flnlfT~R WlfDomfinifT~R wifDom 8
A Journal of Words and Pictures for the Lesbian
Imagination in All WomenWINTER, 1979
Editors : Harriet Desmoines & Catherine Nicholson
Poetry Editor : Susan Leigh Star
Contributing Editors : Sarah Hoagland, Beth Hodges,
Mab Segrest
Advertising & Promotion: Debbie Alicen
Staff for this issue : Edy Ambroz, Rita Anygoodabookslately,
Barbara Bradford, Liz Beu, C. Colette,
Eddee, Morgan Grey , Moco, A. Murray ,Vicki Nogle, Julia Penelope (Stanley),
Donna Saunders, Mary Young
Cover photograph by Deborah Snow
Printed by Iowa City Women's Press
Special Thanks to the Lincoln Collating Crew!
Copyright © Sinister Wisdom, 1979. All rights reserved to individual authors and artists.
Published quarterly
Individual subscriptions: one year (4 issues) $7.50
two years (8 issues) $13 .00
Institutions: 4 issues, $12.00
Back issues, while available:
Issue 1, $2 .00
Issue 2, $2.50
Issue 3, sold ou t
Issue 4, $2.25
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Issue 7, $2 .50(Add 50 cents postage when ordering 1-2 single copies.)

Address: SINISTER WISDOM, Box 30541, Lincoln, Nebraska 68503

CONTENTS
cover, 23 , 53

Deborah Snow

PHOTOGRAPHS

4

Irene Young

PHOTOGR A PH

32 , 52 , 72

Tee Corinne

PHOTOGRAPHS

2, 15

Judy Grahn

PO E MS

Sherry Thomas

SHAP E S OF THINGS TO COM E

16

Barbara Deming

POEM

Judith Crewe

THE HAT E/ PAIN / POISON POEM

Nan cy AdairSH E IS STILL PLA YING HER PIANO

Arlene Stone

LOVE POEM FOR TWO LARGE DYK E S

24Melanie KayeCONNECTIONSCRAMBLED EGGS 2 :POLITICS AS AN ACT O F LOV E

Melanie Kaye
Melissa Cannon

SE XTET F OR DREAM VOICES

Susan Krieger

AM BIV ALENCE

39
40

Martha Yates
Theresa Barry

PO EM S

50
Audre Lorde

MY MOTHER'S MORTARACOUSTICS AT THE WOMEN ' S COF FE EHOUSENOTES ON DEAFNESS54Claudia Scott

62

Catherine Nicholson

63

Terri Poppe
Cris South67
69

RESPONSE ON DEAFNESSSISTER

30
38

Cathy D. Miller

STOR Y26
33

Lee Schwartz

WASHING CLOTHES

21
22

Robin Linden

POEM

17
18

20

Kimi Reith

POEM

5

Felice Newman

71

INTERVIEW WITH RUTH AND JEAN MOUNTAINGROVE

Mint Danab and Atharne Mountainclimber73

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEGINNI N G WITH 0 : A R EF L E CTION
ON OLGA BROUMAS
Toni Ann Hurley McNaron

77

Martha Courtot

86

A CHANTTO DWELL AMONG OURSELVES: A REVIEW OF MARYDALY 'S GYN/ECOLOGY
Susan Leigh StarNOTES F OR A MAGAZINECONTRIBUTORS' NOTESHarriet Desn'loines

87
99
103

My name is Judith, meaning
She Who Is Praised
I do not want to be called praised
I want to be called The Power of Love .
if Love means protect then whenever I do not
defend you
I cannot call my name Love.
if Love means rebirth then when I see us
dead on our feet
I cannot call my name Love .
if Love means provide & I cannot
provide for you
why would you call my name Love?
do not mistake my breasts
for mounds of potatoes
or my belly for a great roast duck .
do not take my lips for a streak of luck
nor my neck for an appletree,
do not believe my eyes are a warm swarm of bees;
do not get Love mixed up with me .
Don't misunderstand my hands
for a church with a steeple ,open the fingers & out come the people ;nor take my feet to be acres of solid brown earth,or anything else of infinite worth
to you , my brawny turtledove ;do not get me mixed up with Love.

2not until we have ground we call our own
to stand on& weapons of our own in hand
& some kind of friends around us
will anyone ever call our name Love,& then when we do we will all call ourselves
grand, musc1ey names:
the Protection of Love,
the Provision of Love & thePower of Love.
until then, my sweethearts,
let us speak simply ofromance, which is so mucheasier and so much lessthan any of us deserve .

- Judy Grahn-from "Confrontations with the Devil in . the Form of Love,"in The Work of a Common Woman: The Collected Poetryof Judy Grahn , 1964·1977 (Diana Press, 1978). Used bypermission of author and publisher.

3

photograph by Irene Young

HOW DO I LOVE THEE / ME ?

let us count - acknowledge
scrutinize - criticize
bask in - love
the ways ...

4Sherry Thomas

THE SHAPES OF THINGS TO COME

When they began making love, they had been friends for seven years.
The change was experimental, neither knew what to expect.
The writer thought she wanted to get married , though by that she meant
she wanted partnership not ownership. She'd seen enough intense beginnings
with dead ends to last her a lifetime
The artist wasn 't interested in getting married. She'd lived for seven years
with a woman who had then left her for a new lover . The artist herself had
had several subsequent lovers . She wanted to be limited only by her own
desires, to live for herself.
The writer had withstood the artist's advances for months.
"I'm not having any more casual affairs," she told the artist , " and, besides, why endanger a good friendship?"
Until one night , her defenses lulled by a great deal of wine , she gave up
resisting.
''What the hell ," she told herself, "you can't win if you don't even start.
And, who knows, the artist might surprise herself and settle down again ."The writer was a consummate egotist , secretly convinced that, having known
her, the artist wouldn't want anyone else.
Their lovemaking that fust time shook the writer. Its slow pace was exquisite, touch following touch like an old and familiar conversation; the joyof exposure eliminating shame .
"Is it always like that for you?" the writer asked humbly of the artist's
greater experience .
"No, no." The artist smiled, black eyes as alluring as distant skies . "Neverthe first time."
The relationship grew slowly, with days between meetings, each of themretaining the balance of their separate lives. Each-time they met , they tookgreat care to rediscover the other . Awkwardly direct questions, "Do you
want to?" "Do you?", came between each decision, each movement. They
were willing to forsake the omniscience expected of people in love if they
could also escape the dangers of expectation and habit. The only habit they
allowed themselves was one of continual exploration. The writer loved theirslow pace , thought she had all the time in the world to build strong foundations , to firmly root herself in honesty.
But their passion threatened often to engulf them. It began with kisses ,kisses like neither of them had known since the days of adolescence , whenkissing was making love. Kissing became again an experienc;e of love but infused now with their full knowledge of passion . Their kisses could last forhours, a dance of tongues, delight of subtleties. Tongue tip brushing tongue
tip was ecstatic.
5

All their lovemaking contained an element of entering, merging each withthe other : eyes through eyes, mouth to mouth, tongues to inner ears, hands
to vulvas. Woman to woman, they became both child and mother in ever
reversing circles: hand in the vagina, child seeking wombward; the vagina
stirring toward the birth of orgasm. They drew nourishment from eachother's breasts. The child lover became mother of the other's ecstasy; hergreatest gift was tenderness.
It began with kisses, hours of gentle, sensuous touch , and melted fmally
into fierce desire . Mouths to each other's vulvas were kisses transformed .
The passion did not end at orgasm; the energy passed between them, transformed itself, but did not diminish. They lay together crying sometimes,
laughing others; tender, joyful; exposed, bare to the heart and sinews; boneshaken.
One night they lay on the writer's bed watching the evening sky transform itself to darkness.
" I'd like just for once to be full," the artist said, "to have enough. Why
didn't I meet you when I was twenty and unattached?""Because it wouldn't have been the same. I sometimes think we evenwaited those seven years just so it would be like this." The writer lay curledagainst the artist.
"Do you supposed our friendship can survive this?" she asked.
" Aren't we just becoming deeper friends?" the artist teased.
The writer felt pierced by sadness, realizing that there was no going backfrom where they were, that they would always be touched by the knowledgeof each other's bodies. She wondered if they would ever again be simply,
unconsciously , oblivious of the other's presence.
"Such passion is rare, even in a lifetime of lovers," she said .
The artist turned until they touched breast to breast, belly to belly.
"You are everything I'm moving toward," the artist said.
And the writer believed her.

****
" I don't like being in love," the writer said, sitting up by the pond .
"You don't?" the artist teased, running her fingertip softly across thewriter's cheek.
"It's too dangerous to be pleasurable. The minute, the minute, I start
trying to hold on to what I feel now , I lose everything." The writer spokewith great intensity, unaware of her own melodrama. "Being in love shouldbe the most changeable of emotions, and yet it is the one that is most often
grasped , smothered." Her face softened as she looked the artist fully in theeyes. "Do you know, there are moments I think I will die of so much feeling as I know with you. I don't know how to let go , so all I can think of isthat I will just die.""You couldn't hold me even if you wanted to, you know ." The artist
took her hand and squeezed it gently. "Nothing can ever hold me except
my own desires. Everything, everything changes; always. The thing to discover is how not to lose but to grow with the changes."
The writer stared out across the water. For, though she knew aboutchange , she wanted now to feel herself part of a continuous spiraling web .
6She wanted now to know that freedom could include steadiness, a constancy .
She looked back at the artist, "No, there's no point to what we're doing
if there isn't always room for each of us to be whatever we are. Perhaps thefaithfulness I want to bind myself to should be for my work-the need towrite is the most absolute thing in my life.""Do you know, E. was asking me last week which was the primary relationship in my life, you or her."As the artist paused, the writer felt a sharp stab of pain, not knowing
what the answer would be.
" ... and I realized that the only 'primary relationship' in my life now ismyself, myself and my work. At thirty-three, this is the first time I've everbeen able to say that."
The writer nodded, the moment of jealousy already past. She knew that
however much she would like to attach the artist, she would not love theartist so were she not already so committed to herself, to ideas, to the process of creation. And she felt most sharply the paradox that she would bindthe artist most completely only by loving her freedom , by letting her bewhatever she would.
Then she laughed. "How ridiculous it is to think of 'letting you be as you
are.' As though I had anything to do with it! Lovers are such egomaniacs!"
She stood up. "I'm going in."In the icy water of the pond, she came clean. Shook off the artist's spelland the spell of herself as she was with the artist. The water tightened her
skin, the ancient movements of swimming took over her body. She had
spent her whole childhood in the water, came back to it now like a salmon
fmding its native stream .

****One day the writer sat in the artist's cabin and was struck suddenly, painfully by the artist's beauty. The artist's beauty was not conventional or
daily; it shown out rarely, at moments when her dark eyes seemed to danceand her thin skin seemed suddenly translucent , when all of her was lit up
from within. She was talking about a series of drawings that had begun twodays before and still kept coming. Every time she closed her eyes, the imagetransformed itself yet again into its next metamorphosis- so that each drawing grew out of the one before and yet was unique.
As the writer listened to the artist speak, she thought suddenly , "It is as
though I'm watching her through a window. Her beauty has nothing to dowith me, was not meant for me."But as soon as she said it to herself, the writer knew that the image was
all wrong. For she was not seeing her "through glass"; there were no barriers
between them in those few feet of air. And suddenly the writer realized that
she was utterly deficient in an image system , a vocabulary for love that included the separateness of the other.
"I have no words left to love you with," she interrupted the artist. "Even'love' covers such an enormous range of feeling that it is nearly useless. And
everything else is worse. 'My dear' sounds as though you were mine . 'I love7

you' places far too much emphasis on the 'I' for what I'm feeling. 'You arelovely, lovable,' that comes closer."She reached ou t and took the artist's hand. "Sometimes I think the only
endearment I have left is the word 'you.' You." She looked at the artist,
her own face alight now. "Somehow that says everything to me, speaks of
the all of you I know or will know, and the all of you that belongs only to
yourself. "The artist laughed. "Does everything have to have a name?""Does everything have an image?"
They smiled at each other.
"There is so much in me that must find some way out," the writer said
passionately. "Finding its name releases it, sets the image, the idea, the feeling loose in the world . Sometimes I think I will choke if lean 't invent a
language for loving you in. I am too full, but nearly all the words are lies .
And those words, those lies, keep us from knowing what we really are together.

****"I came to see if you wanted to go to the ocean, maybe out to dinner,"
the writer said.
The artist was at that momenta farmer, struggling to trim the hooves ofa recalcitrant goat. She shook her head. "I have a date with E. as soon as I
get done here."
The writer held herself in tightly, allowing herself no feeling. She had
told herself all the seven-mile drive that she would have no expectations ..
And E. , after all, had been the artist's lover long before the writer. Jealousy,
she told herself, was ridiculous and irrational. How could she be jealous ofwhat she had known and accepted when she opened herself to the artist?
She felt close to tears but could give no name to any feeling. Having no expectations nearly canceled out desire itself. And jealousy was impossible.
She wasn't even sure she co uld feel disappoiJ:tment when she hadn't allowed
herself to desire that which she was now deprived of.
The goat kicked again and the artist looked tired and harassed. "This is
the last one . If you'll wait till I'm done, we can talk about it."
The writer sat on a log in the sun, trying to still the insistent voice inher head. The feeling had become suddenly, clearly, anger.
"It's been a week. I can't stand such extremes of intimacy and isolation.
It batters me, I adjust to nothing." Her voice was harsh , a weapon wanting
to pierce the artist's self-containment.
The artist sat down beside her. "You may have noticed that I'm not goodat saying that I care." She put her hand on the writer's shoulder, willing her
to turn and face her. "You will have to trust my gestures, to trust all you
know of the moments we share."Suddenly the writer's anger was deflated, and she saw her arguments
about time and distance were insincere. For she herself had been too busy
until that morning to even feel the artist's absence. Her head had been so
peopled with the conversations of her characters that she had not noticed
the external silence, and would not have welcomed interruptions.
8She knew then that the knot inside was fear. Fear so strong she was willing to deny the connections she knew were real.
"How can I trust gestures , trust how we are with each other, when weare always apart?"" It's time for us to be together again. I'm only busy tonight."
The writer felt the knot giving way within her, its strands unraveling.
She began to cry , something she di rt awkwardly and rarely. The artist roc krd
her in her arms.

****
They came home one night from a poetry reading each of them enlarged
by the stories of women , a chorus ringing in their ears. Snug in the warm
pickup truck, they composed a poem of their own as they drove, trading
lines back and forth, playing off each other's images.
The writer loved how anything could sound profound when she was a
bit in love with herself, and with all the other women in the world.
In her kitchen, they sat warming their hands around cups of cocoa.
"Oh, you could leave me over and over ," the writer said , "if each time
we met again it was as 10'.'·~1/ as tonight! "The artist's face grew still , and she looked for a moment at the blanknessof the dark window.
"I will be leaving," she said gently , meeting the writer 's eyes. " \ waswaiting to tell you. I've decided to go to France next summer ; I don ' t knowfor how long, maybe six months, maybe forever."
She watched the writer tensely , wanting to touch her , afraid to reach out.
''Why?''"I'm not sure how to explain . .. I want to see things, really see with theintensity of foreignness. And ... does it make sense that I need to be alone
with my painting? I've never in my life been alone."
The writer nodded slowly and brushed tears from her face, trying to staycalm. The work, the work was something she was not jealous of.
"Summer is too far away," she answered , "for me to think now of missing you. Here we are." She 11eld. out her hand, then added fiercely , "But I
cannot sit here waiting for you to come back."****"Fondness seems to be the middle age of this affair ," the writer thought.
"What do you mean by 'fondness'?" the artist asked when she said it toher.
The writer thought for a moment. "Something not less than being in love,but more dear. A familiarity that has never grown ordinary."
They were lying together in the early morning light, skin alive to skin's
touch all along their bodies. Drifting at ease, affectionate, the feather edgeof desire brushing at the edges of their awareness.
The writer sniffed the artist's skin. "Put me blindfolded in a room of
five hundred women and I could find you by your smell."
The artist smiled, delighted . "You exaggerate so.",A smile, a dear familiar smile. The writer felt her skin could not containsuch joy as that simple, fleeting smile produced.
9

They lay together encircled, circling. Held within a perfect moment ofpassionate delight and of simple comfort. Riding a meteor whose core wasstill good solid rock.
The writer had decided the week before to eliminate the word "we," always using "you and i" instead. "We," she said pontifically, " is a fiction , adenial of how the artist and 1 remain always unique."But lying in those arms, she found she would have to resurrect the "we."There was something present that encompassed but was not limited to herself. She felt that cell nuclei might merge at any moment , atoms might beexchanged in the molecular distance between their bodies .
"1 would have to say there is also an 'us,'" the writer thought and thenlaughed out loud, mocking herself but also secretly delighted. Her propensity for naming was a passion equal to that she shared in spirit and bodywith the artist.
The artist , looking up to inquire at the laughter , was caught by the sightof a ray of gold green light on the far wall. For her , images were always
just as present as the writer's words.
Driving home , the writer thought of the artist's latest painting sitting on
her easel , the last thing the writer had seen as she left the studio. The painting was of a bowl of apples : the center one polished and perfect; toward
the edges of the bowl, the apples grew more and more sketchy until theoutside ones existed only in bare outline.
"Our relationship is like that ," the writer thought , "something absolutely
perfect at the center; the future barely sketched, empty of everything but
limitless possibility. We can do anything , anything we want! Even her goingaway can b ring us closer."****
The writer was in the orchard , looking out across the wide sweep of her
hilltop land. She suddenly imagined the artist living there with her. The
main house was big enough, surely, for two. And the cabins could becomestudius , one for each of them, inviolable private space. As she walked, she
looked at the nearest cabin , imagining the artist was already at work there .
She felt a rush of protectiveness , thinking how she would guard the artist's
separateness , her time for work . Acknowledging ruefully that such generosity
was founded in self-interest , for how else could she claim the time and spacefor her own work, the right to spend days and days undisturbed at will?
That simple fantasy made her blush with a flood of desire, an intuitionof all she was capable of and wanted passionately to achieve: a union ofpartnership and creative independence. She did not ordinarily allow herself
fantasies about the artist. For so long she had believed so absolutely in theirprocess together that she had nearly forgotten there was anything else she
might want. Then , in her moment of wanting her vision, of believing in all
they might be , she saw the artist sitting in that studio with a new lover, andthe vision vanished from her mind's eye , died swiftly and unconsciously,with a rush of imagined pain .
As she came toward the house , she saw the artist's car in her drive, on arare unplanned visit. The writer stopped at the garden to pick a few roses ,10

carefully willing herself to look closely at each bud , until their beauty
stilled her heart's joy at the artist's arrival and she could walk to the housecalmly, roses in hand, expecting nothing but whatever would happen.
The artist looked first at the roses and then at the writer 's face, savoring
both. She drew the writer to her , careful not to crush the roses .
"Hello ."The writer buried her face in the artist's neck for a moment , breathing
in the scent of her skin .
"Hello." She smiled. They knew each other's faces so well ; wordlessly ,they acknowledged that the visit was unusual , and welcome.
They sat together on the front stoop.
"I need to talk about the future." The artist clasped her hands together ,looking down into the dust at her feet. "I need to know that we will befriends whenever I do come back , that we'll look each other deeply in theeye, sit together with open hearts ."The writer was surprised by the question . "What else has it all been for?"1 promise you nothing specific. 1 don't know if we 'll make love, be lovers.
But whatever form it takes , 1 want always to meet you with an open heart."
There seemed to her no room to speak of her dreams of might-be. She
reminded herself that she would not choose to spend a year waiting, herlife suspended , while the other traveled , grew , changed .
"It's not so easy to do , you know," the artist answered . "I was with J.
for seven years and now she will not look me in the eye."****"I would have made such a good nun ."The artist laughed at the writer. She had been raised Catholic. " I doub t
it."
The writer lay with the artist 's arm around her , stretched out comfo rtably on the bed . "No , I mean it. 1 thrive on harsh discipline . 1 have evenbeen ecstatic this last week of not seeing you . Isn 't there something perverse
in getting such joy from renouncing what one wants very much? "" You 're crazy," the artist said , brushing the writer 's nipple gently, teasingiy , with her fingertip . ' 'We've both been busy ."" No , 1 haven't," the writer answered firmly. "It's strange how egotisticallove is . 1 like myself so much for being able to let you go ."The artist bent to kiss her . She got tired sometimes of all the words.
"I want her to seduce me," the writer realized , as the kiss ran like aflame through her breasts, down her belly, out her vagina . "I want her tomake me feel. "Then she sank into the kiss , giving up conscious thought , moving instinctively to the pure sensuous impUlse . And as the kiss ended , she experienced
another far sharper desire , so complete , compelling, that it never reachedarticulation . She wanted the artist, wanted her not as lover but as beloved.
Her mouth moved to the artist's breast, sucking, caressing, whispering about
her nipple. Her mouth traveled up and down the artist 's bopy , drawing feeling from every sensitive spot, until the artist's whole body was alive , awake
to all sensation . The artist caressed her also, but for the most part, the writer
kept just barely out of reach, avoiding distraction, doing exactly as she 11

wished. Then she turned her mouth , her whole self to the artist 's vulva ,found her vagina as open and caressing as her other lips had been . She
stroked the artist without haste , building passion to the edge of orgasm andback , again and again , until fin ally the artist came , screaming. And the writerwent along with her , her own body alive , ecstatic , satisfied. Then they lay
together silently, the writer cradling the artist in her arms, both of themcrying .
When the artist turned to stroke her , touching gent ly her inner ear , thewriter said , "Only do what you want to do."" Oh ," the artist answered , " I want to do everything to you ."And the writer felt a moment of panic ; willed herself to relax , to give in ,to acce pt. When she finally came to orgasm , its ferocity surprised her. The
arti st 's hand in her vagina seemed to reach clear to the core of her, to touch
her heart. And for a moment she was graced by feeling too great to be contain ed within her , energy given , taken , exchanged with the artist , even withthe air around them.

****" You pull on one little thread and the whole fabric comes unraveled ,"the writer marveled to herself. "So we aren 't going to make it to the end
after all. "Her inner voice was commenting on a scene the rest of her was engaged
in. She had just said to the artist , " It 's over. I'd have to start again and I
don't want to . I don 't want to do it anymore. ""Did you come here to say that? " the artist asked , her face harsh , still.
The writer shook her head , incurably honest. " No , it came to me when
E. walked in just now to get you for dinner." Suddenly she felt blazingly
angry . "I've been gone for three weeks , and my first day back you make adate with her. There is no message from you. I have to come here and findyou with her. You can 't even say you missed me, can you?"" I wou ld have come tomorrow or the next day," the artist said quietly ,trying to calm her. "I thought you might want to get resettled.""I've been gone long enough that I can just let go. What 's the difference
now o r next month? Will you pin a medal on me as you leave? "" I have to go meet E. I can't talk now. Can I come tomorrow?""No . I'll be busy ," the writer said, shaking off the artist 's arm. She felt
deprived of a scene and wanted to be deliberately , spectacularly childish.
She had never even had a fight , much less a scene , with the artist in all theirtime together. The artist wou ldn 't fight , kept her emotions safe and tidy .
The writer went home and drank three straight whiskeys, not allowing
her mind to stray for a second from the pages of a Dorothy Sayers murder
mystery she had already read twice before .
In the next two days , the writer found how very much less "done" shewas than she had proclaimed . She held endless self-justifying harangues with
the nonexistent artist. Incidents which even she could still recognize as small
in themselves assumed prophetic and symbolic importance. Twenty times a
day she screamed at herself to stop it, stop it, stop it. But the voice continued without cease.
12

"I am killing myself with her," she said, "bit by bit I've eut every desire ,every need, every spontaneous gesture out of myself until there is almost
nothing left. Wind me up, see how good I'll be. It doesn't matter to her
how long we go between visits. If she can sandwich us in between meetingsand dates with E., how lovely. It's been a year , a year, since we've spent
two nights in a row together. I'm not even used enough to her to get a goodnight's sleep in my own bed!""And she's welcome to E. She can have her. How long would that relationship have lasted if she hadn't had me to be creative with? How long
until the possessiveness and the tantrums would have suffocated her , if she
hadn't always felt she was growing with me? And her art. I didn 't paint her
paintings, but what would she have done without all our talks, without mein the bleak dry periods? Or I without her? Or I without her?"
The artist came to find her at the end of the second day.
They eyed each other warily . The artist's face was questioning, the writer's
stony .
"Have you decided what you want to do? " the artist asked.
"You can't have the decision without the speech. I've been rehearsing
for two days." The writer found it all suddenly ridiculous. "I don't want to
be enemies. That just makes me spend all my time thinking of you." She
tried to smile. "But I don't want to care either. I don't want to let you
hurt me. I've let you be however you were , I've let you go. What's left is
for me. I want to give myself something for once.""Come on," the artist said gently , "that can't be the whole speech."
So then all her anger, bitterness, recriminations came pouring out. How
she felt unrecognized , unvalued , uncared for.
The artist reached out to touch the writer's rigid body. Her eyes gentle ,hurting too. "That first week you were gone ," the artist said, "I realized
how much I depended on you. But you were gone , and so I began to depend on myself more. I need to . When I leave, I can't afford to be leaning
on anyone."
The writer could understand that. She wished wearily that for once shewouldn't understand , wished she could maintain the purity of her anger.
"You should have explained to me sooner. I could have tolerated the
distance if I'd known why I had to.""You know I'm not good at saying things.""You could learn."
The artist shook her head . "If I could , I would have.""What can we do now?" the writer asked. "When we were first together,
I thought perhaps we'd form a partnership that would last for years. Then
when I saw you were going to stay with E., I thought we'd do somethingelse wonderful, that we'd love each other absolutely , without attachment .
I thought that we were perfect. Now it just seems to me to be a trivial little
love affair winding to an ordinary end."''Whatever this change is, it isn't an ending," the artist said sharply . Hereyes met the writer's . "Whatever we do, don 't deny what we 've been."

