SINISTER WIS..1e"the rape our lack of language:
last night Boston November
the river flat pewter veined with light"you can't write poems about sunsets, the ocean, or love"
explained my Expos teacher freshman year
prick

sunsets are nonlinear Isis
squats over the water Her
thighs opening Her
great angry Uterus heaving writhingbloody scarlet streams of clouds
sun splitting sky birthing dying
curved over latitudes
to a different dawn
a different set of suckling stars.

-Susan Leigh Star

Published three times a year
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SINISTER WISDOMVOLUME I, ISSUE 1

JULY , 1976

Editors: Harriet Desmoines
Catherine Nicholson
Contributing Editor: Beth Hodges
Technical Advisor: Jan Millsapps
Special Thanks to: Drastic Dykes,
women of the Charlotte Lesbian Center

Cover graphic by Marianne Lieberman\

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Harriet Desmoines
Julia Stanley
Susan Leigh Star
Ellen Marie Bissert
Catherine Nicholson
Jan Millsapps
Deena Metzger
Elsa Gidlow

Notes for a Magazine
Go Tell Aunt Rhody ...
A Cursory and Precursory
History of Language ...
PoetryInside Front
Christina

13
Cover
16

How Rage Mothered my Third
Birth . ..
Poetry35
46

from Scars on the Body
Politic
from Ask No Man Pardon

3, 27
69
5

49
53

54

Kris Gray

Journal Entries
Graphic
Once Upon a Time •..

Merril Harris

from Sisterworld

57

Cathy Cruikshank

Opening Conclusion

60

Puce

Purple Passage

62

Mandy Wallace

55
56

TO PROSPECTIVE CONTRIBUTORS:"Deadlines" are the lifelines of a magazine. Our lifeline forthe third issue is December 15, 1976.
We welcome ALL forms of material that develop the vision ofSinister Wisdom (see "Notes" on pages 3 and 27). Please do not
submit poetry that is unrelated to the creation of a revolutionary
lesbian imagination in politics/art. (We're overwhelmed with fine
poetry, and we must choose according to content.) We need line
drawings.
Right now we pay contributors with a year's subscription. However, as soon as we're able to cover production costs, we'll publist a rate schedule for contributing writers and artists.
We protect your work with copyright, but all rights revert toyou. We would like Sinister Wisdom credited when work is reprinted
Copyright@SINISTER WISDOM 1976.

(Note: We shall nevers~gn ~ver rights to .r~produce any part of this maga-z~ne ~n the non-fem~n~st press.
The right of copy on
all individual pieces, however, is reserved to theauthor.)2

Harriet
NOTES FOR A MAGAZINE I

The Editors:
We're lesbians living in the South.
We're white; sometimes unemployed, sometimes working part-time.
We're ageneration apart.
Catherine directed university plays for twenty
years until the spring she pasted on her office door:"You are a witch by saying aloud, 'I am a Witch,' threetimes, and thinking about that.
You are a witch by being female, untamed, angry, joyous, and immortal."
I was an erratic activist in the civil rights mover
ment, the Left, and then the radical feminist women's
movement. During the same ten years I was first a student, competing my way into the professional classes,
and then a wife/stepmother, having settled on marryingin.
Between us we span the political/cultural abyss.
Catherine is vulnerable to criticism from writers,
artists, and heads of English departments.
I'm vulnerable
to all criticisms couched in Marxist terminology. We'reboth quick to perceive or imagine slights on our motives
or abilities.
A nightmare reveals our fears: Catherine dreams that
she wakes next to me.
I'm holding slides of mutilatedbodies and soundlessly screaming . Catherine looks up
at the blank TV.
A single open eye stares at us fromthe screen.
So why take chances? Because we needed MORE toread on, to feed on, more writing to satisfy our -greedy
maws.
We'd become lesbian separatists because no otherpolitical position satisfied. But that left us with
scattered beginnings of a culture and no viable strategy.
We believed with the CLIT papers that consciousness is
women's greatest strength, and we both responded
strongly to Mary Daly's call for "Ludic cerebration,
the free play of intuition in our own space, giving
rise to thinking that is vigorous, informed, multidimensional, independent, creative, tough." But how tothink that keenly and imaginatively, how to developthat consciousness?

3

We knew how far we'd come with each other.
We'd given each other the strength to let go of illusory"safe places," those toeholds the patriarchy offers women who deny themselves and other women. We'd talked
and talked and set fire to each other's imaginations
until, with the help of other lesbians, we were spinning visions and digging more and more deeply at theroots of our experience as boundary dwellers.
Thinking
about our past together, we decided to do with numbersof women what we've done best with each other; we decided to extend the love affair with Sinister Wisdom.
Sinister Wisdom is also our political action. We
believe that writing of a certain consciousness has
greater impact when it's collected, when several voices
give weight, harmony, and countermelody to the individual message.
The consciousness we want Sinister Wisdom
to express is--briefly--that of the lesbian or lunatic
who embraces her boundary/criminal status, with the aimof creating a new species in a new time/space.
We're using the remnants of our class and race privilege to construct a force that we hope will help ultimately destroy privilege. We have the freedom for ayear to edit and produce a magazine. We're paying forand controlling the contents of three issues. Whensomeone sends us $4.50 anytime in the following year,
they'll receive the three issues of Volume I.
THAT'S A
BLOOD PROMISE.
If contributions of money and labormaterialize, we'll continue for a second year, a second
volume of three issues.

-Harriet Desmoines

None of the women who contributed to this issue knew
what our vision was. They had onLy an ambiguousLy
worded LeafZet; most had neither known nor heard ofus. contributors shouLd not be heLd responsibLe forthe poLitics of the magazine. Nor shouLd Issue I be
taken as a definitive modeL of what you might want tosubmit for future issues.

