making herself and her reader part of the narrative...an offhand, conversational manner"13
Not positing oneself as the only, sol(e) authority. Sheep of the sun. Meaning, a statement that is open to the reader, not better than the reader, not set apart from him, not seeking the authority of the writer. Not even seeking the authority of the writing.
/
If one does not just rest silent, stuff the mouth with food.
/
An art object may then be nonhierarchic, showing "an organization of material in fragments," breaking climactic structures, making an even display of elemnts over the surface with no climactic place or moment, since the materials are "organized into many centers".20
Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères, a form of verbal quilt. We hear her lists, her unstressed series, no punctuation even, no pauses, no setting apart, and so everything joined with no subordination, no ranking. It is radical parataxis. Something droning. Nothing epitomizes another. If fruits are mentioned, many are named, for unlike symbolism, where one stands for the many, here the many stand for the many.
/
The form of the desk, the tote bag, the journal. Interesting that for Woolf it was the form of a journal, and for Pound too it began as a "rag bag," a market mess of spilled fish, but became the form of Analects, of codes, a great man's laws. The Cantos. For Williams, it was the form of antiquarian history, local lore, wonders, layered in the City. Paterson. For both the male writers, a geopolitical stance, and this may have happened in a turn from the female, a reassertion of the polarized sexes. For the woman, it is a diary;: her bag, her desk.
/
We intend to find ourselves. In the burning city.
/
Take Nin. Her diary as form and process is a stratagem to solve a contradiction often present in acute form for women: between the desire to please, making woman an object, and the desire to reveal, making her a subject. The culturally sanctioned relationship to art and artists which Nin continually imagines (ornament, inspiration, sexual and psychic reward) is in conflict with the direct relationship she seeks as artist, colleague, fellow worker. And Nin's diary as fact and artifact trnasposes these conflicting forces, reveals and protects simultaneously, allowing her to please others (by showing male friends specially prepared sections) while writing to please herself. Double, sometimes duplicitous needs.
/
Female aesthetic begins when women take, investigate, the structures of feeling that are ours. And trying to take them, find also the conflict between these often inchoate feelings (coded as resistances, coded as the thirsty animals) and patriarchal structures of feeling--romantic thralldom, fear of male anger, and of our own weaknesses of nerve. Essentialist? No. We are making a creation, not a discovery.27
Yet it is also clear that there would be many reasons not to see female work as different. Why might someone object?
First, a desire to say that great art is not made by the factoring out of the sexes, is "androgynous" as Woolf uses the term in the twenties. The desire to state that greatness is (must be?) universal, that anything else is special pleading. The fear that to notice gender in any way becomes destructive to women. Thus the disincentive: if gender categories have always been used so destructively, our use of them, is it not "playing into their hands"? (There can be no greater proof of gender difference than this argument.)
Women may then respond with a strategy of self-chosen, proud ghettoization (Richardson's "feminine psyche") or may respond as Woolf did. In that (neo-Freudian) context, Woolf's argument for androgyny is a situational trumph, rejecting the ghettos, stating that woman's art contains the man, contains the woman, has access to both.
Where then is (the) "female aesthetic"? In both, in all these strategies of response to difference. Even if, even when, contradictory.
Then, there is the desire at all costs to avoid special pleading, anything that looks like women have gotten by because of our sex (ambiguous word: meaning, our gender, meaning, our sexuality). This is a rejection of the stance of the courtesan for the firm-chinned professonal, who does not (in dress, in manner, in talk) call attention to her "sex." She has her babies bravely between semesters. She fears being ghettoized. Being patronized. But it happened anyway. Any way. And she did not "control" it.
Another fear: that any aesthetic is bound to be misused, misappropriated, and this one is surely extremely vulnerable, with its blurring of all the elements we have firmly regarded as setting art apart: blurring between art and life, blurring between social creativity and "high" art, blurring between one's journal and one's poem, blurring between the artifact and the immersion in experience. Such exact polarities.29
I am hungry. I am very very hungry. Have I always been this empty?
/
Can I prove it? I can prove that different social groups produce differences in cultural expression. I can prove that women are a social group. I can point to examples of differences in our relation to the symbolic order and in our cultural expression.
But I cannot prove that only women, that women only, use this aesthetic. And this failure is actually the strongest proof of all.
Thinking smugly, "She shouldn't be working on Woolf." 1964. "Doesn't she know that she'd better not work on a woman?" Why was I lucky to know this. What was the threat? Dickinson? Marginality? Nin? I bought Nin's book, I threw it out. What! Didn't want it, might confront
The great difficulties in understanding the language...not...from an inability to read the script, every letter of which is now clearly understood. It is as if books were discovered, printed in our own Roman letters, so that one could articulate the words without trouble, but written in an unknown language with no parallels.1
myself. 1979. The general feeling (of the dream) was that I was free of the testers. However, I was entirely obligated to take and pass their test. My relationship to the testers is--? 1965. My big ambition, my hemmed and nervous space. Her uncompromising, oracular poems. Her fluid, decisive writing. Her dream life, surfacing. Not even to read this? to read with contempt? "This is a Blossom of the Brain--/A small--italic Seed" (Dickinson, no.945).