13

The writer felt worn out. She cursed her understanding , and was gratefulfor it. What she could understand, she could live with. And somehow shealways felt better sharing hard truths with the artist than remaining separate
and silent.
She reached out and clasped the artist's hand, smiling wryly . "Did you
believe me when I said it was the end?"
The artist shook her head. "I knew you wouldn't leave like that.""Damn it, I've been through two hellish days, you know."
The artist just drew her close enough to hug.

****
When the artist left for Europe, she gave the writer the apple painting.
The writer looked at it often as she went on with her own work.
As she looked at the painting day after day, meditating on the bare outlines of apples around its edges, she began to see that the possibilities were
not , and never had been, infinite. Just as the apples' shapes were defmed,
so were she and the artist bound by the shapes of their own characters, of
all their past experiences. The artist's years of attachment had left her
fiercely protective of herself; the writer's years of changing had left her
yearning for stability .
In the moment of parting, their eyes had met more deeply than theirbodies ever had. They knew absolutely that they loved each other; and justas clearly they knew that this was an ending, that there were kinds of partnership and communion they could not fmd with each other. But all theirwork made it possible for a new friendship to begin to grow between them,spanning two continents, an ocean, the end of their love affair.
"You showed me the way to so much I'd never known and now must
have," the artist wrote . "Not just the passion, my dear ," (reading, the writer
could imagine her wicked laugh), "but your belief in your work , strengthened my belief in mine. And something else-you will know the words forit- how we just were what we were.""And your leaving," the writer answered, "is forcing me to finally learn
to love myself."
All the attention and concern she had once directed at the artist, she
now tried to turn toward herself. Just as she tried to rid her stories of thepassive voice, she also rejected the lie that she had been left by the artist.
She was herself, whole. A new novel was growing in her mind, its characterssurprising her with actions she had never dared to take herself. Their insistent voices helped somewhat to fill the silence of the artist's absence.
And in the months that followed , the writer found the apple painting
became at last her own private image. For it was her core that was shining
and solid; her possibilities that were, not infmite, but limited only by her
visions. Like thousands of women , most of whom she would never know,
she struggled daily to affirm that all the power she would ever need was
already in her hands. That she could become whatever she would.

14

Lo ve came along and saved me

saved mesaved
me.
However, my life remains the same as before.
a What shall I do now that I havewhat I've always been looking for.

Love came along and saved
no oneLove came along, went broke
got busted, was run out of
town and desperately needssomething. Dont tell her it's Love.

-Judy Grahn-from "Confrontations with the Devil in the Form of Love,"in The Work of a Common Woman : The Collected Poetryof Judy Grahn, 1964·1977 (Diana Press, 1978) . Used bypermission of author and publisher.
15

Our love, like the new moon,
Lies at last within the old moon's arms
And grows again.
Lone night after night we had been
Without its light - this grace withdrawn.
Shaken with tears, we spoke our loss Admitting what was bitter, bitter.
With this burst water
Love was born again.
Again I swoon upon your mothering breast,
Again the white crescent of your body
And my body are joined, and blessed.

-Barbara Deming

16

THE HATE / PAIN / POISON POEM

(for Connie)
pain hurts me
when I hurt you
still, I gather theharsh black clods
of words , and throw themeasy / careless/heedless that I do .
and then my guilt
clawlike creeps in
gnaws on my soul
like a rat
that must sit
and devour
everything richdanae , andgood and true.
and yet I go on
hurting/paining you
with poison words
from the night-hag's
store replete
blaming thenight (oursecrecy itself
necessary)and far worse
blaming you
for a world's hard -hatingstone folk wielding
the word-hoarde- Judith Crewe

17

Nancy Adair

SHE IS STILL PLAYING HER PIANO

Fantasy of Erotic Frustration and Some Satisfaction

i'm walking up the street... up the crumbling steps to her house .. . thetrees are overgrown ... the shrubs snag my legs ... the house is spanish ...
th e house is in barcelona behind a great white wall covered with geraniums
hidden by fig trees ... i am wearing black ... i am wearing boots ... i'm walking up the street... up the crumbling steps to her door. .. i'm knocking
on the door. .. i keep knocking ... i hear no voice ... so i shrink and slip
through the horizontal mail slot... the brass flap claps shut against its
brass frame ... i recognize her. .. she is on the other side of the tall room .. .
she's start led ... she's playing the piano ... she's surprised but her fingers
continue ... and she has forgotten ... her fingers skim the keys ... her bodyis staked to the bench ... her head doesn 't move ... she is navigating a complex tune ... i reconstitute myself.. . rakishly toss my black cloak roun'~my shou lder. .. i put a knife in my teeth and walk up and down the longtall room following the rhythm of the music ... i slide along the floor as
her fingers skim · the keys ... i do a flamingo dance up the wall... i do flamingo across the ceiling ... i hang out above the piano and pull flowers
from my sleeve and drop them on the keys ... then i sing a gypsy song in
the fine tradition of the cante hondo ... i'm taking the dagger from myteeth .. . i cut off my head .. . my cordoban hat flies across the room ... myhead bounces ou t the window .. . she does not notice me ...
i'm walking up the street to her house ... i'm walking up the crumbling
steps past the decrepit overgrown trees ... and bushes that scratch my knees ...
i'm knocking on the door. .. there is no voice ... i turn sideways and slip myself in between the grains of wood in the door. .. i remember her. .. she's
playing the piano ... she does not notice me .. . i casually meander over andstand behind her. .. i am picking up her hair. .. i whisper in her ear. .. "youcan trust me" ... i stand back a few paces ... and i grow my arms ... i stick
my hands through her shoulder blades ... i slide them down her arms ... andi fit them into her fingers .. . her hands are my gloves ... i play music withher. .. our hands skim across the keys .. . 0ur hands negotiate the tune .. . weplay we ll together. .. she does not notice me ...
i'm walking up the steps to her house ... i'm trying to direct my fantasy ...
to finish my daydream ... to complete a story ... i'm trying to get her to18notice me .. . so i'm walking up the steps to her house .. . the passage is dark ...
the tall old trees are all overgrown ... the thick bushes snag my knees ...
i'm walking up the decaying steps .. . i might fall... but i am in full control of myself.. . i'm knocking at her door. .. she does not answer. .. i
can't write that piano number again ... i'll move her to another room ... nothen i'll have to go through some different song and dance ... i'll do the
piano routine one more time ... this fantasy is not supposed to be frustrating ... i'm meant to have a goood timein fifteenth century barcelona ... i'm walking up the steep hill to her
castle ... it is surrounded by a four foot thick ten foot high white wall ...
i have a difficult time clearing a way through the jungle of trees andbushes that attack my knees ... the worn steps have disappeared ... i'm
knocking at her door. .. i can hear her playing her piano ... i can hear
her stop playing the piano ... my god she is stopping playing her piano .. .
the door is opening ... the door is opening very slowly ... when i see her
i recognize her. .. she is wearing a long black velvet dress ... she is wearing myoId cordoban hat.. . she is carrying a knife in her teeth ... she cuts
off her head ... it bounces out the door and down the decayed steps .. .
roses pour out of the neck ... it stops at the foot of a bush ... the mouth
is smiling ... the eyes are staring at me ... but she does not notice me .. .
i really am trying to finish this fantasy .. . i'll review the purpose ... i'mhaving this fantasy so that i won't feel lonely ... so i have something to
do ... i'm writing this fantasy because i don ' t feel like doing what i'm
supposed to ... i'm really writing this fantasy to get turned on .. . and iam only getting bored ... i just need to create a simple seduction scene ...
i just need to seduce this woman .. .
one more time ... i'm knocking at the door. .. she answers ... she is surprised to see me ... she waves her arm ... motions me in ... she offers me
tea ... i ask for tequila ... and she sits down ... to play the piano ... her
hands scan the keys ... she discerns a comple x tune .. . the music is beautiful... i ask her what it is ... she does not answer. .. she is concentratingon her music ... it must be her own conception .. . she is fixa ted .. . i tellher i love her. .. she does not answer. .. she does not seem to hear. .. sheis playing her piano ... i am asphyxi ated ... i succumb to the music's spell.. .
i fall asleep on the couch ... in my sleep i wake up ... i hear her sto p
playing her piano ... i feel her presence .. . she is kissing my eyes .. . sheis stroking my fingers ... she is drawing circles on my vest... on my breasts ...
her fingers trace my mouth ... she beckons me to stand ... who is seducing
who .. . she has said nothing ... she has a tear on her cheek .. . it is crystal. ..
the tear is making a rainbow ... i ask her why she is crying ... she points
to the sheet of music on the piano ... she gives me the tear and makes
another. .. i put it in my pocket... the rainbow hangs out.. . we holdhands ... we float.. . up the stairs ... we are many colors ... we are a chagall painting ... we are standing in her room on the top £1oor. .. it looks
out over the moat.. . her dress has thirty eight buttons ... i have a long
zipper. .. she unzips me as slowly as i unbutton her. .. she has a body .. .
i have bones ... she is running her hands up my arms ... and down my19

arms ... i am sifting her hair through my fingers ... our knees are locked ...
our feet are tired .. . she is scannin g her fingers on my head ... she is notpl ayi ng the piano ... she is playing me·... she speaks ... "why are you shy" ...
i am too shy to answer ... i trace soft lines on her face with my finger .. .
down her long nose ... across her eyelids ... along her fo rehead ... aroundher tear ... she cocks her head and catches my hand between her ear andher sho uld er ... i to uch the other side of her neck with my other hand ...
her muscle is ta ut... i can fee l her pulse racing ... i can feel my pulse
racing .. . my eyes are looking at hers looking at mine .. . i lick her tear .. .
the rainbow is all fl avors ... we sh ift our weight... our knees are locked .. .
our feet hurt... she lights a candle ... we are slipping into ironed white
sat in sheets ... under a deep brown ... goose down ... velvet qUilt... weare on a carved mahogany fo ur poster bed ... it is snow ing outsid e ... afire is crackli ng in the grate ... the rainbow surrounds the bed ... her
faithfu l great dane is on the floor .. . orl ando and queen cristin a aremaking love .. . we embrace ... slowly lips touching ... tongues ... nipples ...
hair .. . bel lies ... fans .. . we are slipping into each other .. . we are notplaying the piano ... we are playing each other ... "you are not so shy
after all " she says .. . i say "as soon as i get off my feet i am fine" ...
the cand le flickers .. . the words fa ll out of ou r heads ... we make beautiful music toget her ... later we say we will never love another .. . we will
never leave each other ... strong words ... but i can wr ite any story ilike ... i am creating my own fantasy ... when i wake up on the couchshe is still pl ay ing her piano.

her ears are teeny
as a eat 's noseeyes are greedy bad and beadythief of wishes, burglar on my premises
Her cunt the flashlightwith a soft ruby bulb

-Kimi Reith

20

LOVE POEM FOR TWO LARGE DYKESThis poem for my sisters
Barbara and Kathy
Evolving to the female form the circle
That buries its end in beginnings
The circle
The shape of revolution
And energy
That is eternal
These women wide in love
Who needed fuller dimensions
Who could not be stiffened pricks
Or thin as broomsticks
Or be banished as the harpies were
When women were still diapered
These women crawled out of the crib
And stood on their own two feet
And shot themselves into space
Like Quaker oats
From far below we saw them
Round moons as radiant
As helium balloons
And rich as frosted donuts
Their breasts tucked tenderly
One upon the otherLike deep soup bowls with radiant glazes
Each finding comfort in one cosmos
Each keeping her own sphere
These dykes who fertilized new trenches
On menses-shaded Mars
Then travelled far beyound like zeppelins
Or whales
Inventing sonar harmonies for those
Like meWho walked the straight male arrow
My sisters climbing comets
To torch out causeways-Arlene Stone
21

Folds of skin weave a web of lines when you smile
I love to laugh with you.
Something other than language
renders my meanings transparent
a deleted agent
unnamed subject
a quickening moment
ephemeral
Your insisting I find words
choosedelve deeper into the silence
darkness
face the formlessness before the form
that I am the formlessness , the form.
Always the ambiguity .
No equation defines the curve we plot together
without time, spacelanguage
We are the points along the matrix
phonemes
We are the matrix, syntax.

-Robin Ruth Linden

22photograph by Deborah Snow
23

CONNECTION
if love were a current to turn off
I could put out the lightand sleep easy
not lie on my back screening rerunsof you and me and her
at the table in various framesof discomfort , youpulled back from your skin a good 3 inches,
she crackling along the wirefrom your face to her face ,my line to you clippedsome miracle!
finally I sleep
to dream I'm at the ocean with my sister
inside a hotel. a singer was there ,a man , someone famous .
my sister wanted to hear his music
she would not walk with me on the beach
I was afraid to walk alone
inside the dream an ancient heart
was thrumming danger, can Jtransform the danger

*

*

*

*

*

we were laughing tumbling touching
everywhere we could find, another curveto the climb into the pink-fleshed caves,
my fingers were pilgrims, seeing signstell me , J said keep
going , y ou said, it 's a worthy cause

*

*

*

*

*

loss if I careloss if I don't careyour face over eggs and pancakes is
pleasan t , remote
if you liked your nameI'd have said it
if you wanted me balanced on one ungrateful toe
I'd have tried24

I cut your hair partly in anger
I have looked for everything in you
not to like

*

*

*

*

*

across the room at a meeting to stop
nuclear power, the patriarchs' fmal bargain,
our faces
watching some man miss the point
conspire to blow up, laughinghow to stay mad?

*

*

*

*

*

opening the day's eye
to refuse nostalgiaold clothes conjured back to sizeon grounds of boredom .
not to imagine
the walk led anywhere but straight here
to a force-field where each speck and particle
schools me
not to repeat myself.
if I reach back, it's not for you
but for myself
for a bite of the tribal egg
reborn in the lines between us, bloody
as any birth. the heartbeats open , making room
for the new animal
Melanie Kaye

25

SCRAMBLED EGGS 2 :Melanie KayePOLITICS AS AN ACT OF LOVE

Love is an abused word. Men exploited it. Feminists exposed it. Lesbian
Feminists, remembe ring the mothers we had or wanted, reclaimed it , aspossibility:****
But J ean 't call it life until we start to movebeyond this secret circle of fire . ... *****By chance picked up Viktor Frankl's book- Man 's Search for Meaning- "atitle only a man could make up ," I say contemptuously, and D- tells me it's
abo ut the concentration camps . [ read it straight through. 1 have dreamed thecontents of this book : the dwindling self who can focus on nothing but physica l need and deprivation, hunger pain cold. What [ had not grasped was thehighly selective passionate loyalty :AIl 'that matte red was that one's own name and that of one's friend were crossed
off the list of victims, tho ugh everyone knew that for each man (sic) saved
another vict im had to be found.

( I wish 1 knew if this was the same for the women.)to remember : deportation of jews in each country began with stateless jews,
non-citizens. rich educated jewish citizens helped the nazis to gather andidentify the aliens, thin king to prote ct their own by giving over the others.

so the circle of protectioll shrinks from people to jews to citizen jews to
the camps and the point where we becomes you & me and all that mattersis that one's own name and that of one's friend get crossed off the list.
also to remember: in denmark where people from citizen to king refused
to cooperate with the nazis but instead defined the jews as us and would
not turn them over, efforts at deportation simply failed.*** from "Origins and History of Consciousness" by Adrienne Rich, in The Dream of
a Common Language, Poems 19 74-1977.
"''''Moreover, "it is the only case we know of in which the Nazis met with open
native resistance, and the result seems to have been that those exposed to it changed
their minds." (Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 175) That is, Nazis stationed
in Denmark became unreliable as Nazis.

26

if every jew in europe had taken the survival of every other jew as seriously
as she took her own and that of her family ; if every jew in europe hadjoined in resistance, as they did in Warsaw, Byelostok, Tarnow, even in thedeath camp at Treblinka - would 6 million have died ?
Revolutionary love would mean feeling the same passionate loyalty for eachone of us that jews in the camps felt for their one or two friends; would
mean love-for-one 's-people, as for one 's child ren, lover , self. we would all
be us to each other. we would know this love was anything but altruistic,that our survival required us to love this way.
* ** *On the other hand, we do not make ourselves capable of either love or revolution by pretending we already are capable ; but by extending our capability where it exists, and examining where it does not.

****it could be easy to think larger than one
to think larger than two or three or four
this is me
this is my partner
these are my children
if i say, these are my people
who do i mean?
(excerpt from journal , 1977)
I am a woman, 33 years old, a jewish child of working parents , a lesbian ,an activist whose political education began in the civil rights movement , awriter, a teacher, and an unemployed part-time scrounger for wages . Whati mean by my people is not always obvious.
for practical purposes, i use a rule of thumb discussed by Andrea Dworkin
as primary emergency-the [identity] which brings with it as part of its
definition death.* my people are those with whom i share a state of primaryemergence: women. anti-gay activity can modify this identity, as would empowered anti-semitism .
I have promised myself to protect any woman's life , including my own, as
if it were the life of a woman i love. i have imagined thousands of women
making a like promise, chanting it as vow and battle cry.
at the same time i find myself thinking i hate her about a woman who iknow is basically on my side.
most often we don't function on basics. our emergei1cy is Sl) a!1cient, so
ordinary. i know things are desperate but i don't feel it. (when i do feel it ,i lose control.) when our lives are not structured in need of each other , ourdifferences flash neon.

sometimes we're so hungry for blood
we forget whose it is* ** Woman Haling, p . 23.
**excerpt from conversation with Amy Kesselman

27

****
dream :
a mystery novel i'm in, part of a closed group like a ship or a village. i don't
know who has been murdered but fear soon someone else will be. i suspectthat 2 men are the killers, i'm tempted to trust a man standing nearby - but
this is a mystery novel and the killer could be any of us. i'm afraid.

s

i find my car and i know someone tampered with it, is trying to kill me.
then i see a woman, part of the group, and though i don't know her i suddenly realize i can trust her. her name is lily. walking through rooms i seeanother woman i barely know. i realize i can trust her too, and some others,though not all. the women i trust come with me to lily's room to confront
this problem of murder. i feel a kind of elation, like love: i am not in thisalone, i can trust the women.

in lily's room there are others, including dykes from my community andsome who travel from place to place. some of the travelers have agreed thatthey don't want to talk about anything upsetting. i am furious, and fearfulthat they will block discussion of the danger we're in.
i see i can't trust them because they don't share my sense of danger.
i tell them to leave, and that those of us who want to talk about the danger will stay.

* ***to extend the secret circle:
begin at the fiery core
the most exciting , pleasurable, and effective political work i've done has had
the quality of a vital love relationship. we uncover imaginative risk-taking
se lves. when we meet , energy rises . our thoughts merge into some larger
thinking process. we leave meetings high on ideas and our own power.
that is, the group falls in love with itself.
the bond is different from personal friendship /intimacy. it doesn't mean we
all want to snuggle in bed on cold mornings . it means we can risk saying
what we think is true , risk doing what we think needs to be done ; that wehave fun ; that we gather for wholeness , as we are drawn to love, in need,desire , and possibility .
****why bother?
on my wall is a quote from Brecht: a political guru asks an aspiring revolutionary:y ou don't want to get the best out of life, why should Y Ollrrstruggle?
I put it there to remind me not to be a puritan.
But I also reject the question as beside the point.

28

I struggle because it is the best I know of life: a larger unit of love. obno xious powers see struggle as hateful: to them it is . but i agree with Che
Guevara, who knew something about political commitment: let /lie say , atthe risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true rellolu tionaJY is guided by f eel-ings of 10lle.
I think to women this will not seem ridiculous.* we are making love overin the image of all we want. Why stop ?* * the name of the secret circle ,when it includes enough of us , will be revolution , another abused word to
make new.

"Scrambled Eggs" will appear regularly in Sinister Wisdom. I
welcome comments and suggestions fronz readers, and would
be happiest to open this space to dialogue.

. * though it is certainly informa tive tha t he feared ridicule for saying it.
**in wording and spirit i am indebted to Diane Nowicki:

loving me even o verthrowing the go vernment each tim e
is finite.

why ever stop.
- from "I Dream You Are Anonymous/The 13 th
Century American Poet/A Woman in the Underground " in Naming: Poems by 8 Wom en(Portland,1976).

1 also want to acknowledge general indebtedness to Amy Kesselman, Diane Nowicki,
Dino Lucas & Paula King. Th e de velopmem of political thinking is alway s a collective act.

29

SEXTET FOR DREAM VOICESI en ter your pain . I haveto have it. Thin cry of the needle
striking for thread , a raw vein. My systemstretches, contracts , with this radicaltransfusion. This is the object.
Swollen , speaking in pain , your tongue.
2
You feel me swell up under your tongue.
Nerves blossom like suns. Their aching lights haveburst into nova, space is a disappearing object,a black hole that swallows itself. And your tongue is the needle
spinning our course to a radical
country where we meld into radiant harmonies under one system .
3
I unfold, waking, in the black corridor. Each systemof conduits remembers the sharp taste of my tongue.
I go deeper to fill my need, drinking from the dark radical
before it splits and thins . All night I forget where I havelain, dream-torn, seeing a bright needle
staked through the heart of a small wax object.

4
I was a flame -blind fool not to see how you would object
to this torch thrown in your eye , this heart with no stake in your system.
Now you will needle
the devil out of my splitting tongue,
and I must burn and burn, must burn and cry , until you havemelted from every burning bush its radical.

5This room's long thumbs restrict any radical
move . In it, I am safe from dust and stones, like its most precious object.
I own a glass world on a platter . And when I havedreams of some strangled vital system,
cramped gut, lobotomy, I wake with my tongue
sewn to my lips. I am rocked by a sleeping needle.

30

6Whether I sleep with a bottle or cry to the glazed eye of speed's needle
I hold your shape as I did, once, after the knife had been radical
against you. No ease for your dry moiJth at my breasts, no tongueof desire, but it was one touching, found out and excised like a foreign object
by a white coat on a stick. Where's the trick for beating that system?
Now, alone, you die in a white room in a bare bed . All I have .
Envoi

Articulate: let the tongue joint touch the root of its object;
and where the nerves have failed, into that system
let the radical heart shoot its quick needle.

-Melissa Cannon

31photograph by Tee Corinne

32Susan Krieger

AMBIVALENCE

It is a small house and the curtains in the living room and in Jacqueline's
bedroom are made of old lace, large pieces, hung as if the world outside did
not exist. Jacqueline was painting part of the kitchen yellow when I left ,hair piled on top of her head, in a yellow shirt , standing on a bench, raising
a roller to the ceiling. She did get off the bench and come to say goodbye
a gesture I tried to push away as needless, she had said goodbye yesterday
standing beside her car outside in the rain. I am only to be gone one night,
possibly two. I have only been staying with her for a few weeks and we are
not close. Yet we try. With frustration and hesitation, we try. When Jacqueline came, roller in hand to say goodbye, it was with a kiss and I offered
her my cheek. I looked quickly at he'r lips and gave a cheek and thought as
I turned away of what I had missed-a kiss on the lips, briefly, before she
returned to rolling paint and I left for the airport. It might have been a moment of surprise, because our lips are each thin and tremble at first andwould have a small dance as they sought each other out. But it is perhaps
too wishful to think that in that kiss that did not occur we might have admitted and seen each other as we have not up to this time.

I will probably always be looking for the kiss we will not have and always
be turning from it, and it may not make much difference to Jacqueline but
it will make a difference to me and I am not clear about why. Jacqueline
has asked that she be important to me and she is important, although at thetime she asked I thOUght she was not and would never be. Yet as the plane
took off and I looked into a rainy sky, I felt a fondness for her and thought
to remember it, because it is not often I have distance enough to feel that.
To know what comes between myself and the fondness it is necessary to go
back, back just a few weeks to when I first came to Jacqueline's house andfound her notes and washed her sheets and waited her return .
It seemed such a small house when I arrived , which probably says lessabout the house than about my feelings for Jacqueline. I feel that she islarge, and she and I are about the same size. What is large is Jacqueline's
voice and her enthusiasm and her granting the people she knows large qualities. The man she is with now is a fine, fine man, and I am beautiful andher friend Mardy brilliant and this is said so from the heart and in such alow convincing tone that at the moment there is no doubt. So it was onenight in the beginning when Jacqueline and her man friend and I sat in theliving room after dinner, she and I on the floor near each other, he apart,
across the room in a chair until he got up to stretch, for he is a tall man
and it is part of his charm, and she looked up at him and her eyes becamemoist and she said to me , "that is a fine, fine man, don't .you agree," and I
said yes, and then uncomfortable with haVing said yes, for no man could beso fme, got up and walked into the kitchen, leaving her to admire , to cloak
33
him in awe.