For coming, coming, Coming ... see p. 72.

The titLe Sinister Wisdom was suggested to us by a Linein Joanna Russ' The Female Man (New York: Bantam Books 31975)3 p.

470.

JuliaA CURSORY AND PRECURSORY HISTORY OF LANGUAGE,
AND THE TELLING OF IT

Today I offer my words to the women who created me inlove and in life, in our lives, of whom I am and will
be in this life.
This is my telling of our history, of
how I dreamed it, of how we came into our own sayings.

(the men) say that they have said~ this is such or
such a thing~ they have attached a particular word
to an object or a fact and thereby consider themselves to have appropriated it. The women say~ so doing
the men have bawled shouted with all their might toreduce you to silence. The women say~ the language you
speak is made up of words that are killing you. Theysay~ the language you speak is made up of signs thatrightly speaking designate what men have appropriated.
Whatever they have not laid hands on~ whatever they
have not pounced on like many-eyed birds of prey~ does
not appear in the language you speak. This is apparent
precisely in the intervals that your masters have notbeen able to fill with their words of proprietors andpossessors~ this can be found in the gaps~ in all thatwhich is not a continuation of their discourse~ in thezero~ the O~ the perfect circle that you invent to imprison them and overthrow them.
(Monique Wittig~ LES GUERILLERES~ p. 114)
WinteT Solstice, the year 400 of the Age of Women.
The time of processes evolving themselves out of what
has been.
The women emerging into the light, out of
the earth that had sheltered them for 200 years.
This
is the story of one woman and her going-out, the storyof what she knew and carried within her, bringing her
past to the future.
The "feminist solution" had come easily, as things
do, when everyone had relaxed and stopped stumblingover themselves. As usual, the solution was the easiest and the most obvious, and had been within reachforever, but no one had seen it. We had been looking
off into the distance for so long that the obvious waseasy to miss, being obvious.
And the analysis of thefeminist situation came even easier.

5

Energy.

That simp'le.

Women had energy.

Men,lords and masters of the earth, as they'd like to callthemselves, with typical presumption, had indeed been
"masters" of a simple trick of manipulation which had
given them the control of energy they needed to maintain their "ego-strength." During the dark centuries
known as the Time of Men, they had learned to tap into
energy sources.
They had learned to draw the hugequantities of energy they required from the earth,water, fire, sun, and atom. Most importantly, they hadlearned how to draw energy from women.
The major difference, however, between the energy of women andother kinds of energy was · that the energy of women,
psychic energy, couldn't be stored or controlled. So
men had put the women in little boxes, which theycalled "houses," restrained the power of female energy
with monogamy, channeled that energy into maintaining
the nuclear family, and plugged it in a direct line tomale supremacy. This insured that every man would
have a life-long supply of one woman's psychic energy
to support him in his struggles with other men.
No
man had to earn such support; it was his as a resultof what some called "divine right" and others called"survival of the fittest." Fortunately, men didn't
live as long as women, so we had a few years to ourselves as we prepared for our dying. Now, without thatpermanent source of psychic energy, men were about as
powerful as dead storage batteries or burnt-out lightbulbs.
And the analogy will hold if you work it out
to its conclusion.
Now, some have insisted on asking why women, if
they were so strong, even in those days, went on
letting men harness them and use them without resistingin some way.
Some have even gone so far as to suggestthat this lack of res i stan ce proves the "inferiority"of women.
After all, how could any person be stup i denough to remain trapped for so long? Which is only
one way of asking a ridiculous question, a pseudoquestion. Women did not "fight back" because they
didn't have the energy to construct alternatives forthemselves.
They had learned to be content with living, breathing, and caring, each in her own way.
It
was the women, after all, who maintained living, who
nurtured, who fed, who clothed, who created the "home."
They had not yet realized that they could nurture andfeed each other, and they rarely begrudged their giving
to these weaker creatures who s e emed to need nurturing
so much more than they did.
Consequently, there wasno "battle to be fought." Women smiled, encouraged,
and sometimes wept, and went on being women, although
they began to wear themselves out trying to fulfill
the needs of men.
(Men required tremendous quantities
6

of energy.) You could always spot a woman who was connected to men in those days, especially toward the beginning: they began to age quickly, usually within
three or four months after accepting the male.
They
would develop a harried, haggard look, severe lines
around the eyes and mtiuth, and their eyes would become
clouded with pain and frustration.
In the latter days,
women began to turn to each other, and the effects ofliving with men became clearer to everyone, because
these woman-loving-women, who had as little as possible
to do with men and their tiring games, looked fuller,
healthier, somehow more alive and self-satisfied.
The men, meanwhile, went on about their "business,"making more "business" for themselves, setting traps
and springing them, breaking them, putting them back
together.
Of course, part of the arrangement thatpleased the men the most was called "the double standard," even back then. Women were taught, usually by
their mothers, that they were to love only one man forever, and it usually worked out that way, because thewomen didn't have the time or the energy for exploration.
The men, on the other hand, were free to"raid" other women of their energy, as long as no one
noticed that they were draining more than one woman.
In fact, having more than one woman for energy was agreat source of pride to them, since it proved thatthey were "manlier than other men," and they loved toboast of their "conquests."
At any rate, once women began to love themselves
and each other, they awakened and realized what had
been happening to their lives, and they started tomove together, what they called "a movement," a moving
in and out of each other's lives, and it was only aquestion of time until they came to know each other,and the future began to happen.
Therein lay the solution, although no one knew it then, looking back on
the events that we now see to be inevitable.
Energybeing energy, it will always flow in the direction ofleast resistance. You can cut channels for it, as themen had, channels like "marriage," to make it moveeasier, but energy will flow with or without the channels.
What sparked those first feminists was the factthat men had begun to take themselves seriously, actually believing that their pretentions and pomposities
were profound and important events!
They thought they
were NECESSARY!! They began to believe that they wereself-perpetuating, and it finally reached a point
where they had plundered and pillaged, ravaged andraped, not only the women, but the earth, and eachother.
It became clear that the energy was runninglow, because men used a lot of energy, but they were7