What is going on here? 1968. Is the female aesthetic simply an (1978) enabling myth? Fish on one foot, hook on the other, angling for ourselves. Woolf: catching "something about the body."2 Crash. MOM! WHAT! "You never buy what I like! Only what YOU like! (Fig Newtons.)
****
A golden bough. The torch is passed on. His son clutches his hand, his crippled father clings to his back, three male generations leave the burning city. The wife, lost. Got lost in burning. No one knows what happened to her, when they became Romans.
She became the Etruscans?
Even so, there is nothing to prevent those with a special aptitude for cryptography from tackling Etruscan, which is the last of the important languages to require translating.3
Sheepish, I am sheepish and embarrassed to mention this
that for me it was always the herding. The herding, the bonding, the way you can speak their language but also have a different language or different needs so hard to say this. Always: I have heard this story from many sources--they bond and clump outside your door and never "ask you to lunch" or they talk and be wonderful, lambent, but when you walk up "they turn away" or "they turn on you, teasing, making sexual jokes"
/
To translate ourselves from our disguises. The enthralled sexuality, the knife-edge brilliance, the intellectual dowdiness, evasions, embarrassments, imprecisions, deferments, smug primness with which there is no dialogue. Combativeness straight into malice. Invisibility, visibility, crossing the legs, uncrossing them. Knights in shining amour. Daddy to the rescue. "Imposing" sex on the situation. "Not imposing" "sex" on the "situation." "Doesn't she know she'd better not work on a woman?" She'd better now work on a woman.
/
How to be? How to be-have?...The temptation of Eve was fruit, of Mary, lambs. Thinking that they followed you to school.
/
It is, after all, always the meaning, the reading of difference that matters, and meaning is culturally engendered and sustained. Not to consider the body as some absolute (milk, blood, breasts, clitoris) for no "body" is unmediated. Not body but the "body" of psychosocial fabrications of difference. Or again, of sameness. Or again, of their relation. The contexts in which are formed and reinforced gendered human beings, produced in the family, in institutions of gender development, in the forms of sexual preference, in the division of labor by gender, especially the structure of infant care, in the class and conditions of the families in which we are psychologically born, and in the social maintenance of the sexes through life's stages and in any historical era.5 And as such, these differing experiences do surely produce (some) different consciousnesses, different cultural expressions, different relations to realms of symbols and symbol users. Different "language," metaphorical; different uses of the grammatical and expressive resources of language (verb parts, questions, intonation, pronouns).
Stein says we no longer have the words people used to have so we have to make them new in some way but women haven't had them at all and how can you deconstruct a language you never constructed or it was never constructed by others like you, or with you in mind?6 Frances Jaffer
And therefore there is female aesthetic, but not a female aesthetic, not one single constellation of strategies.
/
Throughout the ages the problem of woman has puzzled people of every kind...You too will have pondered this question insofar as you are men. From the women among you that is not to be expected, for you yourselves are the riddle.7
A specal aptitude for cryptography. The only ones barred from the riddle. Ha ha. His gallantry is hardest to bear. Not to think about the riddle is to remain the riddle. To break with what I have been told I am, and I am able to?...The Etruscan language can be heard, if one chooses to mouth it, but not comprehended. Pondering is not to be expected, so why bother?
What happens at the historical moment when the voiceless and powerless seek to unravel their riddle? (For Caliban to seize his voice, reject the magician of civilization in Césaire's writing of Shakespeare's Tempest.) ANS.: We are cutting into the deep heart, the deepest heart of cultural compacts. They have already lost our allegiance. Something is finished.
/
I dreamed I was an artist; my medium was cottage cheese.
/
All the animals, and I knew they were thirsty. They were mine, and were very thirsty. I had to give them
Something I call an emotional texture, a structural expression of mutuality. Writers know their text as a form of intimacy, of personal contact, whether conversations with the reader or with the self. Letters, journals, voices are sources for this element,
see "no reason why one should not write as one speaks, familiarly, colloquially"10
expressing the porousness and nonhierarchic stances of intimate conversation in both structure and function. Like Orlando, like Griffin's Voices, like The Golden Notebook, these may be antiphonal, many-voiced works, beguilingly, passionately subjective, seeing emotional commitment as an adventure. (As our form of adventure?)11
"What a secret language we talk, Undertones, overtones, nuances, abstractions, synbols. Then we return to Henry with an incandescence which frightens him."12
"addressing the reader, making herself and her reader part of the narrative...an offhand, conversational manner"13
I find myself more and more attracted to the porous, the statement that permits interpretation (penetration?) rather than positing an absolute. Not vagueness--I want each component to be clear--but a whole that doesn't pretend to be ultimate, academic.14
Not positing oneself as the only, sol(e) authority. Sheep of the sun. Meaning, a statement that is open to the reader, not better than the reader, not set apart from him, not seeking the authority of the writer. Not even seeking the authority of the writing.