I am now on a plane again , but this one takes me away for a longer timeand I am far from the living room and that night. This flight marks the endof our visit , the end of our sharing the tiny house that was nonetheless large
enough, the end of my sleeping in the garage out back , never having shared
the bed I was at one point offered. I had the bed to myself at first , for nearly a week before Jacqueline arrived . She had gone for the holidays home toher parents with her small daughter who stands as she does , toes pointed
out , and likes to dance and pouts and is as resolutely independent. Jacqueline calls her "daughter" and Sara speaks of herself as " daughter" and there
is a sense of being on top of it when they do so , as if their relationship islarge enough to comprehend the role without assuming it. But this I did notknow when I first came and the house was empty and I slept those six nights
on Jacqueline's blue sheets. All I knew were the feelings there for me in two
notes, one on the cover page of a book left as a Christmas present: "Forbeautiful Susan, an incredible woman , briefly encountered in this strange
world ," the other at the end of a page bidding me welcome , telling about
how the heater worked and that the goldfish on the kitchen table needed
food and that Jacqueline and Sara would be back Thursday , but in the meantime I should make this my home and know that Jacqueline was in someexcited way looking forward to seeing me.
So the house had from the start an air of expectation , which perhaps all
houses of absent owners have , a sense that at any moment the drama thatis usually played there will recur, it lurks as a shadow , almost grinning at
one 's presence. And sometimes this shadow is not merely there , but there
as if ready to play , to take one on. So I thought that week of playing with
Jacqueline , of our wrestling and exhausting and daring each other to the farthest in our emotions . It was Jacqueline and I in the bedroom laughing withthe final exhaustion of sex, in the kitchen talking with our eyes, outside ina meadow exhilirated with the air and each other. Yet the days were rainy
and the house quiet and dark and I was alone. I was at that time not enoughwith my friends, still in my habits from another life . I helped myself throughthe hardest of my days with expectations of Jacqueline 's return , and thisseemed to serve me at the time , but then on Thursday when she did notcome the disappOintment was grave.
I had, in preparing, bought some groceries and roses and cleaned a bit
and washed the towels and sheets. The sheets when I first crawled into that
bed were heavy with the smell of Jacqueline and there were white stains onthem which made me think of sex and a man above a woman, I as I lay
there somewhere in the midst of it. Yet it was finally only with Jacquelinethat I slept, getting used to her smell , not the smell of sex so much as ofsweat, adding to it my own, so that by the fifth day when I washed the
sheets, the two were indistinguishable. What I am trying to say is that Jacqueline and I for a second time had an affair that perhaps she could imagine
but I could not admit. For a guest ought not take liberties difficult to confess. I never told Jacqueline about those few days, although I hoped she mightknow. I hoped she might see through the roses, and also that she would not34

say so. When she asked who gave them to me, three muted orange-yellow
flowers sitting in a glass jar in front of the lace curtain in the living room
window, I said it had been my birthday the day before she got back and I
gave them to myself. That perhaps would have been a better idea , but as
many of the sort, it was not true. Yet I wanted her in part to believe it , andto think I took care well. To have said the roses were for her would havebeen too bold, would have risked the danger of a premature gift. So all ofa sudden I had them as mine and came in the next few days as they opened
to half believe my story . Perhaps the roses had been for me after all , evenat the start. The affair was not with Jacqueline but with myself. Yet like all
doubtful stories, this one never ended , even a week later as I threw the roses
out, one morning as Jacqueline lay sleeping, it was as if they and I shared asecret and as if even from the garbage they talked .
The other sign I tried to leave was the sheets and that had a harder outcome. When I washed the sheets on Thursday morning, I felt I was washingthem for us, washing them clean of her old sex to make a bed we might lie
in fresh, and I made that bed with gentle expectation and waited the day
for a call from the airport, a car to drive up, a door to slam, the house to
be occupied on one of my returns. There were many car doors that slammed
that day and each of them I welcomed and then forgot, for Jacqueline did
not come and then in the evening called from the home of her friend where
she would be staying the night. He had picked her up from the airport andhad taken her to dinner and all I could say was hello and I had been worriedand been prepared to pick her up.
I am now back in the middle of the country and thinking of Jacqueline
makes little sense. There is a blizzard outside and I have drunk mulled wineand had soup and tried to hang pictures that keep falling down because thewalls are cold. I am lonely again as I was before I came to Jacqueline's house ,and I am angry, as I was with her , at the frustration that bears no good namebut is what we often accept. It must have been sometime on Friday that I
came back to the house and found Jacqueline reading her mail , the blind on
the front door up. We must have embraced but I do not remember that embrace, and it must have been long, for that is Jacqueline 's habit. What I do
remember is her opening her mail and saying she had just gotten back andhow good it was to be home. I remember our ~itting on the two chairs acrossfrom each other at opposite ends of the living room, yet because it was small,
not far apart, and I remember her saying her friend would be gone much of
the time of my stay and I might share her bed . She stood by the heater soonafter she said it, getting warm. And I took pleasure and wondered what she
felt that would mean. Would we easily lie beside each other , or had she noteven considered as she offered? I would not find out that night because she
was to be away again, or the next night which was New Year's Eve, although
on that night we talked in the kitchen for several hours , having dinner , firstburning then making a dessert.
She stood by the stove and I by the sink and I watched her eyes and listened as she spoke of discovering her own power and of needing space andas she said she saw power in me too. We drank and hugged and talked and35touched , all in the kitchen with Jacqueline claiming surprise when she would
look at me and want to hold me. Something was going on which she seemed
not to know . I cannot say I knew . I was not in love. It did have to do withpower , and with home . But some kinds of assertion are not my style and I
felt not as powerful as she seemed . Always through the visit I felt that way ,so I dared not match her , instead took her word that she was too tired, or
too involved with her friend, or too much wanting to run away , and felt that
despite her enthusiasm , her ambivalence was profound , and I, too , had a difficulty as unresolved .
One night for a ve ry long time we stood just inside the front door, holding each other, not daring to move. All that was between us was in that embra ce . The morning we did not make it to the ocean is there. It is in theway she stood, very stilJ, yet occasionally giving in to the strength of a kisssuch as was not really allowed in that house . It is there in the fact that I
would not move her with anything more sudden than an invitation to my
bed in the garage , a moc!< invitation , knowing her bed was the place we should
be , but that in her house I could not ask her there. It is in the orange juice
we drank , and in the lying on her bed where the gentleness of being touchedmattered to her and the passion of finally feeling wanted moved me. It isin our not having taken off our clothes , in my leaving and our sleeping eventhat night in separate beds. It is there too in the fact that she was asleep
when I, restless , came in from the garage to go to the toilet and thOUght tocome to sleep with her , but instead sat on the chair beside her bed for awhile and looked at her and then decided a lonely fantasy was more myown . It was there the next morning which almost did not know the night
before , and the next night when I would have stayed had she not wanted asense that I did not care, that nothing she might have done would commit
her further. So she went to a bar and I left for a friend's and when I cameback and played my record and it was too loud , she heard its message as intended for her, "Sweet darling woman," it said, and I was horrified and madefoolish because that was not my intent.
I t was nearly a month in the end that I stayed with Jacqueline, using herhouse , sleeping in her garage with its rugs and new window and doors thatwould not shut. The first week I was by myself, but for the rest we were
there together , seeing each other , as Jacqueline would have it, "in and around"
whatever else we did . During those weeks , I saw Jacqueline nowhere else butin the house or immediately outside it , except for one night when we went
to a grocery . We would talk to each other as we came and went , often only
briefly , sharing an event or two from each of our days , and the talk was surprisingly lacking in comfort , which confused me . Yet I learned not to ask
for comfort from Jacqueline , to go elsewhere when I wanted the phrases I
often , without taking , simply like to know are there. Jacqueline said she
wanted to be faithful to her new lover and she did not want to spoil what
there was between us , words which never convinced me and tended to discourage me , but which did, I think, reflect a desire stronger than I knew.
Jacqueline wanted a quiet passion, a kind of delicacy she associated withwomen , and with part of herself, and with me. We are all to some extent
36fantasy creatures of each other's desires, but sometimes our fantasies are
more total and sometimes their nature is not clear, until afterwards , looking
back, one sees them in all the movings about , the checking out a new dressin the mirror and gently feeling its fabric , the kisses that are brief and lookedat for a longer time than they take , as if the decision at best is a decision
to linger.
So I stayed, longer than I sometimes thought I should , after one nightof going elsewhere to sleep when Jacqueline's friend was expected , before I
got used to the fact that we were not the only ones. I stayed in the mornings and wrote at the kitchen table, and in the late afternoons standing beside the sink, hearing about Jacqueline 's playing soccer, and the job she hoped
to get , and the bar she liked, and her new friends and discovering herself,
and often late into the night after she had gone to bed , I stayed for the feeling of being alone in that protected space. I sat in front of the fire one night
and talked too long about my disappointment and heard but did not hear
how it was not hers. I stayed to pet the cat and crack two coconuts andwatch Sara, who seemed very small, and Jacqueline , quite tall , sit in Jacqueline's white chair and argue with each other and then make up. I stayed fora few minutes that became a half hour to talk of the trip to the beach I had
taken alone because earlier in the morning when I woke Jacqueline up she
said she preferred to throw pots . But then as she was throwing pots, shethought she would like to be at the ocean, and I, on my way , had been too
angry and too proud to come back and ask again.
The morning I finally left was a sunny morning and I was nervous about
packing and Jacqueline spent a while in the bathroom , staying out of myway, but she talked to me more than usual and joked about my being nervous and the little front room was thick with the sense of us , so in the end
when it was time for me to go, our embrace seemed almost beside the point.
No bodily holding could be as full as the way that house had held us together, no touching more intimate than the sense that sometimes existed acrossthat room, as on nights when Jacqueline , curled up in her chair , tried toread and I, sitting across , tried to think, and the phone rang and my voice
was mistaken for hers, and one then the other of us went for a walk, andI played a few records, and we made our separate drinks . But it is to be remembered that this is only how I felt, and a guest can be so surrounded byanother's presence that it is a kind of drug .
Perhaps the last embrace ·and the two very light kisses we gave and lookedat and gave again felt differently to Jacqueline . It is often easier to leavethan to be left. It was she who said she would miss me , and I believed shewould, for I had wandered about in her life with a seriousness that is lasting,and I was leaving her a vacuum cleaner and , for a while , a car and when you
use another person's things , you remember , and you think of what was andit seems right and like it had to be and the fit of that is easy to miss, as is
the feel of the air on a cool, damp night and the sound of an imagined luteand the fact that some of it did not fit at all and all of it is important.

37

WASHING CLOTHES

Through the halfopoo doorthe pale-blue clothand the gray-blue coillike snakes, mid air .
Your arms charm theminto a circlea blue/blue circle sends waterlike sparks into the evening;sun ignites
each drop.
Of different shades
we lay twistedwater like sparks
shaken from our shadows.
You there ,I here ,tonight we stretch seeing
but not speaking;our outlines clear as this cresent
in a clear sky.
Nothing is twisting us .

-Lee Schwartz

38

Cathy D. Miller

STORY
There were two women. They were disappointed in something. They
were not disappointed in each other. There were two women. One was fat
and the other, thin. Well, one was not too fat really and the other was not
too thin. Actually, they were growing more like each other every day. One
thought she would like to be thin like the other. The other thought she
would like to be fatter like the one. One was growing more like the otherone every day. The other one was growing more like one every day. They
knew this. They were perceptive women. They knew that some drry they
were going to meet in the middle.
And because they were fat and thin and meeting in the middle, they
were good friends and had many disappointments together. They did nothave them with each other. They thought each other was the best one they
had. The disappointments they had were always with others. They could telleach other about their disappointments in others. They could and they did.
The disappointments for both of them were many. The disappointments
were these:
One woman had a lover and then another lover and then another. One
lover after another. Just like that. All the lovers disappointed her. She sensed
that they disappointed her because she disappointed them in some way she
did not understand. Because she was a perceptive woman, she did not liketo think about this because it meant that she was not perceptive. This disappointed her and she did not like being disappointed.
The other woman had only one lover. Her lover was a long-term loverand disappointed her for a long time. And for that she was disappointed.
Her lover was possessive. She did not like being possessed. This disappointed; her. She was disappointed not because she did not like being possessed but
i because someone had tried to possess her and she tried to make it go away.
It didn't. She did.
It was a nice blue room where they told each other how they were disappointed in the others. They explained the others to each other and wereno longer disappointed. They had a nice room where they met there. It belonged to one of them but the other one had things there too. It was a blueroom, a room just for them with lace curtains and satin trim. A very niceroom. They liked it there. They liked their bodies there. (They began toforget about their disappointments.) They liked their hair there. (They
forgot their disappointments.) They liked their bodies and hair there. Here.
And there. (By this time, neither one of them could remember anything .
about disappointments.) They thought they could there. They thought they
could. And, they did.

I

39

Martha Yates

In this essay, I am concerned with "that place where nothing is" ...
with the thought which has no object, rather than the idea or word; theobjectless state, that consciousness in which no object is intended, rather
than a consciousness of something.
I am interested in that which is, not to be imagined or thought. I admit
this is strange. The world is filled with that which can be thought. And yet
I am concerned with un-imaging the world-not with that which can befound in imagination or that which is accessible to reason or fantasy.
A question has faced me, very early, from the time when my senses andmind connected and began to focus together, when I began to feel thoughts
and thoughts appeared ... how shall I live in this world? How can I bearit , which means to me how do I understand it and understand myself in it.
Understanding ... to under-stand something? No. Understanding is a withstanding. A standing with. In this way of "understanding," knowledge is
not a grasping or possessing. It is not to find an answer and never to thinkof the question again. It is to come upon, discover openings, new sights andnew senses .
Feminism, lesbianism must be all of this: always searching, always questioning the vantage point and taking care that it opens onto newness, notonto an old understanding disguised . It is difficult, and I wonder if my eyes
are ever more than partially open.
And yet ironically at their widest and most open, my eyes see nothing.
So then , am I blind? The blind see nothing with their eyes; they see with
their mind-sense and other senses. Often it is the wise man who is blind.
Women don't need to lose their sight in order to be wise.
How is it, then, that nothing can be seen? Why should this concern me,
except as possible madness? Each of us knows from her own special experience how this culture, brought to us by the patriarchs, only favors certain
existences with the status of reality. That which must be voiced in the grammar of denial, opposition, contradiction, or negation, has no reality of its
own separate from that of which it is a reflection (as a negation) or inverse
image.
40

Darkness, for instance, is understood as being without light ; in this culture there is no such thing as seeing in the dark without light. The word
no, a deep and passionate demand , is heard in this culture as a negation ofsomething (the culture itself). Grammatically , at least , we can say that theculture is still in possession of that which is its negative.
These and how many more forms of negation are applied to women andseen as having no real existence of their own , for their existence depends
upon the positive of which they are the negative. No matter what is said
about negative and positive supporting each other, the negative does nothave the same high status of reality as does the positive. I suspect that thoseways of life, of existence and possible existence , ways of thought and waysof with-standing, those ideas, fantasies, and imaginings which did not accord with the principal streams of this culture found their way into thelanguage in the grammatically negative form.
I would like to explode the ideaword WoMan. In this culture we arethought of as Womb-Men. Just as there is being and nonbeing, there is man
and not-man . . . womb-man . Womb refers to what this culture understands
as empty space, and to be empty is to lack. Womb, it is believed , refers tothat which is nothing, has nothing ; its only fullness is when it is full withsomething other than itself-for instance, as a place for sons to dwell. Thisis one negation present in the word WoMan . There is another. We are notmen and that is how they call us. Again we are known as a reflection in thenegative form; negation , twice present in the word wo-man.
I would like to expose this . I would like to explode the glass I was given
to wear over my eyes (which has felt like a cage). There is such a thing as
seeing in the dark when there is no light. There is a no which is pure affirmation
seeing in the dark when there is no light. There is a no which is pure affirmation , and space which is a fullness , not a lack. There is a darkness of themoon, always there , even during those times when men under-stand it only
as a reflector which lights the sky. The moon is its darkness, not the lightthat it reflects.
I would like to shatter even the value that is given to the negative; tushow that which is seen in the mode of not as the affumation in its own
self that it is; to free these affirmations which are now imprisoned in thenegative grammar of this language and culture . To shatter the word that. surrounds me, wo-man itself, and open myself anew to that with which I
can with-stand myself: my darkness, my left and sinister handedness, myspeaking about nothing , so I can begin to speak about it asthat itis .
I am concerned with
. I am interested in consciousness in which
no object is intended, yet which is not a passive consciousness. I am interested in that which is , not to be imagined. I am concerned bywhichbrings everything into question and places the question and the questioner
herself under suspicion ... as if the question is in itself unsightly. Sometimes
I look into a woman's face and connect with, which is ... not to
be touched.
41

It is not the unnameable ; there are unknowns which are not yet named.
It is not the unknowable which has no name. It is not that which cannot
be found (we can play tricks with our minds and imagine or fantasize thatwhich can't be found), nor is it , really, the unthinkable , nor the un-imageable . If all of this is so , how does it happen that I can ask about?
It seems I am speaking in quick signals, but perhaps this is all I can do foris, just as that.
I am not speaking of the gap between things- that space-between which
can be defined by the objects which surround it-nor of nothingness, thatstrange· reification present in twentieth-century psychology and philosophy.
I am not speaking of the "instant" of which Kierkegaard speaks, nor ofabsence as Sartre speaks of it, l nor of nonbeing which finds its support in
the idea that we are , nor of god given a negative form, nor of death or lack .
I am speaking of
which is separate from the process of constitution . God can be constituted (we know very well about him) ; god can beintended. I am unable to constitute or even intend
, yet
is,
present to me. If not imagination, does intuition playa part in this? Perhaps,
but if so,
also empties intuition of intentionality.
Existence seems to deny
. To ask any question aboutisto contradict the very asking . Yet in some way
is present. If I cansay that consciousness is basic to my be-ing, and all modes of knowing(imagining, seeing, sensing, naming , intuiting, fantasiZing , and others) are amaking present the world to myself, then how is it thatis, present
to me? Heidegger asks in An Introduction to Metaphysics, "Why are there
essents rather than nothing? " My question is, rather, how does
arise for me at all?
What I wish to explore should not be confused with death-neither physical nor psychological death-death which presents to me the inEmate possibility of my own nonexistence. Death is like nonbeing present to being.
Like the gap between things. I can see it seasonally ; I can see it daily. I canalmost imagine it as an end to life . Death is, because I am; existence posits
death. My point is that existence seems to refuteat every moment.
I am speaking of the sense or consciousness of myself existing at thesame moment thatis present to me . The harrowing sense of you
and me here but bound up with, which is posited in spite of itself
and in spite of existence and in turn places everything that is, and theconsciousness I have known itself, under suspicion . To be is to stand with, or to stand across from or to with-stand; be-ing is to be in theface ofI have not been brought to this by meaninglessness; meaninglessness follows at the heels of
because in this western philosophical and maletradition, there is no consciousness without the possessive, without something- an object, an other-to be conscious of, and without this consciousness, men say, there is no meaning. This assumption is what I wish to
expose.

42

The Desire to be God and Object-making
The desire to be god. What I call man's insatiable longing to view all thatis (and even himself) from the position of an "original creator." To understand and know in the mode of grasping , dominating , controlling, knowing
without question. The desire to possess the image , to encircle it by putting
his mind around the object to be known in the same way that he sends his
spacecraft around the moon . The wish to be his own creator, to be his own
foundation. In Freud's words, the wish to be his own parent. The wish to
be outside with a view on totality while staying in. To live with the paradox
by gaining control over it. To wish completeness and perfection in the modeof knowing as "God would know ."The first necessity in this desire to be god-this desire to control be-ing,
to possess and dominate-is to make (or imagine) that which he needs topossess into an object for possession . He then needs to produce those toolsselect and develop the kind of consciousness-which can encircle and dominate (or fill) the object ; and, finally, he must do away with that which cannot be possessed.
Even be-ing has been given objective status and measured. Although the"idea" "infinity" cannot be said to be within the possibility of measurement , it is believed forms of measurement can articulate it. It cannot be
enclosed by the finite, but "infinity" can become accessible by being seen
in terms of finite parts . Eternity is defined as an endless succession of moments or as time-without-end. Ontology is given an objective description
which becomes its definition and measurement. Death is understood as
being-without-life, and nothingness is known as an infinite number of negations. By understanding infinity , eternity, nothingness, be-ing, in terms ofan endless succession of finite objects, he thinks he can have control overbe-ing. He thinks by putting his mind (or arms) around one object in thisinfinite succession of objects, he can come to grasp his situation.
For Sartre, "Nothingness can appear nowhere except at the heart of being." He declares that the fundamental passion of man , especially the philosophical man, is to "fill holes" and to fill them with himself. Nothingness,for Sartre, is that hole at the core of being which is to be filled , and it is
this filling of the hole which produces the movement of freedom, itself
founded upon man's power to negate. This movement of freedom which he.calls the "infinite pursuit" feeds off the passion "to fill the hole at the coreof being." "The hole," he says, "is originally presented as a nothingness 'to
be filled' with my own flesh." He continues:
The obscenity of the feminine sex is that of everything which 'gapes open.' It
is an appeal to being as all holes are. In herself woman appeals to a strange
flesh which is to transform her into a fullness of being by penetration and dissolution. Conversely woman s~nses her condition as an appeal precisely because
she is 'in the form of a hole'.

The hole which he fills with himself is WoMan. In this passage Sartre has
exposed the third necessity in this desire to be god: he must do away withthat which cannot be possessed. This project has to do with us. Man desires
the hole in a woman, but he cannot possess space so he fills it with himself.
43

For Sartre woman is that hole at the core of being, that nothingness
which is possessed (must be possessed if man is to transcend himself) by
filling it , by negating it. The hole of which Sartre speaks is seen as something to be filled for only when it is negated (filled) does it have objective
status and man can only connect with that which is object. For man there
can be no relation without something to relate to.
We can encounterin ourselves and each other without fillingwith objects to fear, dogmas to believe in, rituals to perform, objects to love . This need to fillwhich is at the basis of patriarchal
desire is not the nature of a woman's desire . In some way we are in intimate
relation towhich is, not to be imaged , and which we can encounterjust as that.
This desire which I symbolize by saying the desire to be god is now atthe basis of the technology which surrounds us : the infinite extension offinite tools with which man hopes to encircle be-ing (so it becomes for him
Infinite Being) ... the rod in physics which measures space , the spacecraft
which will infinitely repeat traveling through finite distance, man who believes he has a handle on be-ing by thinking of time in terms of fmite periods
extended infinitely , man who thinks of himself as a tool to be extended
infinitely .
But there must be someone to carryon this infmite count. And I imagine
that "God himself" is sitting on a rock somewhere counting to infinity. If
not , the succession of sons will carryon this count. Infinity is measured by
the infinite number of human lives , and perhaps this is one function of warto hasten the count.
In order for man to fulfill the desire to be god , that which cannot bemeasured or broken into finite parts must be lost. This is what I am concerned with,which is not to be found but can be lost . .. that which
is not accessible to measurement without being lost. The fact that man believes he can measure himself and measure everything against the backgroundof his own making is only possible with the loss of. The more he"knows" himself in this way , the more he imprisons himself.
An image. Man draws not a circle but a square around himself, and in
relation to that square he measures himself. He forgets that it was a square
he drew , and he then begins to use these derived dimensions-a square isaccessible to measurement-to know what it is to be . Man is in the imageof god or god is in the image of man but it is a square god, a god also imprisoned and without freedom.
If man does not have the tools for such measurement, he will develop
the tools or he himself will become the tool. Technology is the omnipotent
and un-mortal extension of man's body: the car, his weapons (man arms
himself), the penile nuclear warhead, never live and cannot die. He seeks toextend that which is not mortal-his tools, his arms, his art-in his effort tobe immortal . They are immortal in the mode of being un-mortal. He is abody without, and this he desires; for the body which is un-mortal
can be extended and refmed while
which cannot be found (andtherefore re-fined) must be lost. He replaces fleshy parts which die with indestructible metallic parts which never live. He will be immortal. That iscorrect. He will not be mortal. He will not live. This "immortality" extends
44only to that which he is capable of creating . . . history , time , forms of measurement, mechanical extensions of his body .. .
So the desire to be god has led to the desire to replace life which dieswith that which does not live. 3 His situation , his condition, existence, hasbeen reassessed in the light of that which he is capable of: immortal lifelessness. This god that man becomes is filled with an immortality which islifeless. God is , dead. And this man imitates for this he is capable of.
Tragedy and absurdity are both representative, in different ways, of patriarchal madnesses coming from the desire to be god . Both are representative of a deep and integral anxiety countered by the need for omnipotence.
Omnipotence is pursuable only when it is possible to be blind. Oedipus
thought himself omnipotent as long as he could be blind to his "destiny"
and when he fmally saw this, he ripped out his eyes so that he would not
be blind again. In the world of the absurd, there is too much light. Thereis not enough darkness in which to be blind. And yet, ironically, this ligh t
which fills everything makes the world impossible to see, leaving the absurd
man sightless .
In tragedy, the desire to be god is renounced and then replaced by asubject-object "relationship" to god , to destiny , or to some eternal justice.
The desire to be god has not really been given up; it has been camouflagedby an inversion. The man who desired to be god becomes god's object andpurpose .
On the other hand , in the world of the absurd the desire to be god cannot be renounced : god is not, the object is lost, the world is no longer available for his consciousness. The image is gone and man is left without hissight. Male consciousness which had depended upon objects is empty. He
hasn't even the subject-object "relation" of tragedy. Absurdity saves manfrom the madness of tragedy (in which the object which he wished to possess possesses him) but delivers him into another madness, another strange
omniopotence, itself much more endangering of life, and that is relationless-ness.
Absurdity is not merely the incomprehensibility, the self-contradiction ,the paradox, the pure contingency of be-ing. Absurdity, for man, is to bein the state of relation-less-ness. The nothingness of the world of the absurdist reveals how the ability to relate has depended upon an object. How
male consciousness has had to be consciousness of something. It is revealed.how the "relation" is not a free relation at all. Perhaps this is why man ismore interested in death than in life and why , as he goes on studying life,
he part/iculates what is living until it is lifeless and thus available for his
consciousness.
In the world of the absurd, man has come full circle to the problem of
patriarchal consciousness, and yet he is unable to go further for his consciousness, his sense of being-here, cannot exist without an object. The absurdity man has found for himself is the state of relation-less-ness he has
always been in.
My be-ing is involved in a relating to. Even to voice that sentence
should be an impossibility. In some way women are in an intimate relation
towhich is unimaginable and which we can encounter just as that.
45

In some way
is present to me. I believe when I say this I am trying
to go beyond my means , those means which I have been given by patriarchal
culture . The "consciousness" of the patriarchs eventually takes itself as its
own object. Reason , for instance , is intentional. It takes for its object thatwhich is susceptible to the power of reason. That god which can be provedby reason to exist can also be proved by reason not to exist. At some point
then the power to reason, itself, becomes the object for study. Reason canfunction adequately within this closed circuit-foundation upon foundation with itself as its own object. In a sense, as Freud would say , man does become his own ideal and, like the uroboros , ends by biting his own tail. 4
What I am saying is: to go beyond our means is what produces a genuine
movement of consciousness.
In some way I am conscious, and essential to my being conscious is thisconnection with. How do I with- stand relation to? How
is such a relating possible when there isto understand? This is avery unreasonable and unsightly statement. Yet, always, within the natureof genuine consciousness is the relation to

Relation and Relationlessness
Relation is a kind of connection but not a connection in the mode ofpossession or identification , of power, domination , or control , or a connection which is a subject-object making. If consciousness is always of something, if consciousness is to know by grasping an object, then consciousness
is not a relation and I cannot be both conscious and in relation-to be-ing,
to another woman . Relation is a connection which leaves that which isconnected free.
besides relation. Man may try to
There are ways of dealing withlose himself and thus rid himself of the disjunction caused by existing in the. Man can refuse this radical possibility ofand beface ofcome god. He then becomes his own ideal, his own creator. Or man may
fillwith an object of fear or belief or an object of desire (which
this culture calls love) . Later he will negate (transcend) the object in orderto have control over it. This may be what lies behind the male nihilistic
philosophies of this age.
Anxiety can be a relation to. It has no object and that is why
we are anxious . Anxiety comes when we cannot make an object of thatwhich is its source.
is at the source of anxiety. Contrary to a painful part of the body or psyche, the individual cannot even prepare to sacrifice the source of anxiety 5 foris, not to be touched . Unlike anxiety ,fear may have an object , and that object can be overcome , that is, conquered,a word of domination .
Paul Tillich in an article called " Anxiety-Redu cing Agents in Our Culture"
wrote :

46

All anxie ty springs fr om lack o f power. The word ban s chaos, the threa t of nonbeing, insid e and outsid e of onese lf. The powers of chaos ... are expressions o f
the basic anxk ty whi ch is the des tiny of man . . . . This so urce o f anxi e ty canno t
be rem oved becau se it is we o urse lves, our very being. But the cre a tive wo rd cankeep it in limit s and make life p o~sib l e . He \\'ho has the word has po\\'e r overcha os and therefo re over anxiety.