physically and psychically incapable 01 r e turnin g energy to its source.
They never put anything back into
the resources they were using up so quickly, and things
got worse and worse, and the men became dissatisfied
and irritable as they had less and less energy withwhich to propel themselves, and they didn't understandwhat was ha?pening. They didn't think there was anything to understand.
The feminists, all this time, went on having meetings where everyone disagreed about everything imaginable, talking and arguing with other women, puttingout a lot of energy and getting a lot of energy fromother women, which they called "consciousness-raising,"
learning to love themselves and each other, and learning to do all the things they had believed they
couldn't do.
Nothing seemed to make sense, and thenall of it made sense, and they continued to become
what they were becoming.
They were getting ready forwhat was going to happen, preparing themselves forliving in a new world coming -around.
They had ceased
to oppose the ordering of the men, had realized that
opposing, the act of opposing, drains energy, creating
its opposite, lack of energy. They had learned that
opposing a thing merely feeds it and strengthens it,
giving it a reason to continue itself.
Instead, they
withdrew into their centers, forcing the men to oppose
them, to drain themselves in the idle activity of battle a g ai nst, while the women began to live f or .
The
women, growing toward wholeness, began to understandthat opposition is itself : o pposition .
The men, in
their appropriation of the world , had defined identity
as opposition.
The women, in becoming themselves, began to create identities out of themselves, on a new
ground.
They refused to oppose, for opposition merely
validates that which it negates. Now, none of themknew how to live differently, but they came to understand that whatever was coming around would grow outof their lives, and they knew that "dissent must transcend the status of negative identification." They had
to create the future out of themselves.
The feminists went underground allover the world,
moving into the large networks of underground caverns,
taking with them their psychic energy, leaving the mento their own violent devices.
They took their power
into themselves and transformed their lives.
Becausethings that are going to happen, will happen, womengave their energy to each other , which meant there
was no depletion among them, and the men destroyedthemselves on the "horns (so to speak) of their own
dilemma."When the women began to withdraw more and more
noticeably, in increasing numbers, the men didn't knowwhat to do.
But they tried everything that could come8

into their one-track minds, and all they could think
about was "how to get the women back." What is a man
without a woman? So they stormed, they threatened,
they raged, they killed, and finally, they begged ,pleaded, and, yes, even wept. To no avail.
We'dheard all the lines before, maybe phrased a little
more subtly, but a line is a line!
Things went back and forth for awhile.
It tookanywhere from three to five years in those times for awoman to be born to herself again, and even today we'restill sorting through, getting rid of centuries ofbondage and drainage. Those of us alive now will never be whole, but we'll die on the way to regaining ourfull womanpower.
Others, who come after us, will be
the women we aspire to be.
Back to our story. The women began to leave themen, singly at first, then in twos and threes, often
waiting until nightfall to slip away to the nearest
underground group.
The men couldn't find them, although they tried.
Even if they had been able to findthem, there was nothing they could do to accomplish
their purpose, getting back the women.
This was theirdilemma: they needed the women in order to continue todo the things they had always done; but all they knew
was violence and hatred.
In order to get the womenout of the caves, they would have had to blow the
caves up, thus killing the women, thus destroying thevery thing they were after.
In their anger, theywould have destroyed the women who were the targets of
their anger, and the reason for the anger in the firstplace.
All that they knew how to do was fight and coerce and destroy. Even their promises were transparent threats.
Therein lay the paradox, the consequences,and the solution.
Since men needed women for psychicenergy, they couldn't risk destroying them. Without
women, they had only their own negative energy, and inone, last, desperate rage, they turned their negative
energy on themselves, blowing themselves into eternity.
Leaving the earth, such as it was, to the women.
And we learned and grew together in the caverns,
reclaiming the powers we had put aside and denied,learning much together of joy and wholeness . Learning
again to love, creating from our loving a language offeeling, of movement, of growing. The language of women loving became a language of sharing love, a speaking of minute sensualities and flickering tongues, alanguage that expressed our thoughts and feelings,
quick things, languid things, but alive and changing.
The language we had learned in the world of men,the ~anguage we had brought with us to the caverns,
gradually fell away from our minds.
Its rigidity, theinflexibility of its categories, its need for classif6