/
If one does not just rest silent, stuff the mouth with food.
/
An art object may then be nonhierarchic, showing "an organization of material in fragments," breaking climactic structures, making an even display of elemnts over the surface with no climactic place or moment, since the materials are "organized into many centers".20
Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères, a form of verbal quilt. We hear her lists, her unstressed series, no punctuation even, no pauses, no setting apart, and so everything joined with no subordination, no ranking. It is radical parataxis. Something droning. Nothing epitomizes another. If fruits are mentioned, many are named, for unlike symbolism, where one stands for the many, here the many stand for the many.
/
The form of the desk, the tote bag, the journal. Interesting that for Woolf it was the form of a journal, and for Pound too it began as a "rag bag," a market mess of spilled fish, but became the form of Analects, of codes, a great man's laws. The Cantos. For Williams, it was the form of antiquarian history, local lore, wonders, layered in the City. Paterson. For both the male writers, a geopolitical stance, and this may have happened in a turn from the female, a reassertion of the polarized sexes. For the woman, it is a diary;: her bag, her desk.
/
We intend to find ourselves. In the burning city.
/
Take Nin. Her diary as form and process is a stratagem to solve a contradiction often present in acute form for women: between the desire to please, making woman an object, and the desire to reveal, making her a subject. The culturally sanctioned relationship to art and artists which Nin continually imagines (ornament, inspiration, sexual and psychic reward) is in conflict with the direct relationship she seeks as artist, colleague, fellow worker. And Nin's diary as fact and artifact trnasposes these conflicting forces, reveals and protects simultaneously, allowing her to please others (by showing male friends specially prepared sections) while writing to please herself. Double, sometimes duplicitous needs.
/
"It is a commonplace of criticism that only the male myths are valid or interesting; a book as fine (and well-structured) asJane Eyre fails even to be seen by many critics because it grows out of experiences--events, fantasies, wishes, fears, daydreams, images of self--entirely foreign to their own."26
Female aesthetic begins when women take, investigate, the structures of feeling that are ours. And trying to take them, find also the conflict between these often inchoate feelings (coded as resistances, coded as the thirsty animals) and patriarchal structures of feeling--romantic thralldom, fear of male anger, and of our own weaknesses of nerve. Essentialist? No. We are making a creation, not a discovery.27
Yet it is also clear that there would be many reasons not to see female work as different. Why might someone object?
First, a desire to say that great art is not made by the factoring out of the sexes, is "androgynous" as Woolf uses the term in the twenties. The desire to state that greatness is (must be?) universal, that anything else is special pleading. The fear that to notice gender in any way becomes destructive to women. Thus the disincentive: if gender categories have always been used so destructively, our use of them, is it not "playing into their hands"? (There can be no greater proof of gender difference than this argument.)
"Another reason women don't like their art to be seen through their bodies is that women have been sex objects all along and to let your art be seen that way is just falling right back into the same old rut."28
Women may then respond with a strategy of self-chosen, proud ghettoization (Richardson's "feminine psyche") or may respond as Woolf did. In that (neo-Freudian) context, Woolf's argument for androgyny is a situational trumph, rejecting the ghettos, stating that woman's art contains the man, contains the woman, has access to both.
Where then is (the) "female aesthetic"? In both, in all these strategies of response to difference. Even if, even when, contradictory.
Then, there is the desire at all costs to avoid special pleading, anything that looks like women have gotten by because of our sex (ambiguous word: meaning, our gender, meaning, our sexuality). This is a rejection of the stance of the courtesan for the firm-chinned professonal, who does not (in dress, in manner, in talk) call attention to her "sex." She has her babies bravely between semesters. She fears being ghettoized. Being patronized. But it happened anyway. Any way. And she did not "control" it.
Another fear: that any aesthetic is bound to be misused, misappropriated, and this one is surely extremely vulnerable, with its blurring of all the elements we have firmly regarded as setting art apart: blurring between art and life, blurring between social creativity and "high" art, blurring between one's journal and one's poem, blurring between the artifact and the immersion in experience. Such exact polarities.29
I am hungry. I am very very hungry. Have I always been this empty?
/
Can I prove it? I can prove that different social groups produce differences in cultural expression. I can prove that women are a social group. I can point to examples of differences in our relation to the symbolic order and in our cultural expression.
But I cannot prove that only women, that women only, use this aesthetic. And this failure is actually the strongest proof of all.