'With his "creative word ," man fills the source of his anxiety , changing
it , in essence , into an object. The ne cessity for an object for his consciousness is integral and original to his very being. I believe , as Solanas wrote in
The S.C.U.M. Manifesto , man is derivative and , as Davis stated in The FirstSex and Sherfey alluded to in The Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality
maleness is a mutation . The divisiveness present in his consciousness- subj ectobject " relationsrups ," the philosophical problem of the one and the other,and the other well-known dualisms- exists because, in some way , man isderivative . He was the original " other." His consciousness canno t do withoutthat from which he was derived. He cannot do away with his source wi thout destroying rumself, but he can mirror it and make himself the source
and make the source the "other." Nevertheless , at every moment , that " other"will threaten man with nonbeing.
"But the creative word can keep it in limits and make life possible." As
Sartre wrote , man 's passion is to fill holes . That which man cann ot encircle
because it has no boundaries , he fills , full-fills , and re-fills with himsel f. Try
going back to the Tillich quotation and reading semen for word .7
It is impossible for man to relate to an objectless state without his own
disintegration. He cannot be conscious without some thing to be consciousof; he cannot be transcendent without something to transcend ; he cannot"love" without an object. He has developed an object-dependent consciousness which functions by domination/submission and fixation / transcendence
or , as in some Eastern philosoprucal traditions, a transcendence without consciousness. Men are derivative and cannot be without this object state inwhich they are either possessed , possessive , or unconscious . This in tum in fects all their action and thought. In male "consciousness" there is no relation present. In fact , because of this , it is not a consciousness at all.
Consciousness is a knowing which is a relating, and in every relation weare in contact with, just as that. The source of meaninglessness formen is not lack of purpose or boredom ; it is not contingency or the nullity
at the basis of being (as Heidegger would say) nor the vague sense of theincomprehensibility of existence. Meaninglessness is relationlessness . It is in
the possibility of relation , as I speak of it, that meaning is found .
But how is relation topossible? Can I even tolerate this question?
Even the language makes the question unacceptable . How canbe. encountered without falling into the desire to be god , the desire to possess
or object-make , or without falling into madness and meaninglessness? If we
can face, we may be able to sense ways of knowing which are a relating because they themselves are relations toor relation tois present in them .
Just as the negative grammar may be a clue to ways of be-ing from which
we have been separated , we may be directed toward ways of seeing, understanding, acting , sensing, wruch are not object-making, controlling ways ofknowing by that which is called irrational : anxiety , rage , sensuality, love ...
Love , for instance . A woman does not need to possess (encircle , dominate ,enslave, fill) anyone (anything) to know her own power of consciousness ; nor
do we need to try to make an object (an "other") of a woman ill order tolove .
47

In love , I am brought to that place where
is. Love between womenis a desire to be with rather than a desire for (which would fix rather thanfree). In this love, that which is felt passionately is not to be possessed. We
can encounter,just as that. Woman's love can with-stand the pressure of
To exist while encountering. To exist without a mirror to reflect
back an image. Narcissus felt his own presence only when he saw that hecould have an image.
Women need no image. We can see through this mirror. We can love without the desire for an object-image to image ourselves back to us. We do notneed to see ourselves reflected in a lover's eye. We can exist, we can know
in the encounter withNotes
1. Kierkegaard in The Concept of Dread speaks of the "instant" as "that strange being ... which lies between movement and repose . . .. Pure being is the most abstract
expression fo r eternity , and in turn , like 'nothing' . . .. " The Concept of Dread (Princeton :Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 75.
2. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square
Press, 1971) , pp . 781-82. I do not know if this passage is familiar to lesbian feminists,
but I offer it here for it should not be missed. Recently, Peggy Holland has written an
excellent article which exposes and details Sartre's phallic philosophy in much greater
depth than I do here. (Peggy Holland, "lean-Paul Sartre as a NO to Women," in Sinister
Wisdom 6, Summer, 1978.)3. I wrote this paper (the present essay is a shortened form) in the fall of 1973 andspring of 1974. Several months later I saw an article called "Sorry, We're Here for Eternity" in the New York Times (September 24, 1974) written by F.M. Esfandiary, whoteaches philosophy at the New School. He writes: "we will refine the existing ability toreplace more and more of our vulnerable parts. We will continue to de-animalize ourbodies, creating new durable attractive physiologies .... We who in this late 20th century
send spacecraft to instellar space .. . can now also marshall our genios to achieve the mosttranscendent and liberating freedom of all: physical immortality."
4. Monique Wittig in Les Cuerilleres wrote: "Women say that men put all their pridein their tail. They mock them , they say that the men would like a long tail but that they
wou ld run away whining as soon as they stepped on it." (New York: Avon Books, 1973),
p . 106.).
5. There is an interesting book by David Bakan called Disease, Pain and Sacrifice(Boston: Beacon Press, 1971). In it, Bakan says that the effort by a man (sic) to bringpain upon himself is an effort to make an object of himself or part of himself in preparation for sacrificing it. This can afford "the ego the sense of control over the source ofannihilation. "6 . Paul Tillich, "Anxiety-Reducing Agencies in Our Culture" in Anxiety, ed. Hoch andZubin (New York: Crune and Stratton, 1950), p. 17. He is wrong that anxiety can only
be reduced. Anxiety can be faced as itself a relation to48

7. In the Tantric systems of Tibet and India this exchange is not so hidden. In the
Buddhist Tantra the source of the seed, the Bindu or ru pa-skand a, is located in the forehead . Alex Wayman, a scholar in Buddhist Tantra, speaks of:... the secret delight by the seed, i.e. the delight engendered from the dripping of
the bodhicitta [the seed] from the HAM syllable at the crown of the head.
(In Alex Wayman , The Buddhist Tantras [New York: Samuel Weiser, 19 7 3], p. 40.)
In the Hevajra Tantra, one of the important texts of the Buddhist Tan tras, Lord Hevaj ra(Lord Thunderbolt) says:
Taking this girl, who has wide-o pen eyes and is of age, and end owed with yo uthand beauty, he should consecrate her with his seed of enlightenment.
(The Hevajra Tantra, trans. D. L. Snellgrove, Part 1 [Lond on: Oxford University
Press, 1959], II , ii, pp. 17-18.)
Lord Hevajra says of himself:
I am the goal. I am the trainer. I am the world and worldly things. My nature isthat of Innate Joy and I come at the end of the Joy that is Perfect and a t the beginning of the Joy of Cessation. So be assured , my son , it is like a lamp in darkness.
(II, ii, pp . 3940.)
Recently in Boston women organized "Women take back the night." Along the way , there
were small groups of men, each man with his hand s around a th in cand le, about seveninches high, lit, which he held slightly below his waist. It see ms they think they mu st stillbring us their light (so that we can see in the dark), and women are st ill letting them in somany different ways: semen, the seed of enlightenmen t, their wo rd . ..

Recently in Boston, women organized "Women take backthe night." Along the way, there were small groups of men,each man with his hands around a thin candle, about seveninches high, lit, which he held slightly below his waist. It
seems they think they must still bring us their light (so that
we can see in the dark), and women are still letting them inso many different ways: semen, the seed of enlightenment,
their word ...

-Martha Yates49

If there were a point to begin
I would tell it in the slow nodding of my headin the sunand I would sit like this, eager and straightwith my hands now on my knees , now swinging throughair to dance the shapes I wish you would makefor me the ones I thought
you were hoarding small and would not use forbreaking a quiet dignity
the same that carries you so proud in thewhite shape that I hold aloof
from the first far dark seeing of you
and still the dusky vision
despite the great rush and tumbling of yes andecho knew that
there is sharing so large as disbelief
here this first talking
and later in the slow weaving of days into days.
hidden from myself I
found back to you each time from the pathstrewn from your door homereluctant. crumbs and the smaller dreams
that crackle and grind under my feetas I turn and climb the stairthe doors that guard me from you solid
at my back.
leap and dream the we that could be in thesafest place hollowedfrom ageless circling and shifting
like the longest nightmare
and the tearing of blankets and damp hairlike that shallow depression you left in my chair
the nest of lost weightthe place of a head seeking warmth
where the lap is echoing still- Theresa Barry50

In touching you are river
fanning wide fingers towards the sea
gliding clear overpolished sand and stone blueeyes leave
faint tracings in the current and sliding night
defy rhythm
and dwell in the wellsprings
that knife cool through your waters there
close me deep in you.
seen closer than vision
the lightest finger swirls away
flesh in the quiet melt
and catch at the river's edge
in a slow lapping pulse.
- Theresa Barry51

Tee's grandmother and her friend Gerti (eQ 1910)

52

photograph by Tee Corinne

53

Audre Lorde

MY MOTHER'S MORTAR

When I was growing up in my mother's house , there were spices you
grated and spices you pounded , and whenever you pounded spice and garlic or other herbs, you used a mortar. Every West Indian woman worth
her salt had her own mortar . Now if you lost or broke your mortar , ofcourse, you could buy another one in the market over on Park Avenue,
under the bridge , but those were usually Puerto Rican mortars , and eventhough they were made out of wood and worked exactly the same way,somehow they were never really as good as West Indian mortars. Now
where the best mortars came from I was never really sure, but I knew it
must be in the vicinity of that amorphous and mystically perfect placecalled "home ." "Home" was the West Indies, Grenada or Barbados to be
exact, and whatever came from "home " was bound to be special.
My mother's mortar was a beautiful affair, quite at variance with mostof her other possessions, and certainly with her projected public view ofherself. It had stood , solid and elegant, on a shelf in the kitchen cabinet
for as long as I can remember, and I loved it dearly.
The mortar was of a foreign fragrant wood, too dark for cherry and too
red for walnut. To my child eyes, the outside was carved in an intricate
and most enticing manner. There were rounded plums and oval indeterminate fruit , some long and fluted like a banana, others ovular and endswollen like a ripe alligator pear . In between these were smaller roundedshapes like cherries , lying in batches against and around each other.
I loved to finger the hard roundness of the carved fruit, and the always
surprising termination of the shapes as the carvings stopped at the rim andthe bowl sloped abruptly downward , smoothly oval but suddenly businesslike . The heavy sturdiness of this useful wooden object always made me
feel secure and somehow full; as if it conjured up from all the many different flavors pounded into the inside wall visions of delicious feasts bothonce enjoyed and still to come.
The pestle was a slender tapering wand, fashioned from the same mysterious rose-deep wood , and fitted into the hand almost casually, familiarly.
The actual shape reminded me of a sUJ1lll1er crook-necked squash uncurledand slightly twisted. It could also have been an avocado, with the neck of
the alligator pear elongated and the whole made businesslike and-eff.icientfor pounding, without ever losing the apparent soft firmness and the character of the fruit which the wood suggested. It was slightly bigger at thegrinding end than most pestles, and the widened curved end fitted into the54bowl of the mortar easily. Long use and years of impact and grinding within the bowl's worn hollow had softened the very surface of the wooden
pestle until a thin layer of split fibers coated the rounded end like a layerof velvet. A layer of the same velvety mashed wood lined the bottom inside the sloping bowl.
My mother did not particularly like to pound spice , and she looked upon
the advent of powdered everything as a cook's boon . But there were somecertain dishes that called for a particular savory blending of garlic, raw onion
and pepper, and souse was one of them.
For our mother's souse , it didn't matter what kind of meat was used . You
could have hearts , or beefends, or even chicken backs and gizzards when wewere really poor . It was the pounded up saucy blend of herb and spicerubbed into the meat before it was left to stand so for a few hours before
cooking that made that dish so special and unforgettable . But my motherhad some very firm ideas about what she liked best to cook and about
which were her favorite dishes , and souse was definitely not one of either.
On the very infrequent occasions that my mother would allow one of us
three girls to choose a meal-as opposed to helping to prepare it , which wasa daily routine,-on those occasions my sisters would usually choose one ofthose proscribed dishes so dear to our hearts remembered from our relatives'tables , contraband, and so very rare in our house . They might ask fo r hotdogs, perhaps, smothered in ketchup sauce , or with crusty Boston-bakedbeans; or American chicken, breaded first and fried crispy the way thesouthern people did it ; or creamed something-or-other that one of my sisters
had tasted at school; what-have-you croquettes or anything fritters ; or once
even a daring outrageous request for slices of fresh watermelon , harked fromthe back of a rickety wooden pickup truck with the southern road dust stillon her slatted sides, from which a young bony black man with a turnedaround ballcap on his head would hang and half-yell , half-yodel-"Wahr-deeeeeee--mayyyyyyyy -lawnnnnnnnn."
There were many American dishes I longed for too , but on the one or
two occasions a year that I got to choose a meal , I would always ask forsouse. That way, I knew that I would get to use my mother's mortar, andthis in itself was more treat for me than any of the forbidden foods . Besides, if I really wanted hot dogs or anything croquettes badly enough, I
could steal some money from my father 's pocket and buy them in thes.c hoollunch.
"Mother , let's have souse ," I'd say, and never even stop to think about
it. The anticipated taste of the soft spicy meat had become inseparable inmy mind from the tactile pleasures of using my mother's mortar.
"But what makes you think anybody can fmd time to mash up all that
stuff?", my mother would cut her hawk-grey eyes at me from beneath theirheavy black brows. "Among you children never stop to think , you know ,"and she'd turn back to whatever it was she had been doing . If she had justcome from the office with my father, she might be checking the day 's receipts, or she might be washing the endless piles of dirty linen that always
seemed to issue from the rooming houses they managed .
55

"Oh, I'll pound the garlic, Mommy!" would be my :1~XI line in the script
written by some ancient and secret hand, and off I'd go to the cabinet toget down the heavy wooden mortar and pestle.
I would get a head of garlic out from the garlic bottle in the icebox, andbreaking off ten or twelve cloves from the head, I would carefully peel away
the tissue lavender skin, slicing each stripped peg in half lengthwise. Then I
would drop them piece by piece into the capacious waiting bowl of themortar. Taking a slice from a small onion, I would put the rest aside to be
used later on over the meat, and cutting the slice into quarters, I would
toss it into the mortar also. Next came the coarsely ground fresh black pepper , and then a lavish blanketing cover of salt over the whole. Last, if we
had any, a few leaves from the top of a head of celery would be thrown in.
My mother would sometimes add a slice of green pepper to be mashed inalso, but I did not like the textures of the pepper skin under the pestle, andpreferred to add it along with the sliced onion later on, leaving it all to sit
over the seasoned and resting meat.
After all the ingredients were in the bowl of the mortar, I would fetch
the pestle and placing it into the bowl, slowly rotate the shaft a few times,
working it gently down through all the ingredients to mix them. Only thenwould I lift the pestle, and with one hand firmly pressed around the carved
side of the mortar caressing the wooden fruit with my aromatic fingers, I
would thrust sharply downward, feeling the shifting salt and the hard littlepellets of garlic right up through the shaft of the wooden pestle. Up again ,down , around, and up, so the rhythm would begin. The thud push rub rotate and up, repeated over and over; the muted thump of the pestle on the
bed of grinding spice, as the salt and pepper absorbed the slowly yielded
juices of the garlic and celery leaves and became moist; the mingling fragrances rising from the bowl of the mortar; the feeling of the pestle held
between my fmgers and the rounded fruit of the mortar's outside against
my palm and curving fingers as I steadied it against my body; all these transported me into a world of scent and rhythm and movement and sound thatgrew more and more exciting as the ingredients liquefied.
Sometimes my mother would look over at me with that amused annoyance which passed for tenderness with her, and which was always such awelcome change for me from the furious armoyance which was so much
more usual.
''What you think you making there , garlic soup? Enough, go get the meatnow." And I would fetch the lamb hearts, for instance, from the icebox
and begin to prepare them. Cutting away the hardened veins at the top of
the smooth firm muscles, I would divide each oval heart into four wedgeshaped pieces, and taking a bit of the spicy mash from the mortar with myfmgertips, I would rub each piece with the savory mix. The pungent smellof garlic and onion and celery would envelop the kitchen.
The last day I ever pounded seasoning for souse was in the summer of
my fourteenth year. It had been a fairly unpleasant summer, for me. I had
just finished my first year in high school. Instead of being able to visit my
newly found friends, all of whom lived in other parts of the city, I had toaccompany my mother on a round of doctors with whom she would have56

long whispered conversations that I was not supposed to listen to. Only amatter of the utmost importance could have kept her away from the office
for so many momings in a row. But my mother was concerned because I
was fourteen and a half years old and had not yet menstruated. I had breasts
but no period, and she was afraid there was "something wrong" with me.
Yet, since she had never discussed this mysterious business of menstruation
with me, I was certainly not supposed to know what all this whispering wasabout, even though it concerned my own body.
Of course, I knew as much as I could have possibly found out in thosedays from the hard-to-get books on the Closed Shelf behind the librarian's
desk at the public library, where I had brought a forged note from home inorder to be allowed to read them, sitting under the watchful eye of thelibrarian at a special desk reserved for that purpose.
Although not terribly informative, they were fascinating books, and used
words like menses and ovulation and vagina.
But four years before, I had had to fmd out if I was going to become
pregnant , because a boy from school much bigger than me had invited me
up to the roof on my way home from the library and then threatened tobreak my glasses if I didn't let him stick his thing between my legs. And atthat time I knew only that being pregnant had something to do with sex,
and sex had something to do with that thin pencil-like thing and was ingeneral nasty and not to be talked about by nice people, and I was afraid
my mother might fmd out and what would she do to me then? I was notsupposed to be looking at the mailboxes in the hallway of that house anyway, even though Doris was a girl in my class at St. Marks who lived in thathouse and I was always so lonely in the summer, particularly that summer
when I was ten.
So after I got home I washed myself up and lied about why I was lategetting home from the library and got a whipping for being late. That musthave been a hard summer for my parents at the office too, because thatwas the summer that I got a whipping for something or other almost every
day between the ·fourth of July and Labor Day.
When I wasn't getting whippings, I hid out at the library on 135th Street
and forged notes from my mother to get books from the Closed Shelf andread about sex and having babies and waited to become pregnant. None of
the books were very clear to me about the relationship between having yourperiod and having a baby, but they were all very clear about the relationship between penises and getting pregnant. Or maybe the confusion was all
in my own mind, because I had always been a very fast but not a very careful reader.
.
So four years later, in my fourteenth year, I was a very scared little girl,still half-afraid that one of that endless stream of doctors would look up
into my body and discover my four-year-old shame and say to my mother,"Aha! So that's what's wrong! Your daughter is about to become pregnant!"
On the other hand, if I let mother know that I knew what was happening and what these medical safaris were all about, I would have to answer
her questions about how and wherefore I knew, since she hadn't told me ,divulging in the process the whole horrible and self-incriminating story offorbidden books and forged library notes and rooftops and stairwell con57
versations.