ication, were no longer sufficient for the thirrgs wewere experiencing. We no longer had space for dichotomies and abstractions, for as we outgrew dichotomies,
we found we didn't need abstractions.
Our eyes became
alive, and our language formed itself out of our perceptions of distinctions evolving within us and aroundus. We no longer needed that peculiar fusion of opposites in expressing our joy or our disappointment.
Words that had once served the dual functions for describing our sexuality and our feelings of rage or disgust began to drop out of usage; we did not need to
speak of being fucked, screwed, nailed, or ripped off,
nor did we have any use for the strange combination ofviolence and sex that we had learned from such words.
As our understanding of change grew out of our ownchanges, so our use of time began to change, and weunderstood how the present was the creative evolutionof the past blending with the possibility of the future.
And our language gradually developed a time inwhich our memories of the time before and our hopes
for the days to come blended and fused.
In the caverns, we learned to explore silence,both what it had meant to us before and what it mightcome to mean in our understanding.
In the old days,
before we had come to know ourselves, we had felt uneasy within our silences, the silences that often comeamong people. Then, our silences had been painful,uneasy obstacles that we tried to leap with words; but
our words were empty, not carrying meanings to ourselves or others, because we were afraid of our meanings, of our feelings.
Because our words were empty,
we would throw them into our silences, trying to fill
our silences with noises, chattering teases, lips andtongues struggling toward meaning, but our throats
tensed to strangle any meaning that might slip throughour defens'es. We had carefully been taught to excise
our thoughts and feelings from our spoken words and,in the process, we came to realize how we had falsified our words and our silences, thereby betraying
ourselves. We had filled our silences with words thatpointed away from our center, and the awkward silence
into which we had hurled our useless words had remained, full of the strain and tensions of our unexpressed motivations, expectations, and fears.
And
that jostling crowd of what we did not say became the
air we breathed.
As we grew in knowing ourselves, we put aside thelanguage we had once cherished for its ambiguities,
although we had called those ambiguities "subtle nuances." We had once been proud to speak a language inwhich we had no means of speaking our meanings clearly,
even to ourselves.
First, we had to discover ourmeanings, and out of that discovery grew a language10that expressed them clearly.
As strength dissolved
our need for fear we began to explore our silences,which came to satisfy us as rest and the fulfillment
of meaning. We learned to speak only when there ismeaning in our words. That was the hardest thing we
had to learn, so many of us did not know we had
meanings.
The language that evolved out of our learning together was a language of acting in the world, rather
than "events"; it was a speaking of our living, notour "lives"; of our doing, not our "deeds"; of ourtouching, eating, tracing, dancing, of moving, not"motion," of dying, not "death." The nouns of men became our verbs, what had been "objects" became doers.
The abstraction, the labeling, the classification, theimposing of a fixed, external order was no longer
needed.
"Love," "death," "honor," "dignity," and"trust" were expressed in our living together; we did
not need to speak of such things as though they wereunreal, fragile.
Through the verb we entered into theworld and began to understand the other beings in theworld as they lived. We began to learn to participate
in the world, to move and grow with it, and so ourspeaking became our meaning in the life of the world.
There is a story we still tell for the joy of thetelling, of a group of women who once gathered together, and some of the women called for words fromthe other women, and out of these words they wove a
chant, and the chant became a singing together.
And
one woman yelled out the word anarchism~ which wasthen woven into the fabric of the chanting, and in the
chanting that word became orgasm~ going on.
Accept this telling of me as it is of you. We
belong t o ourselves . Feel the power that is yours
swell and lift within you.
It is yours.
It is you.
It is all of us . Womanlove self-creating womanpower
within us.
Take your power into your hands and lift
them up, your power living in you.
Let us join ourhands together in strength and in love, the radiantpower of women.
Let us speak the language of ourliving.

-JuLia Stan Ley

I have troubLe writing about myseLf in the first person. I'm aLways writing either about myseLf or to myseLf~ but most importantz.y~ I write out of myseLf.
So it's hard to write out of
myseLf about me writing out of myseLf. (Am I making myseLf
cLear?) Other women often ask me WHY I write~ WHY I engage in
the activity of putting my words down on paper so that other women wiLl. read them. It's a good question that I can't answer~
and I often ask myseLf the same question. I think they want toknow "who the heU :r think I am" and "why ao I think '!lJi.. ideas
are important enough to be corrmi~ted to paper." Again~ I don't
11know the answer(s). I do know that things happen in my lifethat start things happening in my head~ and then I start to findit hard to know where I began and where I'm going~ and I start
to write it all out of me~ which forces me to really listen tomyself and what I'm saying. The act of writing creates an organization (when I get lucky)~ and I can then examine my thinking
and what's going on in my head. When I'm writing~ I'm hard atplay with myself.
Now~ you may say~ it's all very well for you to talk to yourself by writing~ but WHY publish the results? If I'm explaining
myself to myself~ what makes me think that anyone else is interested? To be honest~ hardly anyone is interested. But a few
are. All of us talk to ourselves. Some of us write~ others
paint~ or write poetry~ or sing~ or dance~ or act~ or meditate.
In each~ the primary activity is the talking to oneself. Communication with others begins with talking to oneself. (Maybe thisis the reason males can't communicate with others--they don't
talk to themselves~ and spend vast quantities of time talking at
or about others.)
Finally~ I believe that every speech act involves personalrisk on the part of the speaker or writer~ it she is being honestwith herself. And I believe that taking this risk is necessaryand healthy. If I choose not to expose my thoughts and feelings~
I am safely hidden. I can also hide behind language~ but I try
not to. The writing of my fable~ "A Cursory and Precursory History of Language~ and the Telling of It~ " involved great personalrisk~ because I also believe that trust must be based on a demonstrated and consistent correlation between one's words and one's
actions; and I cannot yet match my own actions to the words inthe fable. As I wrote the fable~ and as I spoke it at the GAU
conference~ I was shaking~ shaking because my self was Iron theline." I was frightened~ and I am still frightened when I readit~ because I cannot match my words.
But I was writing out of
my self~ writing of a self that does not yet exist~ a self thathas not been born. But I am engaged in dialogue with her.
-Ju Zia Stan ley

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bryant, D.M.
The Comforter: a mystical fantasy.
(Berkeley, California: Evan Press, 1971).
Daly, Mary.
"The Qualitative Leap beyond Patriarchal
Religion," Quest~ I (Spring 1975), 20-40.
Herbert, Frank.
The Godmakers.
Wilden, Anthony.
System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange.
(London: Tavistock Publications, Ltd., 1972).