A year after the rooftop incident, we moved farther uptown and I wastransferred to a different school. The kids there seemed to know a lot
more about sex than at St. Marks, and in the eighth grade , I had stolenmoney and bought Adeline a pack of cigarettes and she had confirmed mybookish suspicions about how babies were made . My response to her graphic
descriptions had been to think to myself, -there obviously must be another way that Adeline doesn 't know about , because my parents havechildren and I know they never did anything like that. But the basic principles were all there , and sure enough they were the same as I had gatheredfrom The Young People's Family Book .
So in my fourteenth summer , on examining table after examining table ,I kept my legs open and my mouth shut , and when I saw blood on my pants
one hot July afternoon , I rinsed them out secretly in the bathroom and put
them back on wet because I didn't know how to break the news to mymother that both her worries and mine were fmally over. (All this time I
had at least understood that having your period was a sign you were notpregnant.)
What then happened felt like a piece of an old and elaborate dance between my mother and me. She discovers fmally , through a stain on the
toilet seat left there on purpose by me as a mute announcement, what has
taken place ; she scolds , "Why didn 't you tell me about all of this, now? It's
nothing to get upset over, now you are a woman, not a child anymore . Now
you go over to the drugstore and ask the man for. .. "I was just relieved the whole damn thing was over with. It's difficult totalk about double messages without having a twin tongue . But meanwhile ,all these nightmarish evocations and restrictions were being verbalized by mymother :"Now this means from now on you better watch your step and not be sofriendly with every Tom Dick and Harry ... " (which must have meant mystaying late after school to talk with my girl-friends, because I did not evenknow any boys); and,"Now remember, too , don 't leave your soiled napkins wrapped up in newspaper hanging around on the bathroom floor where your father has to seethem , not that it's anything shameful but all the same remember. .. "Along with all of these admonitions , there was something else corningfrom my mother that I almost could not defme. It was the lurking of that
amused/annoyed brow-furrowed half-smile that passed as an intimate moment
between my mother and me, and I really felt,- all her nagging words to thecontrary , or the more confusing,-that something very good and satisfactoryand pleasing to her had just happened , and that we were both pretending
otherwise for some very wise and secret reasons which I would come tounderstand later as a reward if I handled myself properly . And then at theend of it all , my mother thrust the box of Kotex in its plain wrapper which
I had fetched back from the drugstore with a sanitary belt at me , and said :"But look now what time it is already, I wonder what we're going to eat
for supper tonight? " She waited . At first I didn't understand , but I quickly
picked up the cue. I had seen the beefends in the icebox . that morning.
58

"Mommy, please let's have some souse-I'll pound the garlic." I dropped
the box onto a kitchen chair and started to wash my hands in anticipation.
"Well, go put your business away first. What did I tell you about leavingthat lying around?" She wiped her hands from the washtub where she had
been working and handed the plain wrapped box of Kotex back to me.
"I have to go out; I forgot to pick up tea at the store. Now make sure
you rub the meat good."
When I came back into the kitchen, my mother had left,. r moved toward
the kitchen cabinet to fetch down the mortar and pestle. My body felt newand special and unfamiliar and suspect all at the same time.
I could feel bands of tension sweeping across my body back and forthlike lunar winds across the moon's face. I felt the slight rubbing bulge ofthe cotton pad between my legs, and I smelled the warm delicate breadfruit smell rising up from the front of my print blouse that was my own
womansmell, erotic, shameful, but secretly utterly delicious.
(Years afterward when I was grown , whenever I thought about the way
I smelled that day, I would have a fantasy of my mother, her hands wiped
dry from the washing, and her apron untied and laid neatly away , looking
down upon me lying on the couch , and then slowly , thoroughJy, our making
love to each other.)
I took the mortar down, and smashed the cloves of garlic with the edgeof its underside , to loosen the thin papery skins in a hurry. I sliced themand flung them into the mortar's bowl along with some black pepper andcelery leaves. The white salt poured in, covering the garlic and black pepper
and pale chartreuse celery fronds like a snowfall. I tossed in the onion andsome bits of green pepper and reached for the pestle.
It slipped through my fingers and clattered to the floor , rolling around ina semicircle back and forth, until I bent to retrieve it. I grabbed the headof the wooden stick and straightened up, my ears ringing faintly. Withouteven wiping it, J plunged the pestle into the bowl , feeling the blanket ofsalt give way , and the broken cloves of garlic just beneath . The downward
thrust of the avocado-shaped wooden pestle slowed upon contact , rotated backback and forth slowly, and then gently altered its rhythm to include an
up and down beat. Back and forth, up and down, back, forth , round ,round, up and down ... There was a heavy fullness at the root of me thatwas exciting and dangerous.
As I continued to pound the spice, a vital connection seemed to establish itself between the muscles of my fingers curved tigh tly around thesmooth pestle in its insistent downward motion , and the molten core of
my body whose source emanated from a new ripe fullness just beneath thepit of my stomach . That invisible thread , taut and sensitive as a clitoris
exposed, stretched through my curled fingers up my rounded brown arm
into the moist reality of my armpits , whose warm sharp odor with astrange new overlay mixed with the ripe garlic smells from the mortar
and the general sweat-heavy aromas of high summer .
The thread ran over my ribs and along my spine , tingling and singing,
into a basin that was poised between my hips , now pressed against the
low kitchen counter before which I stood , pounding spice . And within59

that basin was a tiding ocean of blood beginning to be made real and available to me for strength an d information.
The jarring shocks of the velvet-lined pestle , striking the matted bed of
spi ce, tra veled up an invisib le pathway along that thre ad into the center ofme , and the harshness of the repeated impact became increasingly moreunbearabl e . The tidal basin suspended between my hips shuddered at each
repetition of those st rokes which now felt like assaults. Without my volition the downward thrust s of the pestle grew gentler and gentler until its
velvety surface seemed almost to caress the liquefying mash at the bottomof the mortar.
The whole rhythm of my movements softened and elongated until , dreamlike , I stood one hand tightly curved around the carved mortar , steadying
it against the middle of my body : while my other hand , around the pestle ,rubbed and pressed the moistening spice into readiness with a sweeping
circular movement.
I hummed tunelessly to myself as I worked in the warm kitchen , thinking
with relief about how my life had become now that I was a woman. The
catalogue of dire menstruation warnings from my mother passed out of myhead. My body felt strong and full and open , yet captivated by the gentle
motions of the pestle, and the rich smells filling the kitchen, and the fullnessof the young summer heat.
I heard my mother's key in the lock.
She swept into the kitchen briskly , like a ship under full sail. There weretiny beads of swea t over her upper lip , and vertical creases between her brows .
"You mean to tell me no meat is ready?" My mother dropped her parcelof tea onto the table, and looking over my shoulder, sucked her teeth loudly
in weary disgust. "What do you call yourself doing , now? You have all night
to stand up there playing with the food? I go all the way to the store andback already and still you can't mash up a few pieces of garlic to season somemeat? But you know how to do the thing better than this! Why you vex
me so? "She took the mortar and pestle out of my hands and started to grind
vigorously. And there were still bits of garlic left at the bottom of the bowl.
"Now you do , so!" She brought the pestle down inside the bowl of themortar with dispatch , crushing the last of the garlic. I heard the thump ofwood brought down heavily upon wood, and [ felt the impact throughout
my body, as if something had broken inside of me. Thump, thump , went
the pestle, purposefully, up and down in the old familiar way.
"It was getting mashed, Mother ," I dared to protest, turning away to theicebox. "I'll fetch the meat." [was surprised at my own brazenness in answering back.
But something in my voice interrupted my mother's efficient motions.
She ignored my implied contradiction, itself an act of rebellion strictly forbidden in our house . The thumping st®pped .
"What's wrong with you , now? Are you si.:k? You want to go to yourbed ?"

60

"No, I'm all right, Mother."But I felt her strong fingers on my upper ann , turning me around, herother hand under my chin as she peered into my face. Her voice softened.
"Is it your period making you so slow-down today?" She gave my china little shake, as I looked up into her hooded grey eyes, now becoming almost gentle . The kitchen felt suddenly oppressively hot and still , and I
felt myself beginning to shake all over .
Tears I did not understand started from my eyes: as I realized that myold enjoymeht of the bone -jarring way I had been taught to pound spicewould feel different to me from now on, and also that in my mother's
kitchen there was only one right way to do anything. Perhaps my life
had not become so simple, after all.
My mother stepped away from the counter and put her heavy arm aroundmy shoulders. I could smell the warm herness rising from between her arm
and her body, mixed with the smell of glycerine and rosewater, and the scentof her thick bun of hair.
"I'll finish up the food for dinner." She smiled at me, and there wasa tenderness in her voice and an absence of annoyance that was welcome ,although unfamiliar.
"You come inside now and lie down on the couch and I'll make youa hot cup of tea."
Her arm across my shoulders was warm and slightly damp. I rested myhead upon her shoulder, and realized with a shock of pleasure and surprisethat I was almost as tall as my mother, as she led me into the cool darkened
parlor.

Note: "My Mother's Mortar" is an excerpt from Prosepiece, a work in progress.

61

ACOUSTICS AT THE WOMEN'S COFFEEHOUSE

in sequestered silence

only by appreciating
the affmity of separate silences
stillnesses magnifying stillnesses
for centuries has this space everbeen achieved
how can these sounds of laughterof laughter, conversations
notes from a guitar
exclude only distractions
the essence has beenrealized and saveda habit of regard, exactly
a respectfully declining
to disturb, intrude, impose
upon anothernot the silence
but the keeping of
our silences
our sounds-Claudia Scott

62

Catherine & Friends

NOTES ON DEAFNESSMy Deafness: Deafness as Separatism
A few years ago I began to have trouble hearing: What? What was that?
What did you say? Repeat that last phrase .
At first I blamed the speaker. Speak up! Stop mumbling. Project! I wasa teacher then, and in my arrogance I knew it was the student's fault. I recalled the cynicism of older colleagues (usually male) who joked about deafness (like alcoholism) as an occupational hazard. Deafness was cultivatedalong with arrogance . They waxed together to mold an armor against theinanities mouthed by students.
I went to an ear doctor . He said it was wax build-up- a common maladyof middle-aged ears. With washes and probes he unstoppered them. It felt
good-a bit sexy. But driving home, I began to have some regrets: the cacophony of traffic hurt a lot. At a faculty meeting next day the voices of themen violated me , and I realized that for weeks my deafness had protected
me from academic battering. My own body had provided me with a baffle
against the assault of male opinion. I had been under a partial anaesthetic(since I was in an "Arts Department," anti-aesthetic is a more apt term)
which had created a temporary, quiet observation post from where I had
begun to see more clearly the machinations of the minds that produced thebattering sounds.
Oh, what a blessed state deafness had been! I resolved that henceforth I
would practice deafness in order to cultivate deep listening, listening words
back to their sources-and deep seeing, seeing the machinery that projected
the farcical mime of the male academics.
When I told Harriet about all this, she said that my deafness had meant
the beginning of my separatism.
Deafness to Me: Deafness as Pain
But I was concerned with deafness for another reason. When I announced
in SW 5 that I wanted to write about it, I had just re-read all the sinister
wisdom of that issue and I was wondering how many women would hear it:
Lesbians rightly develop deafness as self-defense: the exhortations of the patriarchy are deadly. To be deaf is to control ingress and hence access to one's self.
But deafness can be killing, too. It can, like speechlessness, be cultivated to preclude growth. We impose deafness on one ear to protect us fro m the threats andblandishments of the father, but-out of fear-we can also stop up the other ear
to muffle the new words of our sisters. If, as Julia Stanley says, every speech act
involves personal risk on the part of the speaker, then every act of honest listening involves personal risk, too-the risk of a changed consciousness which canmake the listener as naked and vulnerable as the speaker. She who hears, as well
as she who speaks, is a witch-a knower of changes.
.

63

At that time I was and had been deeply pained by my inability to talkto two women (closet Lesbians) whom I had loved and treasured for many
years. We lived long distances from each other-B. in Kentucky, E. in Florida,
I in North Carolina-and we had long ago replaced the letter with the telephone call, believing (wrongly, I think now) in the importance of immediacyinstant stimulus and response-over the time-consuming, time-lagging exchangeof correspondence . So we kept in touch through the ear-something not so
hard to do, until one of us-me-becomes a radical Lesbian feminist and announces in print her Lesbian separatism. Suddenly, gulfs and chasms exist,
and the telephone cables and acoustical instruments that serve them don't
serve us.
Although E.'s and B.'s questions were identical-WHY? HOW?-the styleof their response was different : E.'s a thick deep silence sighing on the line;
B.'s a slashing, contemptuous attack crackling static on the line. But the effect of their deafness on me was the same : the sound of my voice was baffled back to my ears as hollow rhetoric. Their protective deafness bent mywords into babbling. I ceased to speak. Their deafness had struck me dumb.

[boomerang- "an act of utterance that reacts to the damage of its originator ."]I was damaged . It was this pain that prompted me to announce that I
would write notes on deafness. But my intention was not to write about theexperience with B. and E.-no, of course not. My intention was to carve profundities on the page so precisely shaped and brightly polished that all thewomen who saw them-all the women who didn 't know me very well-would
fall in love with my gray-haired wisdom and I would dwell in the hearts ofmy sisters forever.
It didn't happen like that. In fact, nothing much happened at all. I sat
and I thought and I occasionally dribbled a note or two(Sample: how are hearing and deafness related to power? I don't think I
ever knew a man who ever listened to a woman. ... listening is something
done by slaves-the possessed and the powerless listen to the powerful forclues to survival. ... Dogs do a lot of listening. Cats, more aware of theirpower, listen only on occasions they deem essential to survival. So do children in the houses of their fathers. Deafness is a shield and a weapon of
the powerless: you can't carry out an order if you don't hear it. ... To bedeaf to your master can lead to passive resistance-to sabotage. * Perfect listening makes puppets and good slaves . . . )But when I read them over, the words seemed flat and unresonant. So after
awhile I quit.
In December while back in North Carolina for a brief visit , my friend
Joy talked about her failure with an article she was trying to write for Sinister Wisdom. Her honesty, her truth-telling about herself, opened me up andI told her that I was unable to write the notes on deafness because I was
ashamed of the experience with B. and E. that had prompted me to write
them, and I told her why I was ashamed. After listening tenderly and intensely, she told me that she had had a similar experience and that she too
had been ashamed of herself. "But you must write about your feelings of*l'm indebted to Sarah Hoagland for this insight.

64.

shame," she said. "It's important to write about why you can't write noteson deafness."
So , dear reader , the truth is that I was not cast in the right role. I preferred the more attractive role of writer-thinker of profundities about deafness; I deplored the role I feared I had actually played in the telephone
drama. In my worst moments (about ninety percent of my moments) , myself-analysis was:1) I had seen myself as a Lesbian feminist voice crying in the wilderness ;a true prophet without honor, self-righteously demanding to be heeded.
2) I had been insecure in what I believed. If my words were not indeed
hollow rhetoric, if they had sprung from my blood and bone marrow, I
would have been heard. E. and B. were after all reliable tuning forks, and I
was way off key .
3) If I were truly Amazonian, the deafness of E. and B. would not havedamaged me. And I did not want to be judged weak and dependent - foundwanting by tough and vital Lesbian feminist frien ds.
Result: speechlessness. Conclusion : dead-end .
Hearing and Transformation
While I was trying to write about deafness , there were women who werethinking and writing profoundly about hearing . Shortly after I wrote theannouncement in SW 5 but before it had appeared in print , I received fromNelle Morton- a wise crone in southern California- a copy of her paper "Beloved Image!" in which she had written this illuminating passage on hearing:

It was in a small group of women who had come together to tell ourown stories that I first received a totally new understanding of hearing andspeaking. I remember well how one woman started, hesitating and awkward,
trying to put the pieces of her life together. Finally she said: "I hurt . . . I
hurt all over. " She touched herself in various places as if feeling for the hurt
before she added, "but . .. I don't know where to begin to cry. " She talked
on ... and on. Her story took on fantastic coherence. When she reached apoint of most excruciating pain no one moved. No one interrupted. Finally,
she finished. After a silence, she looked from one woman to another. "Youheard me. You heard me all the way. " Her eyes narrowed. She looked directlyat each woman in turn and then said slowly: ''I have a strange feeling you
heard me before I started. You heard me to my own story. " I filed this experience away as something unique. But it happened again and again in othersuch small groups of women. It happened to me. Then , I knew I had been
experiencing something I had never experienced before. A complete reversalof the going logic in which someone speaks precisely so that more accurate
hearing may take place. This woman was saying, and I had experienced, adepth hearing that takes place before the speaking-a hearing that is far morethan acute listening. A hearing engaged in by the whole body that evokes
speech-a new speech - a new creation. The woman had been heard to her
own speech. 1
A few months later we received from Beacon Press the page proofs ofMary Daly's Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, and there65

again in the fantastically coherent final chapter of her book were quoted
Nelle Morton's insightful words on hearing. Using these words , these thoughts,
Mary spins the major reversal of the Spinsters' Journey:
In the beginning was not the word. In the beginning is the hearing. Spin-sters spin deeper into the listening deep. We can spin only what we hear,because we hear, and as well as we hear. We can weave and unweave, knot
and unknot, only because we hear, what we hear, and as well as we hear. 2
When I first read these amazing statements, I knew them to be true.
But I didn't really understand them-hear them deep in the labyrinth of myconsciousness. Instead, I responded with a sort of intellectual glee at thereversal that turned christian theology upside down . But I was de.af to theresonance of its truth - deaf to its relevance to my life and my broken connections with B. and E.
I had responded deeply , of course, to the truth of Nelle Morton's accountof hearing a woman into speech. I had been present at such occasions andexperienced the wonder - the miracle of a woman giving birth to herself mi'dwived by the loving hearing of the women surrounding her. I had known too
the exhilaration of a similar life-creating experience in a special rapport between myself and one other woman. Moreover , on some level of my being,
I felt exonerated by Nelle's "reversal of the going logic": I realized that nomatter how Amazonian my character or eloquent and lucid my speaking, B.
and E. or indeed a whole alphabet of women would not have heard me. I
was brought home to the truth of the old saw that "nobody hears what
they don't want to hear."But there was something else - some lost connection - that I kept gropingin the dark to find (Gropings: I think there is something other than - above, under, surrounding-speaking-hearing when two or more women talk together . .. What do wemean by "rapport" anyway. . .. [Merriam-Webster : Fr. rapporter. "to bringback, " relation marked by harmony, conformity, accord, affinity. .... "affinity ":relationship by marriage; distinguished from "consanguinity".. ... "consanguinity ": of the same blood or origin; descended from the same ancestor; a close
relation or connection] .. . When we feel rapport with some women, is itthat we sense that together we will un-cover, dis-cover clues to find our way
back to the "original ancestor "- to our original oneness- or forward to awholeness--------)At that point my "internal ear" opened up and the truth of "in the beginning was the hearing" began to spiral down into my consciousness. I wasunderstanding what Nelle and Mary meant by the transformational power ofhearing . I was also understanding what Mary Daly named "the earthquake
phenomenon ,"3 that harrowing experience that happens suddenly: just when
we think we are clearheaded and surefooted the ground opens up at ourfeet and we stop terrified that we will fall into the chasm. The deafness ofE. and B. had produced such an earthquake in me . By writing about it I
have discovered a new balance.
1. Paper presented at a workshop on feminist imaging at the American Academy ofReligion Conference, December 28, 1977. To be published by Queriniana Press in thethird volume on Liberation Theology, Perspectives on Feminist Theology, edited by Mary
E. Hunt and Rosino Gibellini .
2. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), p. 424. See S. L. Star's review of Gyn/Ecology on pp.
87-98 of this issue.
3. Ibid ., pp. 409-13.

RESPONSE

Terri Poppe

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE CONCEPTOF FULL COMMUNICATION
To communicate is one of the basic principles of my life, and of otherfeminists in my life. Meaningful, full communication is honest exchange ofthoughts and opinions, particularly when they directly affect the relationship of the persons communicating. This involves honest speech (as Michelle
Cliff wrote about speechlessness in Sinister Wisdom 5). It also involves listening: paying attention to the speaker-hearing the words, the inflections,
understanding the meanings of those words in context. And it means seeing-reading the nonverbals: how is she sitting? looking at you or not? seeming to be comfortable or not?
Through using all our senses, and checking on our own perceptions withthe persons(s) we're perceiving, and being as honest as pOSSible, we begin
growth toward full communication . It's work, a lot of work; and commitment to the process is necessary for any two or more women to have any
suc~ess at all .
Each of us has many levels of communication-from the more superficial
when communicating with someone peripheral in our lives (postal workers,
supermarket checkers, and so on) to the more intense (closest friends andlovers). The level is based on how well we know and trust the other person.
It's also based on a need to protect ourselves from hurt; this is often why
we have superfiCial communication with persons close to us.
We also need to protect ourselves from overextending-to be always completely honest and open is to set ourselves up to be taken advantage of,hurt, and used. The risks are huge even when the other person is someone
sharing that commitment, that risk. Most of us cannot, physically or emotionally, work on full communication with more than four or five others
at a time (at the most, and then probably not fulltime).
But this doesn't mean full communication isn't a valid goal. Maybe, as
more of us work on it, we'll develop ways of doing it that will help theprocess be less difficult. Or at least we'll get a sense of many of us working
at communicating and some satisfaction and minor successes .
To get to the concept of deafness. As Catherine Nicholson implied (Sinister Wisdom 5), we impose deafness on ourselves for protection. It is aweapon or a tool for self-preservation.
Being deaf to catcalls and whistles of men in the street is self-preservation.
Being deaf to our children whining and crying because our attention
leaves them for five minutes is self-preservation.
Closing ourselves off from non supportive words from co-workers, friends ,and others allows us to continue what we're doing. (But we may also be:tuning out constructive criticism and help.)67

Being deaf to lovers and friends may seem like self-protection , but it canalso be closing doors to growth in these relationships.
Others are deaf to our lesbianism , preferring not to recognize us andtherefore keeping us in places we may be trying to get out of. Or-theyhear that we love women (in the sexual sense) but are deaf to the politics
of lesbianism , to what else we try to say about lesbianism.
Deafness can also be hearing too much : taking in so many messages, often conflicting, that the passageway to the brain (to convert hearing tospeech/action) is blocked. We can become paralyzed and not even be able
to communicate that paralysis.
If others of us cannot/do not listen , we are unaware of the paralysis andunable to act on it. And so mis-communication continues .
Those who are trying to listen , to practice full communication, often
feel their efforts are one-sided and not working. The sense of defeat may
stunt their growth and create their own deafness to someone who is trying
to be honest with them.
Sometimes it doesn 't seem worth the trouble, pain, and work .
Occasionally Vfe are rewarded , even if only briefly , with a glimpse ofwhat we can be if we try .
How to be deaf to nonconstructive criticism and harrassment and how
to , at the same time , be open and ready to hear another are two of the mostdifficult things we can attempt in human relationships.
I believe in the concept of full communication . I want to practice it in
my whole life . I attempt it with my women friends and in my writing . I
often fail .
Is a failed attempt worse than no attempt?
Some of my friends believe in silence and in internalizing feelings andthoughts rather than expressing them . Sometimes I want to do that. They
appear to be less hurt, more functional, in the world , in their own lives
than I am.
When I try to be quiet, to be deaf, I usually fail.
Funneled hearing (that is, to be tuned in to only certain sounds and persons and tuned out to others-the catcalls, for example) is one form uf
deafness .
Over-hearing (listening to so many often contradictory things that we
become paralyzed) is another form of deafness.
Perhaps the small approach is best for our time and place: working toward
full communication in small groups, with only a few others (friends, lovers);
developing the skills involved (hearing and speaking honestly and taking therisks involved , accepting constructive criticism), achieving some sense of
success in the process within that structure ; and recognizing that full communication is not happening with everyone , or even with everyone we'dlike it to be. And we can move on from ,there , increasing the circle slowly,
strengthening ourselves, knowing the process can work if individuals arecommitted to the ideal of full communication .

68

Cris SouthRESPONSE

THE DEAFNESS SYNDROME

It's not always easy to hear what someone else is saying when conversation happens . Pleas for help and understanding often come in vague ,clouded disguises. And sometimes one may simply not like what she ishearing. But if listening is an art, as " they" say, the hearing is its final and most completed form because usually the two are not evenfaintly synonymo us. In many ways, most listen but few actually hear.
To hear the words of another woman takes a certain amount ofcourage on the part of the listener. I t means opening oneself up to another's experience , pain, joy , or anger. It means understanding , analyzing, evaluating, accepting. It takes time , effort, and involvement. But
most of all, it seems there has to be willingness .
"Deaf ears" is a commonplace syndrome that befalls most of us at
one time or another, whether we are doing it or having it done to us.
If it were an anatomical or a physiological reaction, perhaps most of us
could come to accept its existence. But it isn't and it intensifies thefrustration we feel when we first started talking or even felt the need totalk. Usually women don't just pour themselves out for the sake of
dumping on one another. They do it for the support that just the actof being heard alone can and does provide. Perhaps I am fortuna te to
be in the midst of a lesbian community whose women do listen and hearand respond to my words. They question and support and remember
what is said to them . They often check back into previous conversations to see how things are going. This gives a tremendous sense of relief and sharing in addition to helping ease the aloneness that often besets us in times of crisis.
I encounter a tyrannical form of deafness, however , when trying tocommunicate with many heterosexual women or with my family. It
often takes the shape of arbitrary , oppressive disapproval , sometimes
loudly expressed and demonstrated. They may , at first , give the appearance of truly listening but will almost immediately negate or refute everything I have said or have tried to say. The mildest form ofnegation I have experienced is having someone simply turn away when
I was expressing a feeling or an opinion. I much prefer to have theirverbal anger leveled at me. At least then r know they have heard me.
Hearing is a powerful thing. It is a conscious motion, an act of will.
The woman who hears and who understands what is being said to her
is then faced with having to deal with new knowledge or information .
Usually it can't be lightly tossed away without serious consideration andevaluation on the part of the re cipient . Herein lies the element ofcourage , I think. All of us have been faced with new knowledge , at
one time or another, that unsettled or frightened us because of its. overwhelming honesty and truthfulness.

69

Unlike many of my friends, I did not " come out" as a lesbian.
This was a process for me . I was a feminist but still I emerged fromeight years of marriage as a gay woman. I knew little about dyke
politics and awareness and I still attached bad connotations to theword " lesbian," seeing it as impossibly extremist and hopelessly irrational. Besides, the word greatly upset everyone around me. I
wasn't completely sure why but I knew I wanted to live in thisworld as easily as possible and being gay insured that to a great degree.
Still, I was unsettled and getting more angry. The peace I expected from the dissolvement of my marriage didn't materialize although I was happier in my freedom from him than I had ever been
during the years of being bound to him. But I refused, for a periodof time , to acknowledge that being gay was only a statement of pre ferred sexuality while lesbianism embraced that along with a wholewoman-centered, politically aware, self-caring lifestyle. And a great
deal of that first knowledge came from finally summoning the courage
to hear what lesbians were saying to me . Then, regardless of my fear
and uncertainty, the words settled into me and had to be dealt with in
one fashion or another . Emerging a lesbian is to me my greatest
triumph.
Change is threatening, frightening . And to hear a lesbian woman
talk and share her life is to face the ultimate in change. The fact thatmost lesbians are angry and are unashamed of that feeling is perhaps
the hardest of all to accept and to hear. An angry woman is one tobe reckoned with, one who won't sit still for the ax to fall on her.
And this threatens every existing part of society from role-playing
marriage to traditional family to conventional femininity to cultural
motherhood to woman herself.
I saw and heard the anger in women ; I saw their fear of the this powerful emotion as well. I was able to place accurate fingers on manyof the sources of my own anger, but I, too , was fearful of the some times violent surge of feeling - the face drawn , the fists clenched , thewanting to lash out and destroy. There were tamer levels of anger
also , but I had to acknowledge that the current of this particularfeeling glowed through every level of my being, whether I liked it
or not.
It has taken much time and effort on my part to start really
hearing the words of other women , to recognize their legitimacy
and relevancy. It has taken a lot of evaluation to remove my own
judgmental attitudes and to simply listen and hear what is being said
to me . I am not always successful certainly, particularly when I
don't like what is being said .
Change comes from anger and awareness. Many of us have heard
our own anger and the anger of other women , and we accept the presence and validity of this anger. But change, major change , the kindthat we as women need so desperately in this society, will come only
when enough women begin to hear one another . Conquer deafness
and we may very well have won our own much proposed revolution.
70.