12

Leighfor Jean n ed'Arc~

burn i n g

in the end
the fire is all that we will see.
already its glow shames my fear of death : 'I close my heated eyes,
smote against
Her indigo sky.
(listenI have found another of us)
our life the struggle torn
and melted, wounds suspended
she too has trained to burn in silence
who moved in dry and aching quiet
who loves with deadly grace.
At every rapeat every stake
incessantly whispered into
incessantly scraped acrosseach of our body's sacred openings
moment -by moment for all the days of our lives
We hurl molten sunsand slide and tear to kisscontaining movement-and slowly finish screaming:
We rip ourselves
into each other's blood,a union of liquid and blazes
burnished with alonenessthere are no echoes anymore in what is named love
I speak her name clearly into your eyes

13ashes melting: outof the flames, unraped eyes
there was nevera time when
we did not know
the stakes
are high
our silence whole

you cannot hear a scream
we also wound by naming
for which we have no language wealso wound by naming tearopen toheal

tigre mariposa*
we do not fear
your winged
poison your petalled
poise ofdeath
for some*UteraUY3 "tiger butterfly"
in Spanish; the most deadly typeof Venezualan snake 3 whose biteis alleged to kill in thirty seconds.
"Mariposa}' it may be noted3 isvernacular for Lesbian.
14

now poised to perceivewith my arched uterus.
a great arc
stretches from your eyes
through my spine
across which the faintest
rustle of thoughtrocks my cervix my center withtremors which are notdifferent from the nuzzle
and bulge of the moon
Artemisslipper perfect silence travels between us
who knows how long I waited to feelto see to hear
as a panther walking
picks her way
across a shelf of thin crystal glasses:
your hands lurk with that quality
soft searing pulses
poisedSusan Leigh star is a name I chose for myself--taking the first two
which are my birth-names and the last from a special Tarot readingin which the Star came up as the card of self/highest ideals.
My writing first of all is divided up sharply--a reflection of"them," not us--between poetry and social science theory. It'seasiest for me to conceptualize the difference in te~s of rightbrain-left brain activity: writing my thesis in psychology, forexample, meant days of linear, slow connections-.1'logica7!'by themale definition of the word. Poems come in an instant, for themost part; they "brew" for weeks or years in some section of myright brain and then burst forth in a very nonlinear fashion. But
there is some sharing on each side (the creative flash in theory
writing or the slow reworking of lines of poetry to make them"talk" right), which gives me a hope of integration someday. I
cherish both modes for myself and would like to see them appear
together in my work and in my world.
I live in Somerville with March, who is often the subject,sometimes the object, and always a participant in my writing. We
are radicallesbianwitchspiritualsexualpoliticalpersonalfeminis ts,
none of which lab~.ls can beat my favorite characterization of myself as a true deviant. (True deviants do not deviate from any
nO!'ms--and, therefore, another name for us is "no~al.")-Susan Leigh Star
15

Ellen Morie
CHRISTINA"Christina" is a work that has a Lot of emotion attaohed to its
writing and to writing for me in generaL. As an undergraduate,
I was the onLy woman in the "oreative honors program." ALthough
I had been writing Longer, Living harder, eto, I was the onLy
student and thus the onLy woman whose thesis (a ooLLeotion ofpoems) did not get passed. One month Later, I was being awarded
the first short story prize for an earLy version of "Christina."
That year I was eno~ousLy oonfused and wrote a seoond ohapter.
With these two, I was admitted into a graduate program in Creative
Writing--in fiotion. In the first few weeks of oLass, I was toLd
my work was boring, too oLose to the bone, and with a titter-"pornographio." Later I was teased about it to the point of
humiLiation for the oLass' amusement. Out of my strong sense of
injury, rage, and feminism, I worked to oreate 13th Moon, a Literary magazine pubLishing women exoLusiveLy.
It was two years before I was abLe to Look at "Christina"
again. As a friend heLped me gather the oonfidenoe to work, I
keenLy regretted having been so orueLLy exoLuded from Learning aoraft I wanted to know. It is now a very great joy to me that
Sinister Wisdom, a women's pubLioation, has ohosen to pubLish
this work.
-ELLen Marie Bissert

I have few friends and few social obligations during
the holidays.
I am aware people are gathering in midtown and I feel ashamed to be alone.
I begin a trip
toward an island with long beaches of rotting shellfish.
I know I am going home but I don't know where
I'm going.
I meet a childhood sweetheart or facsimile.
I amagain high-strung and virginal, he tense and plodding.
We ride again the train we rode.
It is now going in
the opposite direction.
It had been filled with warm
morning sun; now I stare numbly through the grimybarred windows at a littered, ~lattened landscape. We
pass turn-of-the-century stations painted in fluorescent colors, then stations painted in somber ones.
In
this section we leave the traip and go to a small garden with tables and chairs.
It seems to be a private
restaurant.
A man, resembling a neighbor famous for16his windows lined with cactus plants, waits for us toorder. We don't.
Still patient the waiter says to
my companion, "You want to marry her because ... " Hewinks and taps my companion's head.
I get up and walk very quickly to the station
where the train is about to pullout.
I catch it with
desperation.
Inside the car my skin quivers like arope about to snap.
I feel again the cold sand penetrating my legs. Again I smell of his damp hands
after he had urinated in the weeds.
As soon as I arrive at my mother's, I go to the store.
While I am traveling on the bus, some boy begins embracing me, saying how soft and how especially clean I
am. He stops abruptly and asks if I am a Catholic.
Isnicker to myself--once a Catholic, always a Catholic.
Thinking he is a fool, a Catholic, and a boy, I endure
it because it is expected of me.
I get off the bus to go to the record store to buy
a phonograph needle.
I see a man behind a counter surrounded by records through the glass. When I walk inside, there is a dark, empty room with a bed in one
corner and two young girls on the other side of theroom.
There are no windows and that boy is in the bed.
He calls me over and begins the same line. He doesn't
realize he can dispense with his seduction.
I understand how I must adjust to this situation and am anxious to have it over. Yes, I will go into that bed
with him with those girls in the room.
I don't care if
they titter and secretly masturbate while they watch.
I don't care if these fragile, unbroken girls are thevirginal "I." I just want to buy that needle.
There is a police raid. Before they break in, theboy lets me go.
I escape to my grandmother's tenement
house. My new apartment is next-door to hers.
My
door faces the basement which opens to forgotten
voices. This is the very apartment to which my parents
returned when I was five, doe-eyed and stringbean
legged.
It is warm and dark in the living room which
overlooks a hexagonal courtyard.
The kitchen is next
to it and overlooks a garden.
I have moved so impulsively I have no curtains.
I am afraid to go out andbuy them, but I am even more afraid I may again see
the faces of animals and animal-like people grimacing
at me.
It is Saturday night and I begin cleaning the kitchen.
I think of the cucumber seeds which became anest of roaches, of the mouse my father killed with acoat hanger.
A large rat approaches me as I sit on awooden dolly with my legs tightly closed, waiting forthem to let me through the window.

17

I go to the hardware supply store for something I havebeen needing quite badly.
I go by bike in shorts.
I
look thirteen but I am older. This is because I am
not wearing the clothes I want to wear or riding the
bike I want to ride.
I am in the discipline of expedient compromise.
Still I scold myself for not having
given myself the pleasure of cycling before or atleast sooner after my green racing bike was stolen .
As I get closer to the store, I become apprehensive.
I don't like it.
The very second I leave my bike I
become aware of myself as a body that is expected tolook one of a certain number of prescribed ways which
is Girl.
I become sweatier as I move toward the store.
My clothes are bands tightening around me . "Supposin'
to be a girl," resounds from every pane of glass where
I must reflect myself as Girl.
Everyone thinks that this store has everything andis everything, but its panes of glass are splatteredwith mud from the store's uncultivated plot.
The insides of these panes have been painted black and reveal me to myself with sharp, unflattering clarity.
They say, "Yes but no no." I almost forget how tostand and walk.
It has stopped raining after a long downpour, andthe sun is shining fiercely on my skin because I havebeen washing too much.
I am now raw to blister.
The
twelve panes of glass I must go by to get to the door
chatter, scream, and hiss, "supposin' to be a girl."
This is a men's place and I cannot belong.
In it I
must be Girl which means I must be checked and evaluated in every mirror and every reflecting surface.
In
one mirror, "You are too short and fat" is repeated
ten times.
In the next, the shaping of my eyebrow is
discussed--each hair, its history, my gestures toward
it, its tweezing, its follicles, its relationship to
my metabolism, my social, my sexual life.
An analyzed
history of each of my cells is given for my ultimate
perfection, for unless I am perfect I will not become
Woman.
After visiting fifteen mirrors I feel I am goingto faint.
But this would prove me even more ugly,
gauche, and stupid.
I want to die but my rage savesme.
This is all unnecessary.
I have told myself
these things before.
A man comes over and asks me what I am doing in thestore.
I can't remember.
I become so anxious I feelI am going to sweat the two of us into a puddle. With
effort I tell him I am looking for a part to something.
He laughs at me and goes away.
Then another man who
is or who looks like my father takes me into a coolgray bedroom. He is tall, cool, and ascetic like theroom.
I have wanted this room and its colors.
I havewanted such a man.