SISTERafter Gabriela Mistral

There is a woman walks as I walk, carrying packages over her
hip as we would carry children. Her boots cut deep holes in thesnow, and I want to take her home .
In all of this town there is no water. Behind a curtain , there isa candle filling a bowl with wax . A field of women, each bent overher stoop, scraping deep furrows in the ice . My hands dig into hercoat. We walk, and our legs are strong for work . If my breasts are
hard and cold, then the winter has come inside me . I touch her scarf.
Because we kneel at my door, in spring the yards will sink with somuch wetness .

- Felice Newman

71PUBLISHING

Mint Danab & Athame Mountainclimber

AN INTERVIEW WITH RUTH AND JEAN MOUNTAINGROVE

Q: What urged you to create WOMAN SPIRIT?

JEAN: Well, I think it was one of those intuitions that you get when you
feel like your back is against the wall or something like that. The doors
had closed behind us and we knew that out of our own experiences something spiritual was happening to us and we thought it might be happening
to other womyn, too . But when we tried to talk to womyn about it, it
was very difficult. But womyn seemed to be able to share it out of theirjournals and letters and poems, and so we thought we would do that. But
it wasn't a thinking, it wasn't a logical decision . It was a leap of imagination, and like all leaps, it was a little wobbly at fust and a little scary.
Q: Could you talk about what kind of material you print?

RUTH: You don't have to be a craftswomon to write for the journal.
You don't have to write perfect sentences, or you don't even have to beable to spell. Because what we're looking for are new clues to our culture ,and many of the diamonds may not be very well cut yet.
JEAN: The beauty of the magazine has always been very important
to me because I want the magazine to be an experience of the culture that
we're moving toward. So we want material that will affirm womyn, encourage them to keep on struggling, encourage them to believe in themselves, encourage us to look always to our own experience. We 're notinterested in whether your material can be documented or footnoted . If
you have documentation and it 's useful to other women who are doing research, then include it. If it's just a hunch or a feeling that you have,that 's
just fme, because your experience is yours and its valuable . If we thinkthat other womyn can respond to it, then that's what is valuable for us .
Q: What kind of response have you gotten from subscribers andreaders, and how widely are you distributed?
73

JEAN: We get a lot of love letters which mean a great deal to us because we
do live in a small community. We don't have all of the immediate feedback we would have if we were living in a big city . As far as our distribution, from the beginning we wanted to be an international magazine
because I had felt that whatever is stirring womyn spiritually is an awakening for womyn all over the world. But initially, we didn't have much access to womyn in other countries, and only gradually have we begun toreach womyn in Australia;, New Zealand, South America , Canada, some in
England and France, and some in Germany and Holland. We have not beenvery good at promotion , so we've relied on subscribers telling their friends
or taking the magazine with them when traveling. And I think that's how
we've begun to spread across the world -through a womyn's network ofsharing with friends. WOMANSPIRIT as a project has been an invention
on the wing -as we go along, we just have to make up what to do next
and to me it's been confusing but very exciting. It's an example of how
we can be creators. We don't have a formula that we follow that will lead
us to a guaranteed place . We have to continually exercise our imaginations and our in telligence to make something new to meet a particular
circumstance. And so we don't know what the next year will be likefor WOMANSPIRIT; we just have to make it up as we go along.
Q: From what I understand, you have a collective of womyn that
produces each issue. Could you talk about how you choose the collective and the process that produces the magazine?

RUTH: Well, the collective chooses herself. Whoever wants to work on
an issue - here or in another city - shows up and starts reading manuscripts and hangs in and goes through the whole process with us - she's
part of the collective. One of the things we like is to have womyn join
us and discover that they have some creativity, too, and to have thatcreativity expressed in each issue of the magazine .. ..Doing each issue islike climbing a mountain and you have to keep yourself in very good
physical condition. You shouldn't stay up late, you shouldn't party when
all this is going on. You should eat properly and show up early; that's
important. ... What we mean by "collective" is a group of womyn gathered together to work and to talk about their feelings and to enjoyeach other if possible. We eat meals together, we have "feeling" meetings in which we pass the rattle, we make decisions all along about what
is going in to a particular issue.
Q: What about the big issue of money -learning to validate yourselves and getting some kind of support for the energy you put
out caretaking the magazine?
'

JEAN: Support comes in many forms. It comes in those loveletters I
mentioned and it comes from the visitors who come and say it 's really74beautiful and we love what you're doing. But it also has to come interms of not having to worry about how you're going to eat tomorrow
or how you're going to keep your physical trip together. I think thatthe whole of the capitalist patriarchal system is arrayed against our survival. I mean this for all womyn 's projects 'because we are inadequately
funded and we don't have many womyn to support us. We worked thefirst year and a half totally volunteer. At the end of that time, there
was enough money coming in that we could afford to pay ourselves forour groceries. And again, we've had to do what is necessary to survivewe've had to invent our processes. We've had a lot of help from otherwomyn's newspapers and magazines and when they print how they survive we read it very eagerly because we need to know how other womyn
are making it. We're still volunteer and we 're still not in any way supporting ourselves because I'm very aware that this magazine does not exist
on our energy alone. It exists on the energy of many womyn. The
reason we are paid and they are not is because there's hardly enoughmoney to pay us, and if we quit it wouldn't matter about the drawings and the poems because the in-between nitty-gritty-office-kind of
maintenance work that is utterly essential would stop.
Q: What about politics and spirituality?

JEAN: I have alot of ideas about it because it is something we think
about a great deal. We don't in any way wish to drain energy from thechanges we wish to see happening in the world. What we envision aschange is so profound and so total that all of us are needed to work atanything we can get our hands on. And I would like to see us be moreaware of respecting all the different places we can work for change. I
think that perhaps it comes out of the hierarchical thinking that men
have trapped us with that we have to think "this project is more important than that project...this work is more revolutionary than that work,"
when indeed, all the work needs to be done, and those womyn who are
inspired to do any sort of work are a great benefit to me. We hopethat what we are doing is adding an ingredient to the womyn's movement. We don't see ourselves as the vanguard. I think if we think ofthings in spirals and circles that there is not so much of a vanguard.
We've each got a piece of it and we're all working as hard as we can,and we're all going to transform it-perhaps more like a loaf of breadthan a battalion or something ... I do want the magazine to be ... there's
no word "enhopement" ... there's encouragement. .. enjoyment. .. but
I think this magazine might be an enhopement.
RUTH: Another insight that has come is that womyn are going to fmd
new ways of bonding with each other. The one-to-one relationship isfundamental, but it's not exclusive. We can bond in larger groups thancouples, and these groups can be very strong and supportive. Somewomyn call this tribal consciousness. Tribal awareness is where womyn
find compatible groups and work with them and travel with them and75

feel responsible in caretaking for each other for a time and these groups
overlap so that as a womon moves from one part of the country or one
city to another there are connections that are made. She's never a total
stranger anywhere for very long because there's so much movement in
the womyn's movement that we are all connected to that network of
womyn who have been there before. Womyn who are coming alongsoon connect with the people we know in other projects . And this isa support ne-twork that I think we're going to develop to replace therestraining nuclear families so draining of our energies . . . new forms of
support.

WOMANSPIRIT is published quarterly at Equinoxes and Solstices. Subscriptions: $7.00;
In stitutions : $12 .00; Sample back issue: $2.00. Order from WOMANSPIRIT. Box 263,
Wolf Creek, Oregon 97497 .

~ _Gibbous RISING•~• a feminist news collective ••Gibbous RISING is not only the description of a partial moon becoming
whole. but signifies the growth ofwomen and the rising recognition offeminism and liberation .

•Women ' s news. art. events . andpoetry - a year for $5.00.

• Gibbous RISING - 1230 H SI.
Sacramento. California 95814

76

REVIEW

Toni Ann Hurley McNaron

The Importance of BEGINNING WITH 0 :A Reflection on Olga Broumas

A review of Beginning With 0 by Olga Broumas (New Haven : Yale
University Press, 1977) $2.95, 74 pages, paperbound.
In her first volume of poetry, Olga Broumas seeks to make language andphilosophy out of her experience of finding and celebrating her lesbianism.
This act is radical because it confronts the patriarchy at its core. Not only
does Olga assert that she no longer chooses to "hold my tongue " in orderto remain heterosexually acceptable; she makes art of her lesbian lovemaking.
Her tongue becomes an agent of ecstatic sensuality and of new speech. Withher lesbian tools , she is both unveiling the patriarchy and exploring an earlier
and projected world in which the powers of women are central. To have
won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for spinning poetry from her outlawry
carries an irony which Olga acknowledges in "Cinderella." Clarifying her
position vis a vis such rewards and their bestowers , she says:. . . I am the one allowed into the royal chambers , whose small foot conveniently
fills the slipper of glass. The woman writer, the lady
umpire , the madam chairman , anyone 's wife.
I know what I know.
And I once was gladof the chance to use it , even alone
in a strange castle , doing overtime on my own , cracking
the royal code. The princes spokein their fathers' language , were eager to praise me
my nimble tongue ....
Olga defines the perils of being a token woman, not the least of which is a
spoiling of all created work : "what good soup I boil turns / in my mouth to
mud ." She ends the poem by laying out alternatives: she can wear "wet/canvas shoes in my sisters' , my sisters ' hut" or "die young / like those favored
before me , hand-picked each one/for her joyful heart." By its very title ,this poem recalls Anne Sexton and other women artists who , while gaining
recognition from the patriarchy , have chosen to kill themselves.
Olga Broumas, slightly under thirty, living in Oregon , writes lesbian love
poems in alabaster. Greek by birth, Olga takes Sappho not as historicalmodel but as mother , sister, lover. Greek mythology is not a metaphor system to her ; it's bread and roses. She is not using tired material and she codes77nothing ; she's speaking plainly and powerfully for us and to us . Her voice
is strong and lyrical. Trained in the techniques of her craft , blga uses thosetechniques to shape a parallel culture, consciously outside the patriarchal
tradition while simultaneously calling up its very roots . She incorporates thefinest elements of that tradition even as she brushes the centuries-old dust
from an older world , the matriarchy. I find this volume a glorious statement
about a woman's ability to transform the Greek (male) tradition by writing
close to her own Greek (female) bones.
The structure of the book fascinates me, beginning with a cosmic collageof the god of a new territory inhabited by women. The center- a bitter corecontains poems about Olga's intimacy with Stephen . The final section combines shades of bitterness and unfulfillment with sensual power and energy.
The overall effect is indeed of beginning: this lesbian poet is finding her
vo ice by refusing to mute her past or present shadows. Like Robin Morgan
and Adrienne Ri ch , Broumas wants to bring all of her selves into her newworld , to enrich her present with realities filtered through former voices,
however painful that process becomes.
In "Twelve- Aspects of God ," the first three faces depict multiplicationof the many from the one, while the fourth and fifth poems present transformations. Midway in the section stands the poem " Dactyls ," in which awoman questions her fate, takes that fate in her own hands , literally , andbecomes her own person. The next trio ("Circe," "Maenad," "Aphrodite")
describes the damage done to women by our long service to the patriarchy ,and is followed by the face of "Calypso," offering an alternative. The womenin this poem discover that they can be free from heterosexual modes ofinteracting: " no need of a wound, a puncture, to seal our bond." From thispoint, Olga begins the final movement: in the last two poems, her god becomes feminist and lesbian. In "Demeter" we see the pain of being a mother. within the patriarchy ; that patriarchy's required hatred of the mother by
the daughter; the trauma of leaving that initial female space, the womb, toenter a hostile "spotlight" with its "gleaming, mechanical eye." At the centerof this poem the poet names her spirit-mothers-" Anne . Sylvia. Virginia. /Adrienne the last , magnificent last." The ordering is significant - I see thesefour writers in an ascending pattern from most self-destructive to mostaffirming of self and other women. That Olga calls Adrienne Rich "magnificen t" and "last" sounds a hopeful note , paralleling the terrors/myths surrounding biological mothers with the relative strengthening to be had fromclaiming psychological mothers , mothers of our work.
Finally , Olga turns to "Artemis," traditionally the goddess of wildlife,
and the virgin hunter , reserving h~rself for herself and women-a lesbian
goddess. For Olga to end her aspects of goo with this poem reflects a direction out of the patriarchy , filled with maligned and damaged female faces:" 1 am a woman committed to / a politics/ of transliteration." Because thispoem is crucial to a lesbian-feminist reading of this volume, I quote it here.
Let's not have tea. White wineeases the mind along
the slopesof the faithful body, helps

78any memory once engravedon the twin
chromosome ribbons, emerge, tentativefrom the archaeology of an excised past.
I am a woman
who understands
the necessity of an impulse whose goal or origin
still lie beyond me. I keep the goatfor morethan the pastoral reasons. I workin silver the tongue-like forms
that curve round a throat
an arm-pit, the upper
thigh, whose significance stirs in me
like a curviform alphabetthat defies
decoding, appears
to consist of vowels, beginning with 0, the Omega, horseshoe, the cave of sound.
What tiny fragments
survive, mangled ·into our language .
I am a woman committed toa politics
of transliteration, the methodology
of a mind
stunned at the suddenly
possible shifts of meaning- for whichlike amnesiacs
in a ward on fire, we mustfind words
or burn.
Artemis-Hecate is the lesbian mythic voice, instrumental in the PersephoneDemeter myth. 1 It seems that Demeter , as earth goddess , could hear only
sounds that traveled horizontally. Persephone, forced below ground, could
hear only sounds that moved vertically . Thus we have a painful momentborn neither from desire nor personal motivation. This impasse resulted fromphysics, from the reality of sound wave theory. The person in this myth ofwhom we rarely hear is Artemis-Hecate, known as a crossroads character.
This woman hears intersections of vertical and horizontal sounds. Artemishears a voice across dead fields calling mournfully, "Persephone," and anotherfrom Hades calling "Demeter." Intuiting the problem, she arranges a reunion .
In ancient drawings of the Eleusinian mysteries, this reunion depicts three
women: Demeter, Persephone , and Artemis-Hecate in the middle with anarm around each.
.
79

In Olga's poem about Artemis , we find a piece which superficially could
be dismissed as a matter of aesthetic choice proceeding from sexual preference. Someone could include this poem in a survey of women's poetry toillustrate the beautiful, erotic celebration of female sexuality and of women
loving women. To do so is to miss the point of this poem: this poem isabout epistemology, a way of seeing reality ; it becomes suddenly philosophical amidst its opulent images. Olga makes an alphabet out of those images,
tying lesbian sexuality to a symbol system, a naming system with all thepower that resides in language : "a curviform alphabet/that defies/decoding,""the methodology / of a mind / stunned at the suddenly / possible shifts ofmeaning- for which/like amnesiacs/in a ward on fire, we must/find words/
or burn." This is not a love poem in the usual (masculine/heterosexual) sense,
yet it is an example of consummate love poetry. Olga presumes that her sexuality as a lesbian affords her an angle on the universe. She'd have much to
say to Emily Dickinson's recommendation to tell all the truth but tell it
slant. She not only acknowledges the need for such a slant ; she creates art
from its edges. The poem "Artemis" proceeds with its metaphors of curveand diagonal not because these are poetically fitting but because they are
her reality .
In the second section of this book, Olga charts married life, beginningwith a poem called "betrothal/the bride's lament" and ending with "theknife and the bread ," whose last lines are "how long/can i keep the knife/in its place ." The absence of a question mark after so potent a question
evidences the poet 's certainty of breaking out of the kitchen in which she
stands, poised at the loaf of bread. By juxtaposing a weapon of destruction
with the essence of domesticity , Olga rips away a curtain to show us theunderside of "anyone's wife ," at home on a routine day, seething with anger
and hatred . Again she is reminiscent of Dickinson, whose women carry a
volcano within , never telling anyone , waiting for the inevitable eruption.
Structurally, Olga carries the feelings from this central group of poems
into her final section . Since she says this is "for my mother ," I ask how thepoems speak to that primal person. Olga describes unrequited loves, in which
she has been attracted to women unable to allow themselves to return her
feelings , and more important , unable to allow themselves to have their own
feelings .
. The last seven poems are Olga's versions of familiar fairy tales. The parallelwith Anne Sexton 's Transformations is obvious . However , these two poets
seem essentially different as they confront basic stories about what it means
to be a girl in the patriarchy. I locate their differences in their tones . Sexton
is almost uniformly bitter, sardonic, paralyzed/hopeless , and then angry under
all that. Her poems seem reactive , while her images remain heterosexual, ugly ,or slick . Sexton changes the angle of vision while keeping the stories intact.
Olga actually transforms. In her versions , the stories and their morals become
something pro-woman , something outside the patriarchy in language andmessage .
The two poets' work with "Little Red Riding Hood" will make my point
clear. Sexton's poem is almost hip in its imagery-talk of Duz and Chuck
80

Wagon dog food, the Congregational Church parking lot; the cute questions
about why the basket contains wine and cake if grandmother is ill ; scenesof Mr. Wolf himself. Olga's images, contrarily , vibrate with life and physicality, even when describing painful scenes-"mantle of blood," "pelvic scaffold," "cramp/me between the temples , hobble/my baby feet." Sexton's
women must be saved by a male-the kindly huntsman who performs a caesarean section on the wolf to free the two females. At the end of the poem,
the three sit down to eat wine and cake. Where is the transformation?
Olga's poem ends with the poet wondering how to connect with hermother, "alone / in your house and waiting, across this improbably forest /peopled with wolves and our lost, flower-gathering/sisters they feed on ."The poet focuses on women all the way through : the wolves are present asa menacing force, yet none of the emotional emphasis is on them. The transformation turns on Olga's placing her own mother within the poem , on her
trying to unite with her. She uses the fairy story to tell her mother how
she helped her daughter remain unto herself unless with other women: "I
kept/ to the road , kept/ the hood secret , kept what it sheathed more / secretstill." This poem is a subtle coming-out , an affirmation of what more andmore of us lesbians are coming to know-our mothers gave us powerful double
messages and by telling us to keep to the road , they cautioned us against
being led down primrose paths to our confusion and loss .
This fairy tale is utterly transformed in Olga's system, ending with her
lesbian voice considering how best to save heterosexual sisters from being
devoured by wolves. I am concerned that Olga seems so taken up by Sexton
and wonder if she sees herself as kin on some level more specific than thatboth poets were let into their fathers' mansions and praised for their "nimble
tongue [s] ." I trust that Olga Broumas will name the real ways in which herbeing a lesbian in that mansion has caused her to write different poems,
utilizing female sexual imagery. I trust she will see that her lesbianism allows
her to escape that place in one piece-something Anne Sexton was neverable to do, try as she did. Such a realization is part and parcel of Olga's
argument for a new language, based in the erotic, leading us always closer
to it, informed at its core by an understanding of the lesbian body.
Olga's language is her native tongue and her tongue is her native language.
This elegant play on words is a cornerstone for lesbian epistemology. I want
now to work with the poems which deal directly with language and artifacts ,where the poet is namer and archaeologist. These poems are "Triple Muse ,""plunging into the improbable," "Four Beginnings/for Kyra ," "Sleeping
Beauty," "Rumplestiltskin," and "Artemis" (already discussed) .
"Triple Muse" speaks of three persons-literal women , suggesting theFates, Furies , Graces- who are cultural workers ("the cabin/full of our tools :guitar , tapedeck , video"), whose idea of inspiration is radically different
from the traditional one in which the artist waits "for inspiration / served up
like dinner, or sex." These women are each other's muses while each is her
own special muse. By being the "mineral-bright pith" which is also the "saltveins" from which wisdom is "cast" and read , they become their content.
Like the spider in nature , they work out of themselves and their own sub81

stance. These women differ from a male "audience" because they use eachother actively and lovingly-they tend their muse(s). By describing men "invoking/ us absently," Olga offers one explanation for male artists' anxiety
about whether they will be inspired at a given moment. Their absent-minded
invocations make them aware that they take poor care of the persons onwhom they depend-their female muses/mistresses/models. The final scene
in this poem is visionary and feminist: "We are/of one mind, tuning/our
instruments to ourselves, by our triple light." The three women assert commonality as their source of inspiration , in opposition to patriarchal artists
who strive for uniqueness; they affirm self as the basis for harmony of song.
In "plunging into the improbable," Olga shows two people in a spelling
bee , agreeing that "words / are supposed to claw you with/beauty, tear at
you / spiran t by sonoran t / tongue by tongue." Given the placement of this
poem, I take the two people as a heterosexual couple trying to find the language of love. In addition to the competitive setting where they "trade offwords, partners/suddenly & at random," the two work with darkrooms, using developing fluid to catch images on film. Around this making of artifacts
and constructing of words, the two make love: " we had signed with thebrush of thighs." With this line, Olga gathers up her strands of meaning. The
pun on "signed" reflects her deep sense that formed art with the artist's signature is intimately related to gestures of the body, especially in states ofpassion (signing as silent language communicating without the boundaries ofletters/words which are often harsh, even hostile). This poem ends on anunresolved note - the picture has been developed and what is on the contact
sheet is "improbable in high contrast." That improbability consists of "acurve/on a piece of paper , a line of ink"- the classic mixture of curve andline , of feminine and masculine. Olga seems only too aware that art making
and lovemaking have been projects. Her ending implies dissatisfaction, evenregret at that process - "the stars / are silent, the sky /exposed."
In sharp relief to this poem is "Four Beginnings/for Kyra." Though thecontent is similar to "plunging .. . ," the images and overall mood have become powerful and positive. This time the two people are women who also
make images , deal with words/tongues, struggle to find a way to communicate. The "you" has come through a scarring marriage to be trying for the
first time to love another woman. The "I" ends up "spellbound/against yourflesh." The pun seems intentional in a poem so centrally about finding a
new language. This language arises from a wish to express feelings that emerge
from their lying together. They feel "speechless," actors in a "common
dream." What they've done by making love is "cross into each other's language ," suggesting that that language will also turn out to be a common one.
Olga then states her essential point: the new tongue will involve full use ofindividual tongues and fingers. Language will be based on touch this time :... I take your hand
hesitant still with regret
into that milky landscape, where brailleis a tongue for lovers, where tongue,
fingers, lips
share a lidless eye.

82

So Olga introduces her metaphor of woman as territory unmapped , unknown
to be explored finally by other women rather than strip-mined or exploitedby patriarchs . Suddenly a poem like "Triple Muse" takes on even richer connotations, since in it women are the mineral-bright pith. If we are the valu,.hle salt veins , then when we look for such veins in other women , we willgo carefully , like loving archaeologists , aware of the worth of the find fromour own sense of self rather than from any scale of marketability or profit.
When Olga says that the other woman reminds her "of each desire that ran ,dead-end , into a mind/programmed to misconstrue it ," we trust her to explore this woman precisely because she too has traveled the emotional spaces,
share the " neurosis , anxiety , phobia" of a woman's mind "e~pertly camouflaged/from the thought of love / for a woman , its native/love ."In "Sleeping Beauty" Olga addresses those segments of society currently
saying to lesbians, "all right, we see you and tolerate you, and your primaryevidence is your love bites-we define you by your sexuality." What is radical about this poem is that it is a poem at all. To make love and wind up
with varicolored marks on our neck is something any of us can do. To makea poem about that experience is to preserve evidence of our existence . To
preserve us as lovers has strong political ramifications. Olga is making cultureout of taboo. Love bites in a poem don't wear off and cannot be hidden byturtlenecks or bright scarves. So the poet frames us, leaving a record for later
cultural archaeologists, making it impossible to say , "oh well , the fact thatthey lived together for forty or fifty years does not really attest to lesbianism. " To frame us in the very act of lovemaking is not merely to celebrate
the personal aspect of lesbianism . It is to proclaim us with no mistaking
vagueness in our most threatening role of not needing men to prove our sexuality or to tell us we are passionate. We are passionate and erotic as the
subject matter of this poem; we are passionate and erotic as the creator ofthis poem; we are passionate and erotic to make and print a critical reviewof this poem. 2
Finally, in "Rumplestiltskin," Olga confronts with a charged directness
the central problem of "how to describe /what we didn't know / exists." On
the most immediate level, her "what" refers to the clitoris,.. . a mutant organ, its function to feel
intensely , to heal by immersion , a fluid
element, crucial
as amnion, sweet milkin the suckling months .
By this point, however , a careful reader will also take "mutant organ" tobe the voice of woman poet and of woman. An image which sears me is of"proud Columbia/stubbing/her bound up feet on her dammed/up bed." Itranslate from Olga's linguistic cues until I see proud Columbia with a tied
tongue as well as bound feet. With her tongue tied, this noble female canmake neither love nor poetry in her native manner. The urgency which begins this poem ("I have to write of these things") carries through to theending where the poet's lover tries to describe their lovemaking , tries to use
her tongue "to salvage some part/of the loamy dig." Significantly, the lover83employs a simile in her attempt to comment on their experience : "[t's like /forgiving each other. " Throughout the poem , the poet has avoided similes ,choosing a direct mode , understanding that what she does is not like anything in the patriarchal world. Therefore , to try to fit her sexuality into conventional phrases/ tropes will not merely reduce it but will deny and kill it. 3
All such comparisons will be as this one by her lover , a "borrowing fromyour childhood priest ," where " priest" is any of the institutional fathers;
such comparisons "wipe clean / with a musty cloth / what is clean already ."For women , for lesbians , and for our cultural workers , the patriarchy functions as a "musty cloth " which can only smear the clarity of our lives, ourwo rk, our passions .
This poem is important because Olga gathers into it both her vision of a
new language based on literal tongues and her metaphor of the lesbian as
ar<.:haeologist. She pictures herself and her lover as " archaeologists of theright / the speechless zones / of the brain." She refers to the division of thehuman brain into a right side which has to do with the irrational, the uncon scious , the creative , the nonverbal , and a left side which controls theration al, linear , verbal , cognitive aspects of our lives. In our culture, the left
side is valued while the right is feared , ignored, devalued . Naturally enough,the patriarchy has labeled activities of the left brain "masculine" and thoseof the right brain "feminine." Olga declares that for women to make loveto each other is to journey into unknown regions where old words are useless. We go looking, exploring "the speechless zones" with our special tools/
tongues.
"Rumplestiltskin" excites me because it is a poem which speaks aboutareas of female experience where words are not the currency. It does what
it says is so difficult - it gives voice to what has been shrouded in silence.
This poem fuses sexual and creative energies in a way that moves me. Talking of their lovemaking , the poet says,.. . Daily
by accident, against
what has become our will through yearsof deprivation, we spawn the fluidthat cradles us , grownas we are, and at a loss
for words ....
Again Olga evokes images of the spider , making her web from her own juices.
So women have the capacity to renew ourselves in our own fluids and thento make art out of that substance . The process takes place heroically, as,salmon-like , "against all currents, upstream/we spawn/in each other's blood."
As suggested by the crucial preposition "in," these two women are mutually
nurturant. They do not spawn each other, as heterosexual couples have long
been figured as doing ; they are not two .halves merging to make one whole.
Olga states early on, "We were grown/women, well/traveled in our time."
The poems in this collection witness their own truths-by their existence,
they are known. Their composite message is clear and potent-lesbian tongues
explore the unconscious, the formerly forbidden and unknowable, the dan84

gerous wild places of female reality and expression. From working on thisbook by an extraordinarily gifted poet , I offer this axiom: to make lesbian
love poetry is to find our language , to speak with and in tongues of fierce
clarity , signaling the emerging of matriarchal poetry .