18

Later when we walk out of the room, I am covered
with excretions while this man remains clean. He
looks like my father.
Have I been sleeping with myfather? Surely it can't be.
It is unlikely he could
have created such an elegant room. But like my father
this is a realistic man, addicted to inflicting thefacts of harsh comparisons.
He brings me before a poster of a very fragile,fawn-like woman. This is what I am supposed to be like,dress like. He places me at an angle with the picture's
glass to juxtapose my image beside hers.
I want tokill myself.
He is delighted I am so quick to understand and with the exuberance of one whose ego has
been deeply gratified conducts me through a complete
tour of his posters. At the end there is a hold-up
during which I am taken to bed by a gangster. He, too,drags me through his gallery. He demands that I become one of his buxom poster girls, for these are thereal women and making love to one of them is to experience Sex.
Finally I am thrown downstairs with the Women.
I
am now at a ball where everyone except me is formally
dressed.
The men hand me over to the Women as if I
were a beast which they occasionally fuck.
I am accepted for the men's sakes.
These women are what I once thought I wanted tobe. They will transform me into Woman. Slowly theyencircle me. They are about to rip my genitals "supposin' to be a girl."
In a medium-sized room I am eleven years old.
I amwith people older than I and have talked with a halfdozen of them without leaving the golden sofa. At
first I think this is cowardly of me.
I try to get up
but I am so weak I cannot move. My limbs are small
and underdeveloped. The night progresses and I growbigger while people talk with me.
At the end of theevening I am a plump seventeen year old.
Perhaps for this reason I get invited to the next
meeting where I am the only female.
I am not particularly bothered about this at first.
I feel very strong
and have had a good dinner so I will be able to maintain myself.
I do so without adding to the self-important arguments.
At 11 o'clock my yellow dress grows
brighter.
I am pleased I have not let the situation
give me a headache.
I then see one of tQe men whispering to the other.
"She looks young, flat and ugly
but she's a mean fuck." I stiffen.
These are supposed
to be my colleagues, not my prospective lovers.
They laugh with each other.
It is as if I wereinvisible.
I hear Miranda's name whispered and see
the leer in their eyes. They have all slept with her
19but cannot admit that not one of them has been able togive her an orgasm. They were nothing to her.
Through their lust, I see their sickly flush of
impotency. They do not seem to know I am Miranda's
first lover.
They begin to discuss their affairs with other
women, congratulating themselves on the number.
I tryvery hard to control the smirk on my face.
I haveslept with more women than any of them.
I am smoking with the confidence of a man with alarge stool-like cigar when it is suddenly my turn.
I
am unprepared as I have been fantasizing caressing
Miranda. The remark upsets me and denies Miranda herorgasm by twenty seconds.
I am so confused I cannot
speak. There is a riot and the lights go off.
I am in a narrow, black room with some boy.
I amthirteen and my body is in delirium. My stomach isbloated and my limbs are painfully thin.
A 300-wattbulb glares five feet above my head and illuminates
my every physiological defect to this sweaty, pimplefaced boy. For him I am supposed to be perfect. He
begins to kiss my neck while he manages to whisper how
I should make up my face, wear my clothes, and walk
down the street.
I use him to take me behind thestaircase the children climb to say their prayers. My
mother is meeting a lover and I am in the closet withthis boy, trying to watch her undress.
As I poke myhead from behind the door, her lover sees me and slams
my head against the wall ~My mother runs out in her
bra and screams when she sees that my glasses have beensmashed into my eyes. My reflection in the vestibule
mirror amuses me.
I am rewarded with a blindness dark
and warm.
The next day somewhat recovered I enter my mother'sroom. She is pretending to be sick and to have had
her legs permanently disabled . She is about to blame
me when she seductively takes her legs out of the covers and sees they are fine.
She passes the mirror tome and I see that my neck is full of cankerous sores
and my nose is stretched over its base.
I laugh thenleer at her as she dresses herself in front of me.
Itseems the more aware I become of her stupidity, callowness, and conceit, the more beautiful and voluptuous she becomes.
I am so beside myself I run fromthe room.
Later at a hamburger stand, I walk around without
letting anyone see my face.
Overheard remarks confirm
my opinion of myself as being tall, thin, with onionwhite skin. Only at this time can I eat hamburgers.
I get two for my mother and myself and am able to makesix out of the two. My mother is pleased with my, cleverness. When I give the burgers back to haverelish added, they are taken away.
I tell my mother20

who jokingly laughs that food is not the only pleasurein life.
I look at her carefully and ask, " Why don ' t
you just kill me?"
My girlfriend and I are eleven years old.
It is earlysummer and we have had our first experience of menstruation. Both of us are beginning our cycles, andwe have a strong romanticism about ourselves as women.
My friend is blonde with finely freckled skin. Herarms have fair down as does her entire body. Next to
her roundness I feel angular and coarse.
Fortunately
she is ignorant of my feelings.
As we walk throughthe . forest lush with goldenrod, thistles, ferns, andvarlcolored mosses, I am anxious. Her innocence annoysme.
I live in my head and face, but she barely seems
to be anywhere inside herself.
When we arrive at the home where we are to babysit, the children rush out to greet us.
Their parents
leave and we have lunch of chocolate eggnogs and tunafish sandwiches. Within the chocolateness of milk andthe saltiness of mayonnaise I feel safe.
I eat until
I am full.
After lunch we walk with the children under the
willow trees.
There is no breeze.
It is a stillafternoon with a harsh midday sun. When it is time togo back, I realize I must approach that house withouther.
I must sleep alone in a strange bed in a blackened house with crying children.
I dream I see her
white naked torso.
I dream I am sixteen and must walk
into twenty-one.
I must walk all night into the day
when I will be twenty-one and woman.
Through a gloomy, moist forest with cool wet
ground, I am thin to coltishness and am wearing an
Egyptian necklace.
The voluptuous night breeze does
not terrify me, and as I walk my necklace becomesbrighter.
I hear a voice announcing "It is now time
for the virgins to go to the temple to give themselves
to strange men. You cannot leave until you have doneso.
Some of you because you are attractive will return quickly, others never. You must go now to become
women."
My body begins to tremble and as I walk throughthe city's gates, the forest goes white and I fall.
Dirt is forced into my mouth and lungs.
I am covered
with a whitish sticky substance.
I vomit into mycrotch.
I go to the northern section of the island where there
are piers and factories and where I have to walkthrough the alleyway of my childhood where flies buzzaround the carcasses of mutilated rodents and wheretailless cats prance about them.
I am again that childabout to leave home.

21

As I walk down this street, I am looking for theaddress where I am to apply for a job. Before I get
there I must pass through a park where children smile
to each other sinisterly as they sit in groups of fourand five under the trees.
The girls insert the prickly
seed ball of the sycamore tree in and out of theirvaginas while alternating another fruit about theirnecks, breasts, buttocks and clitorises. The boys
split the balls and make cones.
They walk around withthe cones in hand trying to put them on someone else's
penis who once caught is spun about by his organ.
Although the children are not undressed, their genitals
are available for easy caress or assault.
Several arehaving anal intercourse under the beechnut trees andtheir exposed buttocks look like pale stones in thesun.
When I pass them , they watch me indifferently.
Before I reach the piers, I wander into a deserted
storefront with a broken window whose pieces are scattered beneath the ashes about the room.
It is thegray November of the twenty-third century and the fog
is coming off the bay.
This is my new home.
I go to bed with food on the table.
No sooner do
I fall asleep when the phone rings.
It is a painterfriend of mine who wants to meet the next day to discuss some project on which we are both involved.
Somehow in the course of the conversation I becomeaware that I have not eaten chicken for five years.
The point of my friend's conversation is to convince
me I must now or at least very soon prepare chicken.
I open the refrigerator and a chicken is sitting on
the top shelf defrosted.
Almost as soon as I begin toclean it, the phone rings again.
It is my friend or amutual friend of ours saying that the meeting is at
10 o'clock at my painter friend's house in the Heights.
I say yes, yes I will try to get there on time.
As I
walk back into the kitchen I become exhausted.
I realize that only if I - go to bed now will I be able toget enough sleep.
I shuffle into my bedroom and collapse into my bed without taking off my clothes.
The next morning I walk into the kitchen and see
the chicken in the sink.
Immediately I think of theroaches eating and laying eggs on my uncooked chicken
through the night. But because the chicken cost me
five dollars, I repress · my revulsion.
I decide toclean it and put it in the refrigerator to prepare
when I return.
But before I can even begin washing it,
the phone rings once more.
It is my friend.
She says
I am already very late and I should come over at once.
I rush out of my apartment and into the subway
station.
A train comes in about twenty minutes.
I
ask the conductor if I should get on this one.
Hesays yes but I know he is wrong.
I let the train pass.