NOTES

1. This information about Arte mis-Hecate comes fro m a chapter in the unpublishedbook on Demeter/Persephone by Nor Hall , fe minist-jungian therapist in St. Paul , Minn.
2. My expanded sense of the erotic comes largely from my hea ring Audre Lorde delivera paper on "The Uses of the Erotic" at the 1978 Berkshire Conference on the History of
Women. In that paper, Audre talks about the erotic as the essential fo und ation of anything
we do with all of ourselves, be it lying beside a lover or writing a poem .
3. Cf. Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own as she advises her audience of young
women aspiring to write . In a key passage, she says: "So long as yo u write what you wish
to write, that is all that matters; and whe ther it matters for ages or only for hour s, nobod y
can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of yo ur vision, a shade of its colour, in deference
to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuringrod up his sleeve , is the most abject treachery , and the sacrifice of wea lth and chastity
which used to be said to be the greates t of human disasters, a mere f1ea-bite in comparison"(p. 110) .

85

A Chant
axe ritual axe ritual acts ritual axe ritual acts ritual axe ritual

lip of the womb
the ritual axe :labyrisshell-headed woman
whom the vines climb

moon-bringer
the tides follow

woman who sits
woman who sits with babies
woman who sits with babies
inside her
inside her
inside her

ritual axe
ritual acts

lip to lip
hip to hip

moon-bringer
shell-headed woman
weaverwhose fingers speak
like needles
through ancient threads
a new language
a new language
a new language
i am looking for my name in your tapestries:
spider-woman
many-legged wonder who brings them inside
inside her
spiderwhose strong toes wrap us
in delicate webs
lfIS
labyrisiris
what can you seein the soft pink dark?
in the soft pink dark?

labyriswho grows in the deep darkflower who opens to seas
who enfolds in the clumsy dreams of young girls
a tender hope
who holds them in your soft pink arms
all the night throughi am looking for my namein the way you sigh :incline : incline now
your shell-ears
my waywrap the nightwebs round my helpless words
swimming upstream toward somethingwith no nameincline now : bring me the moonin a ritual axe
and i will cleave the will of the world
newto bring to you thiswoman
a sacred woman
a woman who sits
lip to lip
in the pink soft darka woman shell-headed
moon-bringer
who sits with babies inside her
lip to lip
lip to lip
your name , and mineand she will wear
and she will perform the ritual act : to begin
to openthe lip of the womb
the ritual axe :labyris- Martha Courtot
86

Susan Leigh StarREVIEWTO DWELL AMONG OURSELVES

A review of Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism by Mary Daly
(Boston : Beacon Press, 1978; $14 .95,485 pages, hardcover.
There's a web like a spider's web,made of silk or light and shadow,
spun by the moon in my room at night.
It's a web made to catch a dream;hold it tight to lie awake with ,and it will tell you,that dream ends allright.
-Old Folk SongYou can fly
High as a kite
If you want toFaster than lightIf you want to.
Speeding through the universe ...
Thinking is the best way to travel.
. -"The Best Way to Travel," The
Moody Blues, from In Searchof the Lost Chord
Quantify suffering, you could rule the world.
They can rule the world while they can persuade us
our pain belongs in some order .
-Adrienne Rich, "Hunger," fromThe Dream of a Common Language
Context. Since reading Gyn/Ecology, my nerves have been humming withnew meanings for this word , seeing it as a verb for the first time. I am profoundly contexted by this work . Placed. Seen. With its reading , I experience
newer and newer navigations of my own consciousness. Without freezing ,without staticness of any sort, this book is the total confluence of method
and content, of the personal and the historical, of the reach for change andthe unflinching examination of suffering, that I have come to know as feminism . Where this book is , there is feminism.
dwell: from Old English dwellan and Indo-European dhweI: to lead astray , hinder, delay;
also reflexive-to go astray, to be delayed, to tarry, to stay ; corresponds to Old High German twellan: to stun, make giddy, or perplex ; also the causal of strong; also, to cease,leave off, give up.
87

If this book/Voyage could be placed neatly in a " field" it would not be thisbook . I have considered naming its " field" Un-theology or Un-philosophy. Certainly, in the house of mirrors which is the universe/university of reversals, it
can be called Un-ethical. [P o xiii]

In a deeply Un-ethical and passionately Unmoral , compassionate way, Gyn/
Ecology Wends its way through and Webs itself across vast expanses ofthought , the spatial and temporal dimensions of which are familiar to us
as cohabitants of the dimension . Gyn/Ecology is an experience of recognition .
Like a spider's web , Gyn/Ecology has qualities that are both aerial andearthy , de adly for enemies and vital for inhabitants . Like a spider's web, itsqualities encompass both location , as home , as connectedness, as creation;and locomotion , as change , movement, spanning; both vertical and horizontal. And like a spider's web , it has an integrity , a geometry that cannot be
unraveled without destroying its meaning. Approaching Gyn/Ecology , then,in writing , I trace threads in fact so deeply intertwined that they have annealed to each other like the sticky silk of a real web.
Methodicide and Context

In Beyond God the Father,1 Mary* spoke of the need for methodicidekilling the gods of method in academia which have determined the shapeand focus of knowledge. Gyn/Ecology commits methodicide at many levels;
as Mary says in the introduction : "This book is a declaration that it is time
to stop putting answers before the Questions" (p. xv) .
Fundamentally, her method for committing methodicide is the specification of context, of social and psychological realms out of which "knowledge"
arises , knowledge which comes legitimated and delivered with the stamp of
approval of patriarchal scholarship.
The clarity and intensity with which she specifices the context of patriarchal knowledge expands and transcends the term "sociology of knowledge ."Loosely defined , the sociology of knowledge is the description of social conditions which give rise to theory and to everyday knowledge . But the methods
or foci of these writers have never extended beyond the boundaries of thepatriarchal paradigm , and thus never really broken out of the "sacred canopy"of assumptions they thought they were challenging .2 Gyn/Ecology, by specifying more broadly and deeply than any scholarship to date, the background,origins , and assumptions of patriarchal scholarship, creates for the first timea feminist sociology of knowledge .
Mary's focus is on patriarchal scholarly legitimation of atrocities, particularly against women and including the Nazi-authored Holocaust of the Jews.
Looking at the facts , historically past and present, of, footbinding, suttee(the Hindu practice of killing widows after the husband's death) , infibulation/
female circumcision , the Witch-burnings , and American gynecology (both bodygynecology and therapy , which she calls "mind-gynecology") , and of the
Nazi death camps , she illuminates seven common steps in "sado-ritual ," whichhave all ended in ritual legitimation b'y "objective" male scholarship:*In using "Mary " here instead of "Daly," I am honoring a fine old tradition of reclamation begun by Julia Stanley in her article on Adrienne Rich's work , "The Rhetoric ofDenial, " Sinister Wisdom 3, Spring, 1977. The first name designation refers to a sharedlocation, and is a reversal of patriarchal reviewers' diminutive intent in using first names
for women writers.
881) obsession with purity2) erasure of responsibility for the atrocities
3) tendency to catch on and spread, since they "appeal to imaginations
conditioned by the omnipresent ideology of male domination"4) the use of women as token torturers5) compulsive orderliness, obsessive repetitiveness, fixation upon minutedetails which divert attention from the horror
6) normalization/normatizing as a consequence of conditioning throughthe ritual atrocities, and7) the scholarly legitimation.
As Mary herself states, doing the kind of scholarship we need requiresthat we become boundary-dwellers: we must both understand the "masters,"
seeing commonalities in their self-proclaimed "objectivity," and go beyond
them. 3 In Beyond God the Father, Mary turned this method on anti-feminist
criticisms; there, she talked about common dimensions of reactions to feminism ("resistances to conSCiousness"), and went beyond to envision new
methods of be-ing with each other as feminists .
The naming of our own methods as feminist scholars is vital because it
involves understanding our very ways of thinking, strengthening and communicating the ways we have developed for unraveling the deceptive models
presented as "reality" by patriarchy. Much of the time this unraveling is almost instinctive, sublingual, psychic; Mary talks at one point about "books
almost jumping off the shelf" in her process of preparing to write. The more
we understand and can communicate about the processes by which we doour own scholarship, the more we will avoid having to unravel our own new
creations ... we will be creating, writing, researching on a totally different
methodological basis. 4 Also, the better we understand our methods, the morecentered and strong we will be in the face of attempts to delegitimize* ourscholarship (what feminist scholar has not frequently questioned her own
sanity and intelligence-especially those of us physically located within academia). As Mary says:
Since it seeks out the threads of connectedness within artificially separated/segmented reality, striving "to put the severed parts together," specious specialists
will decry its "negativity" and "failure to present the whole picture." [Pp. xiii-xiv)

Seeking out "the threads of connectedness" involves what Mary calls "journeying into the Background," that is, looking in a new way at our everyday
reality :I have coined the term metapatriarchai to describe the journey, because theprefix meta has multiple meanings. It incorporates the idea of "postpatriarchal,"for it means occurring later. It puts patriarchy in the past without denying thatits walls/ruins and demons are still around. Since meta also means "situated behind," it suggests that the direction of the journey is into the Background. [Po 7)

Describing the "positive paranoia" of feminism, she names part of our
method of survival/scholarship "pattern discovery":*Delegitirnizing is different from honest criticizing.

89

Spinster-Spooking is both cognitive and tactical. Cognitively, it means patterndetecting. It means understanding the time-warps through which women are
divided from each other-since each woman comes to consciousness through theunique events of her own history. [P o 318)

Violence and Context
Gyn/Ecology , as an example of this pattern-detecting, shows that radical
feminist method is a matter of looking again, of de-anesthetizing our numbedand battered senses , of dishabituating 5 ourselves from patriarchal monotony
in order to see their underlying strategies for gynocide:
We are finding ways of "breaking set"-of focusing upon different patterns of
meaning than those explicitly expressed and accepted by the cognitive majority . . . .
. . . physically confined in oppressive set-ups, we can concentrate on implicit
patterns in styles of communication, such as clothing, postures, gestures, eyecontact, speech intonation , choice of vocabulary , use of "humor," facial expressions, and-perhaps most importantly - silences. [Po 341)

After I read Andrea Dworkin's Woman Hating in 1974, I walked aroundin a stunned state (or what I would now call an unStunned state!), muttering to everyone I knew that we live in Dachau , in Auschwitz-how can peo!lenot see the emergency of this time, how can we be blinrl to the gynocide?
As I began to meet others who understood the emergency and its nature,
my horror did not lessen, but my panic about my sanity did. It is one thing
to be interned in a death camp, and to deal with that daily reality-rape,
death, batterings, mutilations, ridicule , the denial of one's being-and anotherto live among interned others who believe that nothing is wrong . After seeing thousands of killings , woundings, mutilations on TV, it is hard not tobecome inured to the violence, difficult not to normalize it. My defmitionof violence has come to include this normalizing, the anesthetization toviolence.
Deepening the work of feminist scholars such as Andrea Dworkin andAdrienne Rich (and her own earlier work), Mary pierces through the lastremnants of normalizing of violence against women.
This is an extremist book, written in a situation of extremity, written on theedge of a culture that is killing itself and all of sentient life. [Po 17)

In writing about atrocities, one runs a double-edged risk: that the information will either anesthetize, through the sheer numbing horror of the facts ,by repetition ; or that the information will be aestheticized, that is, be presented so "artistically" that one actually forgets that one is reading about/looking at human misery. 7 What skill does it take to present page after pageof this material without either anesthetizing or aestheticizing? The language,
and the method, from which the book comes must pierce through itself, continuously , to resonate with some Other place in us than the worn perceptual
structures that echo only hopelessness and despair. It must be written witha double-edged ax-presenting hope without erasing horror. We must dwellin another frame of reference without ceasing to live here. This is precisely
what Mary does , clearly presenting and performing the choice against any
level of consent to violence (what she calls "subviving") and for a profoundhealing/creation-the spinning forth of our own truths (surviving):
90

Spinsters are also Survivors. We must survive, not merely in the sense of "living
on," but in the sense of living beyond. Surviving (from the Latin super plus
vivere) I take to mean living above, through, around the obstacles thrown in ourpaths. This is hardly the dead "living on" of possessed tokens. The process ofSurvivors is meta-living, be-ing. [Pp. 8-9)

Survival, then, grows out of a simultaneous awareness of the details of normalized violence, and the pattern/context which makes the perpetuation of
the details possible, thinkable .
. . . when the whole is hypocrisy, the parts may not initially appear untrue. To
put it another way, when everything is bizarre, nothing seems bizarre. [Po 17)

The effect, in reading Gyn/Ecology, is to again and again see new sets of"Emperor's new clothes"-there's nothing there but the invisible beliefs anddeception that create the social fabric of patriarchy .
What links the Emperor's-new-clothes phenomenon with violence? Thatis, under what conditions do the consequences of these beliefs in "nothing"lead to violence systematically directed against women? I believe that theanswer has to do with the manipulation of context, with belief systems
which are covert and which allow bits and pieces of "rationale" to be takenout of context and then covertly placed in another context by those inpower. Pointing out, for instance, that many psychoanalytic studies weredone on the prisoners in the Nazi death camps, Mary notes that most of
the psychoanalysts maintained that the prisoners "regressed" to "infantile. behavior." This analysis ignores the physical and material coercion that created the "regression."
The restoration of context to violence is a major task for all feminists :naming names, seeing social patterns, piercing through the pseudo-rationalesof patriarchal reversals (for example, the claims about "reverse discrimination," which ignore historical and social patterns).
An important part of the way that this de-contexting is perpetrated is
the reversal of saying that we as feminists see "men as the enemy":
This is a subtly deceptive reversal, implying that women are the initia tors ofenmity, blaming the victims for The War. Its deceptive power is derived fromthe fact that the Fury in every woman does fight back against males and maleinstitutions that target her as The Enemy . The point is that she did not create
The War, but rather finds herself in a set-up in which fighting is necessary for
Surviving. [Pp. 364-65)

or that we are "intolerant" and those giving silent consent to gynocide areliberal-minded :This attitude of "different strokes for different folks," while appearing to support originality, is in fact often repressive. The tyranny of tolerance is often thesource of silencing/erasure of strong-minded Hags-who are labeled "intolerant,""extreme," and "narrow." However, if we look at Merriam-Webster's fir st definition of tolerance, we fmd an interesting clue for an analysis of genuinely gynocentric respect for difference. Tolerance ... is defined as "capacity to endure
pain or hardship .... " The variety which Crones respect in each other has as its
basic precondition and common thread the endurance/fortitude/stamina needed
for persevering on the Journey . [P. 381)

91

Of all the reversals perpetrated by patriarchy, the one that is most bitterfor me is the naming of our Journeying as lack of compassion, as coldness,"hard-lining." The constant urgings to be tolerant and to "open up ourhearts" are such perversions of the idea of love that sometimes it seems likeany language for compassion, for loving has been rendered obscene. I knowthat what we are about as feminist Journeyers is deeply loving precisely
because there is so much (violence/obscenity) that we refuse to tolerate. I
think of these lines from Adrienne Rich's "Natural Resources": "But gentleness is active / gentleness swabs the crusted stump / invents more merciful
instruments/to touch the wound beyond the wound/does not faint with
disgust."S There is no way to be gentle without comprehending the dimensions of the atrocities, and there is no way to survive without this comprehension. As an assertion of active, courageous gentleness, Gyn/Ecology points
the way toward a new kind of survival. Surviving, in this sense, also means
naming the context, the source of all forms of oppression . For example, of
the Nazi holocaust , and of crimes against humanity in general , Mary says:
The Holocaust of the Jews in Nazi Germany was a reality of indescribable horror.
Precisely for this reason we should not settle for an analysis which fails to go to
the roots of the evil of genocide. The deepest meanings of the banality of evil
are lost in the kind of re-search which shrinks/localizes perspectives on oppressio n so that they can be contained strictly within ethnic and " religious group"
dimensions . . .. The paradigm and context for genocide is trite, everyday, banaIized gynocide . [Po 311-12]

The discussion of "ethnic and religious" "customs" above refers to the factthat many "scholars" have overlooked the pain and torture in practices indigenous to culture other than their own in the name of "cross-cultural"
relativism. In their desire not to impose the standards of one culture on another (or perhaps their inability to see women as human), they have often
named practices like African genital mutilation of women as religious "beliefs and customs." Mary re -names this refusal to see as sexism, racism , andas an active participation in the atrocity itself. She also brings this analysis
to bear on American "customs": "American women, like their African sisters,
are also lulled into pain-full captivity by the prevailing beliefs and 'customs'"(p. 261) . Gyn/Ecology cuts cleanly through liberal mushiness to make thestrongest possible statement about crimes against women: moral relativism
has no place in the face of torture. No one nowadays would call the Nazi
persecutions a "custom" based on "religious beliefs," yet, when similar things
happen to women, they are often ignored, by social scientists and other
scholars. Silence about gynocide is violent - and Mary places the responsibility
for this silence , this collaboration, fully with the "scientists" who have failed
to name names in the course of their studies .
Therapy
The courage to be and to speak, in the au of the holy ghosts of gynecology, is,in the fmal analysis, the Courage to Blaspheme. [Po 264]

Some of the most delightful blaspheming in Gyn/Ecology occurred forme in the section on therapy, or "mind-gynecology." Mary's critique of
psychotherapy expands some of the earlier feminist critiques of therapy,
92

and some of the criticisms of orthodox therapy made by the anti-psychiatry
movement (those of the Radical Therapy group, for example) . But Mary
goes one step farther by bringing her criticisms to bear upon all forms oftherapy which come to replace originality and Amazonian creativity withcategories and formulae:
Like religion, it [therapy] tends to replace transcendence, assuming/consuming
all process, draining creative energy , eliminating Originality, mislabeling leaps ofimagination, shielding the Self against Self-strengthening Aloneness. The Self becomes a spectator of her own frozen, caricatured history. She is filed away , misfLIed, in file-cabinets filled with inaccurate categories. Thus filed, she joins theProcessions of those who choose downward mobility of mind and imagination.
[P o 283]

She questions the structure of therapy:
I suggest that the god of therapy is therapy itself. Moreover, as in the case of
all religions, there is a fixation upon the act of worship itself, which tends tofunction as a shelter against anomie, against meaninglessness. For this reason,
any criticism of therapy threatens/ terrorizes the therapeu tized . [Po 281]

and she calls into question its tautological nature, the way it has names andlabels for all experience:
One who strives for Gyn/Ecological vision may be accused of "not dealing with"therapeutic problems (just as Lesbians/Feminists generally are accused of "notdealing with" men). Yet to satisfy the accusers' often insatiable need to " deal
with" this issue would require falling into the very therapeutic trappings/trap
which Gyn/Ecology transcends. [Po 282]

Mary states that Gyn/Ecological Journeying is not feminist therapy, but"rather is itself an entirely Other Way" (p. 282). Her critique does not exclude counseling in extreme situations, although I get the feeling that she
would definitely prefer that even crises be handled by a circle of sister-Voyagers rather than by "professionals":
I am not saying that genuinely woman-identified counseling cannot and does
not take place .... My criticism concerns therapy as a way of life, as an institutionalized system of creating and perpetuating false needs, of masking and maintaining depression, of focusing/draining women's energy through fixation upon
periodic psychological "fixes." . . . It concerns the woman-crippling triumph ofthe therapeutic over transcendence. [Pp. 280-81]

I find Mary's description of the cognitive processes associated with "therapyas-lifestyle" fascinating. I'm currently a graduate student in a program affiliated with Langley Proter Institute at the University of California, one of the
major training centers for psychotherapists in California. I'm not studying
to be a therapist, but I have had more than enough opportunity to study
my fellow and sister students who are. The descriptions in Gyn/Ecology ofthe patient's process of "indoctrination" into therapy are also good descriptions, mirror-imaged, of the socialization process for student therapists andpsychology students:
Perpetually pushed into this revised past, the patient patiently re-Iearns her his..
story .... The patient learns to fixate upon herself as an object, to objectify andlabel happenings in her process until process is re-processed into processions ofthoroughly impersonal, explainable events. She becomes the therapeutic watcher93

of her reinterpreted Self.... Her sense of transcendence/wildness/adventure istamed . . .. To the extent that therapy mutes the call of the wild Self to transcendence, she fixates more and more upon the observation of details. If totally"cured" she is "terminated." Otherwise, she is maintained in her state of depression." [P. 285)

In light of this critique, I find it striking that most therapists in training arethemselves required to undergo psychoanalysis, or some sort of psychotherapy.
Many of the classes which I had to take as a psychology major were "encountergroup" models-looking back, I wonder if the hidden agenda was to enclose
us in the therapeutic language/lifestyle as Mary describes it.
Besides the process of fixating on details, and learning to classify every
activity according to the theoretical model chosen by the instructor or therapist, another, more subtle process operates to create therapy as reality: theconversion of everything into a homogeneous symbol system. 9 I howled atmany things in Gyn/Ecology, but have been chuckling for weeks over thefollowing passage which describes this conversion so succinctly:
Symptomatic of such pseudo-feminist downward mobility is the Soap Opera
Syndrome, whose one basic Program can be entitled, "How to Deal with Relationships." Like the heroines of the 1940s radio soap operas and 1970s televisionsoap operas, the therapeutized actress deals with her programmed problems before an audience of dealers. Like the radio and television heroines, she rehearses
but does not create the script. She may tryout for different roles, since everything can be coopted by therapy . Thus writing is therapeutic, swimming is therapeutic, painting is therapeutic, demonstrating is therapeutic. The script-follower
forgets that writing is writing, swimming is swimming, painting is painting, demonstrating is demonstrating. [Po 283)

Reading this passage, I was reminded of my hilarity on hearing two students
of Freudian psychology earnestly debating about dream symbols : one heldthat a pencil in a dream was always a penis symbol, and the other (a reformist , I took it) said that no, a pencil in a dream can really just be a pencil. 10
This incident from withinside the therapy paradigm is illustrative of Mary 's
point about the stifling of growth and transcendence. When there is no suchthing as common sense, when every action is "interpreted," life ceases tohave freshness, serendipity :Instead of creating, she deals and deals, struggles and struggles, relates and relates. She finds that her problems are endless, having the infinity of a closed
circle. Everything becomes a problem. The situation of being Feminist and/or
Lesbian adds to the problems but does not break the circle. Only Journeying
breaks the circle. In Journeying/process, therapy is not the priority. [Po 283)

Myth
Mary exposes patriarchal myth as the act of heuristic naming. The repetition of models (both what patriarchal scholars have seen as myths, archetypes, legends, and everyday "myths," repetitions, and stereotypes) is what
we as feminists refuse . In Beyond God the Father, Mary envisioned "a world
without models."l1 This was not, as she went on to point out in her introduction to The Church and the Second Sex,12 an ahistorical world; she affirmed there the necessity for continuously re-understanding our own lives
and the lives of foresisters in light of history, affirming their/our contribu94

tions and elaborating/revising mistakes. In Gyn/Ecology, she contrasts thecodes of the fathers, or the sterile models of patriarchy, with "more ancient,more translucent myth from gynocentric civilization" (p. 44). The translucent myth here is conjoined with transcendence , with Wildness:
For what women who have the courage to name our Selves can do is precisely
to act on our own initiative, and this is profoundly mythic .... When I speak of
gynocentric myth and feminist myth-making I do not refer to tales of reified
gods and/or goddesses but to stories arising from the experiences of Cronesstories which convey primary and archetypal messages about our own Prehistory
and about Female-iden tified power. [Po 47 and 47n]

The crucial difference between patriarchal and feminist myth is thus the difference between organic and imposed; between that which arises from andis continuously subject to the experience of the subject; and the pre-formed ,other-authored directives that resonate only with gendered, non feminist imaginations . Of patriarchal myth, Mary says:
On a level that passes as "sophisticated," scholars from various fields generally
agree on certain components of what they perceive to be myth. Myths are said
to be stories that express intuitive insights and relate the activities of gods. The
mythical figures are symbols. These, it is said, open up depths of reality otherwise
closed to "us." It is not usually suggested that they close off depths of reality
which would otherwise be open to us. [P . 44]

In contrast, feminist myth opens, unfolds.
Spinning, Spooking, Sparking: Zen and the Science of Radical Feminism
The last part of Gyn/Ecology focuses on the breaking-through/celebratingof Hags, Harpies, Crones, Spinsters, and Searchers (delightful new names forthe overburdened "Lesbian feminist" designation). The celebration/breakingthrough incorporates a threefold process Mary calls spooking, sparking, andspinning-the exorcism of old and destructive ways of being and thinking;the interpersonal and transpersonal sparking and joining of minds and bodies
of Hags, Harpies, and Crones; and the spinning-out of tapestries of creativity,
in connection with each other and all of life.
In creating her web of language around the ideas of spinning, sparking,and spooking, Mary uses words that have had profound meaning for me in
my life, but which I have often felt embarrassed to talk about in a "political" environment: hope, innocence, courage, gentleness, compassion, sacredness. Gyn/Ecology frees up some of the coopted language and silences associated with these ideals, gives them new strength.
Spinning is creating an environmen t of increasing innocence. Innocence does
not consist in simply "not harming." This is the fallacy of ideologies of nonviolence. Powerful innocence is seeking and naming the deep mysteries of interconnectedness. It is not mere helping, defending, healing, or " preventive medicine."
It must be nothing less than successive acts of transcendence and Gyn/Ecologicalcreation. In this creation, the beginning is not " the Word." The beginning is hearing. Hags hear forth new words and new patterns of relating. Such hearing forth
is behind, before, and after the phallocratic "creation." [Pp . 413-14]
The term profane is derived from the Latin pro (before) and fanum (temple).
Feminist profanity is the wild realm of the sacred as it was/is before being caged
into the temple of Father Time. It is free time/space. [P o 48]
95Gyn/Ecology refuses all dichotomies of anger and gentleness, innocenceand knowledge. It will be a useful tool for asking some of the basic questions
abo ut life 's meanings and values that we need desperately to ask of eachother and ourSelves. It has helped me to ask some of these questions in noncliched , fresh ways.
Because patriarchal language is dichotomized , and because we still must
use it for some forms of communication, it is necessary to almost turn it
on itself in order to burst its confines. Mary does this repeatedly , employing
paradox, oxymoron , and reversing the reversals to explode and spin :Journeying to the Center is undoin g the knot, not cutting the knot. To try to
cut the knot is merely to take a misleading short-cut. It is to re main fixated in
the foreground, the place of the patriarchal War State. [P o 406]
In the beginning was not the word. In the beginning is the hearing. Spinsters
spin deeper into the lis tenin g deep. We can spin only what we hear, because wehear, and as well as we hear. We ca n weave and unweave , knot and unknot , only
because we hear, what we hear, and as well as we hear. Spinning is celebration/
cerebration. Spinster s Spin all ways, always. Gyn/ Ecology is Un-Creation; Gyn/
Ecology is Creation. [P o 424]

This passage , which ends the book , brings one face to face with the very
context of one's own s/ Self. [ felt my mind whirl on her own heels as I
read this, spinning from me even as I closed the book. Our knotting/unknotting as Lesbian feminists , Hags, Harpies , and Crones, is realming , worldingthe placing of self in conjunction with time and space:As each friend moves more deeply into her own Background she becomes both
her earlier and her present Self. At times this re-membered integrity makes her
appear Strange to her friends, and since the latter are also re-membering, the encounters of these older/younge r Selves can be multiply Strange . [P o 382]

For the next many years, as we encounter the Strange , beautiful, spun unfolding of ourselves and each other , Gyn/Ecology will be a vital part of thepoetry from which we learn , and to which we give, our methods. Without
formulae , without rhetoric , Mary gives exquisite , joyful voice to many of
the realms through which we as Voyagers have passed, and creates new othersin the voicing. And in the Hearing of this book are the Questions which
weave and compel us:... our rough Voyage, which has proved-for those who have persisted - strange,difficult, unpredictable, terrifying, enraging, energizing, transforming, encouraging.
For those who have persisted there is at least one certainty and perhaps only one:Once we have und erstood this much, there is no turning back. [Po 368]

96

HOW TO READ THIS BOOK
How do you read a spider's web? It took me several weeks. I picked it up, andput it down after a few pages. Sometimes I couldn't continue reading because
my hands were shaking with rage. One afternoon , sitting in Golden Gate Park,I read the part in Chapter Nine about how patriarchs have re versed the meaningof tolerance, and called feminists intolerant. I burst into tears, and wept out myoutrage, pain, and horror at remembering how our most idealistic actions are
twisted into mismeanings.
Another sense in which Gyn /Ecology was difficult to read is that the language
Mary uses is thick, convoluted at times, filled with word games and puns, coining
new words and phrases. When I began the book, I had a great deal of resistanceto these. I would throw the book down and declare it to be so much rhetoricuntil several hours or days later, then I found the "word games" coming backto me in some other context, illuminating some aspect of my daily life; working,almost like yeast, on other levels than those at which I am used to reading.
I have begun to recognize this resistance on my part as a resistance to change,
as a reflection of my habits of mind and reading that are linear, which make mealmost prefer to plod through familiar and un challenging territory than to think/read in new ways (whatever it is that makes us like to read mystery stories orwatch TVor eat junk food, I think it's the same). I had the same reSistance/reaction to Bertha Harris ' Lover, to Monique Wittig's Lesbian Body. It almost hurt
to read them, like using a cramped leg muscle for the first time-ultimately, it's
. wonderful, freeing, moving . .. but hard to get used to at first, at least for me.

NOTES
L Beyond God the Father : Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation (Boston :Beacon Press, 1973).
2. See for example Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy (New York: Doubleday, 1967).
3. The concept of boundary-<lwelling is from Beyond God the Father; for the etymology of dwelling, see the beginning of this article.
4. See "The Lesbian Perspective : Pedagogy and the Structure of Human Knowledge,"by julia P. Stanley, paper delivered to the National Conference of Teachers of English,
Chicago, 1976; B. Glaser and A Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies
for Qualitative Research (Chicago: Aldine, 1967); and B. Glaser, Theoretical Sensitivity:
Advances in the Methodology of Grounded Theory (1978: Sociology Press, Box 143, Mill
Valley, Calif. 94941, $10.00) .
. 5. The concept of dishabituating is developed in "The Politics of Wholeness II : Lesbian
Feminism as an Altered State of Consciousness," Susan Leigh Star, Sinsister Wisdom 5,
Winter, 1978.
6. At about this time I wrote a paper on psychology and the witch-burnings for a male
instructor in a sophomore seminar on psychological methods. The instructor returned thepaper with the remark that I had misspelled gynocide, and corrected it to genocide. Woman
Hating is published by Dutton, New York , 1974.
7. This idea is developed by Simone de Beauvoir in The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans.
Bernard Frechtman (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel, 1972).
8. in The Dream of a Common Language (New York: Norton, 1978) .
9. See also Jerome D. Frank, Persuasion and Healing (New York: Schocken Books,
1974) .

97

10. On a parallel track, I have been thinking about the whole idea of the "medium as
the message." I think that this slogan is used by patriarchs (and of course it contains important truths) to ignore the fact that the message is also the message much of the time(for example, in violent pornography) .
11. Chapter 6.
12. Harper and Row, 1975, with a New Feminist Postchristian Introduction by the
Author.

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is essenti~1 reading." -TILLIE OLSEN"CONDITIONS is likely to be a most important andauthoritative voice of feminist writing and criticism."-THE SPOKESWOMANPOETRV ••• FICTION ••• DRAMA ••• JOURNALSCRITICAL ESSAVS ... INTERVIEWS ••• REVIEWSSTILL AVAILABLE, CONDITIONS, ONE(148 pages) ; TWO (144 pages); THREE (176 pages)
1979, CONDITIONS, f'OUR; f'lVE (The Black Women' s Issue).
SUBSCRIBE NOW! SEND GIFT SUBSCRIPTIO!"S !
Subscription rates (three issues), regular, $8; students
and unemployed, $6; supporting subscriptions, $15,
$20, $25; institutional, $15; single issues, $3 . Overseas air·mail, add $4.80/subscription, $1.60/single
issue
CONDITIONS, P.O. Box 56, Van Brunt Station,
Brooklyn, New York 11215

98

NOTES FOR A MAGAZINEDID YOU SAY LU-UV?

HarrietI THOUGHT YOU DID . ..

An issue on love? How tacky . I can't remember when Catherine and I
thought of it. Maybe when the first draft of Sherry Thomas's story came in
the mail and stirred in us tenderness , terror , and old questions we had agreed
to forget. Doing a Lesbian magazine we had finally recognized with someshock would continue to be grueling: never enough time , never enough money ,and our mistakes compounding themselves . It had become for us an easy
relief to stop talking with each other about content and direction , to stop
writing " Notes for a Magazine," and to concentrate instead on worrying
about filing systems, the tax return the IRS was hounding us about , theguilt-inducing pile of unanswered correspondence. And we did make someheadway in solving the practical problems of magazine survival. The move
to Nebraska was expensive and time-consuming , a labor requiring several
months, but at its end , there really were women who wanted to work on
Sinister Wisdom , who decided it was worth their time . By October, Friday
night open work sessions had evolved , and Catherine and I began the unfamiliar process of learning how to organize the chaos while relaxing enoughto enjoy the companionship.
We had silently agreed to stop wondering on why's and focus on how's
because dreams and desires and their halting articulation in new/old words
don 't get a magazine out. And yet they do too, in ways we began to sense.
We had both seen enough of what cynicism does to Lesbian projects, to Lesbian lives-cynicism, and the hysteria which is its other face. Going throughthe motions of activism , dropping out, pulling back, lapsing into the undertow of passivity and despair that sucks constantly at our feet ; and the otherface-the lashings out at other women, the destructive winds that blow throughLesbian groups, Lesbian "communities." We knew enough about what happens when you forget to remember why you're doing what you're doing ; andwe knew enough about how much easier it is to forget than to remember.
If "two women together is a work/nothing in civilization has made simple ," *how difficult is three women together , four , five, a network? And how cana woman continue to participate without knowing why , without remembering that she does it for love?
We decided that it was time for us to remember , and a love issue would
be the way we'd remember.
In 1974 I was struggling in my journal with questions about guilt and shame:
when I think I have overcome my guilt at not-lOving men, why am I stillparalyzed by shame at trying to love myself, trying to love other women?
"It's not bad conscience I suffer from; it's awkward nakedness. It's shameshame when I sing, dance , write , talk, eat, make love spontaneously , shame
when I display my own devalued self."
99

These questions of gUilt and shame and "who-do-you-think-you-are, girl?"
were thoroughly entangled for me with questions about "love." On the one
hand : "Saw Jacques BreI last nite: five goddamn dollars. BreI goes for the"all we need is luh-uh-uv" answer. That piece of romanticism after the carousel
song, when it is obvious that the carousel is romance-Buchenwald-westernculture, and one must get the fuck off the carousel, stop it, or blow it up .
. . . Romance is deadly , a mainlining drug. Seducing women into self-immolation. Maybe it's a virus." And , on the other hand: "Shock at noticing thenumber of times the name Catherine appears in journal entries. Embarrassment. Fear that I'm not at all beyond romantic love. I just unwittingly
stepped into some new elephant trap . ... I'll give my journal to Catherine ,and she'll kill me with it. She'll take it and call it midwestern earnestness;
she'll take my 'poems' and say I'm trying to save the world."
In December of that year, when my confusion about love and self-display
was rapidly esca lating into panic, a letter arrived at the Charlotte Women 's
Center, postmarked Madrid:

i'm writing to ask you to give me yr love
i need you and yr things
come come with me
i am an anarcho feminist in trial because of
my goal of building a revolutionary
art and lifestyle
i need you
power to you
love to me i need you
because of i am alone in this pigland of
motherfuckers my fascist spain
I still don't know what happened to Danieleculla in Madrid. After I readher letter , I gave my journal to Catherine, and she did not call it "midwesternearnestness ." Then I wrote down all the things that, like Danieleculla, I needed ,so that I would know them and so that I would not be ashamed of wanting
what I wanted:
I want to write a poem that will catch Jo in my arms as she falls down
stairs, her boot heel caught on the shag. I want to write a poem thatwill tell Joy how lovely she is and how she soothes me. I want to write
a poem that incites Dorsett to riot, I want to write a poem that will
make a mirror for her to believe herself in. I want to break the twisted
lock that keeps Catherine's words. I want to arch my back until the
lower back stretches out and I am as supple as though I had never beenbound. I want to fall into a particular woman's eyes without fear ofdrowning. I want to be comforted and caressed with the word friend
said like some woman meant it and believed that we will triumph, that
we are in triumph. I want vision that tloesn't fail at the edges. I wanttime, time for us all, time to move by our internal flows. I want Oedipus
to die. I want ritual to renew us and music to lift us and dancing to100

transport us and theory to bind us up. In the mornings, I want to sit
alone at the typewriter until something real comes out. I want to beable to cry and able to come and able to be all the glimpses of a warr ior
l see.
What will we do with the woman on our hands?

Practical Stuff:
At this point , Sinister Wisdom is paying for its own supplies pnntmg
and mailing costs, despite the escalating prices of paper , stamps, and everything else. The magazine has been able to keep financially afloat so far because: a) the women first at Whole Women Press and now at Iowa City
Women's Press do not pay themselves the going rate for their labor ; b) thetypesetting, paste-up, collating, and binding of each issue are done in Lin colnwith unpaid labor ; c) the Tee Corinne fundraising poster is still selling; d)many women are sending in contributions, either on a regular basis, or when
they renew; e) many women are buying gift subscriptions; f) Deidre McCalla ,Llena de la Madrugada, and Leigh Star have given two benefit concert-readings- one in Lincoln and one, with Mary Daly, in Boston ; g) the subscription
list, despite the new higher rates, is still - slowly-growing ; h) more bookstoresare carrying SW, and most of these have increased their standing orders.
However, Catherine and l are in a bind. We are still paying for SW's officespace (a full basement with a small room for storing back-issues and anotherroom large enough for collating tables, typewriter, typesetter, paste-up board ,stapling machine, files, desks , chairs, bookshelves, etc.) Also, we have still
not been able to cut the hours we spend on Sinister Wisdom below 30-35
hours a week apiece * * -~one of which SW can pay for and the extent of
which makes it difficult to get enough freelance jobs to pay the rent andgroceries. And we are running out of money. Therefore, SW has to very
shortly, at the very least , pay for its own office space. We've applied for a
grant (which we're not particularly optimistic about getting) , but the only
sure remedy is to rapidly increase the number of subscribers.
So: if you are buying each issue in a bookstore, please consider subscribing. If you have friends who don't know about Sinister Wisdom , please tellthem. If you are going to a women's event, please write us for SW fliers to
distribute. If you'd like to represent SW, selling magazines and posters, pleasewrite Debbie at Sw. If you can get a free announcement in a local feminist
newsletter or newspaper, please do. If you can put up a flier on an appropriate bulletin board, please do . And so on.
Announcement:
Beginning with issue 9, SW will run a "letters" column, as criticism anddialogue about what has been published or needs to be published in SW.
Please mark your letters (or portions of your letters) so that we will know
to consider them for publication .
101

Unpaid Advertisement:
Catherine Nicholson and Harriet Desmoines now own an old IBM Selectric
Composer (which SW uses in return for buying its own fonts and ribbons).
We wish to feed ourselves by copy-editing, typesetting , pasting-up , and proofreading books . We are literate , careful , and reliable. Phone (402) 435-1141 ,or write Box 30541, Lincoln , Neb . 68503.
Notes: The ti tle "Did You Say Lu-uv?" was lifted from the song by Willie Tysonon her album "Debutante."*from Ad rienne Rich , "Twen ty-one Love Poems: XIX" in Th e Dream of a Common
I.anguage.
**Estimates for ad ditional unpaid hours of editing, pro motion , distribution, andprodu ction: staff- 20-25 ho urs/week; Leigh Star -5 -8 hour s/week; Debbie Alicen - 5-8hours/week. This does not acco unt for the hours put in by the contributing editorsBet h Hodges, Sara h Hoag land , Mab Segrest-nor by women who distribute magazinesand posters in their own communities; nor by women wh o do special job s for SW, liketaping the issues; nor the time spen t by frie nd s who edit an article, collate an issue, etc.
See next issue for a hopefully complete naming of women who have been contributing
labor and /or money.

NOTICEBLACK LESBIAN BffiUOGRAPHY NEEDS FINANCIAL SPONSORS.
A comprehensive, annotated bibliography of materials by and about Black
lesbians in the United States is nearing completion. The bibliography which
has approximately 140 entries is being compiled by JR Roberts and will feature a foreword by Barbara Smith. Graphics and photos will illustrate the text.
So far this bibliography has been done without any fInancial backing. Now
that publishing 1:irre draws near (hopefully Spring, 1979) there is a great needto locate fInancial sponsors. Particularly worren with good jobs and surplus
rmney are invited to contribute. Groups and organizations might help by
doing fund-raisers in their part of the country. This important publication
will not be published without fmancial support from other lesbians andfeminists. HXXl copies will be printed in the fIrst edition. ~s will costroughly about $1,000-$1,200. If you would like to contribute or do fundraising, please write to JR Roberts, 167 Auburn Street, CarrDridge, MA 02139.
If you know of worren who have a great deal of wealth, please let them know
about this important project, urge them to contribute.

102

CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES
Nancy Adair is a wild Irish dyke best known for her work on the film and the book,
Word is Out.
Theresa Barry . " I'm a partner in Labrys Books, a women's bookstore in Richmond,
Virginia. I am a dancer, a photographer and a lover of women. Other labels include
lesbian, feminist, eternal student and, of course, the writing goes on like a threadthrough these."
Melissa Cannon has been writing for about 20 of her 32 years, grew up in Tennessee;
currently, she teaches for a living.
Tee Corinne lives in San Francisco and is researching images of Lesbian sexuality in thefine arts.
Martha Courtot has published two books of poetry, Tribe and Journey , and writes forRunes, the Sonoma county women's journal.
Judith Crewe writes a literary criticism column for the Body Politic in Toronto. She
wrote The Ancient, and Other Poems (Catalyst, 1976) and has published widely in
Canada and the United States.
Mint Danab lives in Eugene, Oregon, and does a weekly women's radio show with Thyme
Seagull.
Barbara Deming has published several books with Grossman Publications: Prison Notes(1966); Running Away From Myself; A Dream Portrait of America Dra wn from theFilms of the 40's (1969); Revolution and Equilibrium (1971); and We Cannot Live Without Our Lives (1974).
Judy Grahn is a poet, publisher, and editor. She is currently working on a novel of
rna triarchal history.
Melanie Kaye lives in Portland, Oregon.
Susan Krieger lives and teaches in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Robin Linden lives in San Francisco.
Audre Lorde is working on her first book of prose . Her latest collection of poetry is
The Black Unicorn (Norton, 1978) .
Toni McNaron is an activist and teacher who works on So 's Your Old Lady, the Lesbian
feminist journal from Minneapolis.
Cathy Miller has been published in Woman Becoming and Backspace magazines, both
Pittsburgh-based publications, and was to be anthologized in a United Sisters publicatio n
before its demise .
Felice Newman edited Cameos: New Small Press Women Poets (Crossing Press, 1978)
and is a member of the editorial collaborative of Motheroot Publications. " Sister" will
be included in a chapbook of Felice's work from Motheroot.
Terri Poppe is a feminist, lesbian , collective member of Off Our Backs , member of the
Feminist Writers' Guild, and has been involved in the women's movement since 1969
(Albuquerque, N.M ., Fairbanks, AI., Fitchburg, Ma., Washington, D.C .)Kimi Reith is from San Diego and lives now in San Francisco. A chapbook, Poems for
my Mother and the Women I have Loved, has recen tly been published by Second
Coming Press, San Francisco.
Lee Schwartz lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and co-facilitates a women's prose/fiction workshop called "Oracle," which is working on an anthology to be publishedthis win tel.
Claudia Scott lives in Philadelphia. Portrait, a book of her earlier poetry, was publishedby Lavender Press.
Deborah Snow is a co-publisher of Persephone Press. More of her photographs can beseen in The Fourteenth Witch, available from Persephone, Box 7222, Watertown, Ma.
She recently had a photographic exhibition at the Woman's Building in Los Angeles.
103Arlene Stone's books of poe try include Th e Image Maker (Emmanuel Press, 1976), Th e
Shule of Jehovah (Plowshare Press, 19 76), and Through a Coal Cellar, Darkly (Juniper
Press, 1977).
Chris South wo rks on the Fem inary, a fe min ist lesbian journ al fo r the South .
Sherry Thomas is one of the fo und ers of Country Wo men magazine, co-au thor of theboo k Country Women , and is now doing a book of interviews with old women who
have spent their lives fa rming.
Martha Yates is a carpenter from Vermon t. She is presently living in Brookline, Mass.
Irene Young is a por trai t photographer in New Yo rk Ci ty .

SINISTER WISDOM POSTER STILL AVAILABLE
In the spring of 1977 , a Tee Corinne solarized photograph of two women
making love appeared on the cover of Sinister Wisdom 3 , followed by adeluge of requests for a poster . The poster was printed in the summer of1977 : a duplicate of that cover, black on gray , 17" x 22". You can haveyour own for a contribution of $3.00 toward the survival of Sinister Wisdom
plus 50 cents to cover mailing costs . (They make nice gifts for friends , too ;bulk rates available.)

Send $3.50 per poster to : Sinister Wisdom , Box 30541 , Lincoln, Ne. 68503 .
Also available in feminist bookstores.

SINISTER WISDOM ON TAPE
The sixth and seventh issues of Sinister Wisdom are now available on cassettetape. If you are interested in borrowing or purchasing the cassettes for either
or both issues, please write Sinister Wisdom , Box 30541 , Lincoln , Ne. 68503 .

Sinister Wisdom
Box 30541
Lincoln, Ne. 68503
I would like to subscribe to Sinister Wisdom.
_____ Enclosed is $7.50 for one year (4 issues). beginning with issue 9.
___ _ _ Enclosed is $13.00 for 8 issues, beginning with issue 9 .

NAME _____________________________________ _ ________ _ADDRESS - - -- ----------------------------------------- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ' - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ZIP - - - - - - - - - - - -,Enclosed is ________ . Please send SW to my friend .
NAME _______________________________________________ _ADDRESS----------------- --------------------------- - _____________________________________ ZIP _____ _______ _SUBMISSIONS
Sinister Wisdom welcomes unsolicited manuscripts and art work. Please type(double-spaced) all written work. Reviews should be no longer than 3500
words; articles no longer than 5000 words. Enclose self-addressed , stamped
envelope and a 2-3 line description of yourself. At this time , we can pay
only with a subscription or copies of the issue in which your work appears.
Please indicate which "payment" you prefer. Allow six weeks for reply.

Important: Please mail poetry directly to Susan Leigh Star, 52 Mars Street,
San Francisco, California 94114 . All other manuscripts, correspondence , andart work should be sent to Sinister Wisdom , Box 30541, Lincoln, Ne . 68503.

BACK ISSUES, WHILE THEY LAST
Issue 1 (Summer 1976): " ... solid politically, beautiful to look at , breaks
the male language barrier. . . ." 72 pp., $2 .00.
Book Issue 2 (Fall 1976) Lesbian Writing and Publishing, guest editor BethHodges: Susan Griffin on breaking the conspiracy of silence ; June Arnold
and Bertha Harris reinventing the world in Lesbian fiction; panel on reading,writing, and teaching Lesbian literature ; essays on a woman-identified aesthetic; reviews; interviews; listing of Lesbian titles (with ordering information), and twenty-one Lesbian writers on why , when and how we publish
with women. 136 pp. $2.50.
Issue 3 (Spring 1977): Sold out.
Issue 4 (Fall 1977): stories of mothers and daughters and witches and lovers;
Joanna Russ's tale for the girlchild in all of us; Lesbian separatism from theinside; photo-essay; interview; reviews, letters and poetry. 96 pp., $2 .25 .
Issue 5 (Winter 1978): Susan Leigh Star, "Lesbian Feminism as an Altered
State of Consciousness"; Judith Schwarz, "Researching Lesbian History";
Michelle Cliff on speechlessness; Lesbian Day speech by Barbara Grier; fiction ;poetry; photo-essay; reviews; interview. 104 pp ., $2 .25.
Issue 6 (Summer 1978): Julia Stanley , Mary Daly, Audre Lorde , Judith
McDaniel, Adrienne Rich on language and silence; Marilyn Frye on separatism and power; fiction by Sandy Boucher, Thyme Seagull; poetry; interviews; essays by Sarah Hoagland and Peggy Holland; drawings and photos.
104 pp., $2 .50 .
Issue 7 (Fall 1978): myths, monsters, teeth, etc. Jane Caputi on patriarchal
fish stories; Judith Schwarz on being physically different; self-portraits inprose and poetry by Alice Bloch and Susan Wood-Thompson; feminist musings by Melanie Kaye; plus a wealth of fiction, poetry, reviews, drawings, andphotographs. 104 pp., $2.50(Add 50 cents postage for every 1-2 copies ordered.)

8 .'

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2.50