22

While I am waiting, I realize I am still wearing mywinter coat although it is the beginning of summer.
Ithen see the girl who was once the beauty of my hometown traveling with her mother.
I am surprised Iva is
still unmarried.
She always had her choice of boyfriends. Without her being aware, I study her.
She
still looks like a Scarlet O'Hara with her heartshaped face, narrow shoulders, full breasts, small
waist, and short thin legs. Her eyes flash tauntingly
and her smile leers in contemptuous provocation.
Since Iva is going into Manhattan, the mother anddaughter seem to have decided Iva should look as sexyas possible.
The mother has always wished her daughterto marry a rich man or at least one who could support
them in comfort.
Iva always chose her boyfriends as
she wished but now it seems Iva realizing her youth isfading is willing to carry out her mother's schemes.
And today could be the one that Iva meets that nicerich man who will irresistibly be attracted to her.
With her mother's help, Iva lifts her yellow tank top
and removes her white bra exposing her large breasts
with long brown nipples to an appreciative audience of
middle-aged men.
The train going to the Heights arrives and we geton together.
I know they are going the wrong way but
I cannot bring myself to tell them.
Iva is flirtingwith the men on the train thinking they must be richsince the train is taking them into the city.
I feelsorry the train is taking them to the Heights and evensorrier I have again left the chicken in the sink.
I
move to another car passing the mother coaching Iva
from the nearest corner.
My mother sends me a picture from my childhood. She
sends me a picture of myself as a chrysanthemum.
I amnear my grandmother's garden.
I look out of the window
to it.
I see Iva.
I see two dreams spelled out in
granite blocks in the garden. One dream suggests Iva
wants to sleep with the boy who is now standing in the
doorway.
It says there is a train and a woman and thewoman stands so the" train goes over and over.
The
first dream s~ys I am a chrysanthemum girl.
As I goto the picket fence to read these dreams I see a rabbit.
I make amiable noises to the rabbit who draws
nearer.
As I draw nearer to the window to get it somefood, it finds a carrot in the grass.
It seems
pleased.
I am delighted the rabbit now has a carrot.
I go nearer to it. My mother is in the house andmoves toward the window.
She says I am a chrysanthemum girl. My dog, who has grown longer legs, a bigger
face and longer back, comes to meet me with an apple
she has picked from the garden.
The sun is moving
under.neath the trees.
I try to assure the rabbit that23

the dog will not hurt It.
The dog is a pony.
A ponydoes not chase a rabbit. We walk toward the second
half of the garden.
I read the dream that says atrain now runs over and over a woman who won't let it
stop.
This is Iva standing in the doorway across theyard kissing her boyfriend, who is exposing her
breasts to caress them in the afternoon sun.
I ameating an apple while I walk out of the garden with mydog. The rabbit has run away. My mother meets me at
the gate with a picture of me as a chrysanthemum girl.
I am not a chrysanthemum.
I am not Iva.
The chrysanthemum girl only exists in her mother's mind and Iva
in her boyfriend's arms.
I am neither.
A friend returns from an extremely painful abortion.
She comes back to me in my alcove adjacent to a monastery which overlooks a bend where two rivers merge.
I am somewhat annoyed that from my window I cannot see
the river; the sky, or the monastery where the monks
flagellate themselves at the third, sixth, ninth, andtwelfth hours of the night .
I want to watch theirbare backs lashed in the open field to the right ofthe chapel beside the bend.
I turn from the window and glance at my apartment
as I sense my friend's approach. She will be thefirst person to visit this apartment.
It is dark lessfrom want of paint than from a lack of a certain quality of spirit that would require cheery surroundings.
My friend comes into this rarefied atmosphere approaching me with such energy I am thrilled.
I am
happy to see her and relieved to know she is still
alive .
I am somewhat taken back when she kisses meand sticks her tongue into my mouth.
As she fondles my breasts, a group of our friends
arrive.
I try at once to stop her and to stall ourfriends from coming into the room.
Both are impossible.
The doorway is covered with a dark heavy drape and ourfriends merely announce themselves before they push it
aside and burst into the room. They find me undressed
attempting to remove my friend's bloody winter coat.
It is Saturday night and a friend is willing to gowith me to my doctor's. My doctor practices at nightand I have come to survey his patients.
It is about
8 o'clock when we arrive.
Shortly after a young woman
comes in dressed in blue jeans and an army jacket.
She is about twenty-five with green eyes and black
hair.
We talk about the problems of finding a good doctor.
She agrees that there wasn't much we could do
except come back to this one whose treatments, hours,
and personality were at best eccentric. She is thencalled in.
24

My friend and I are quiet after she goes into theexamining room.
Because only a curtain is covering
the door, my friend can easily overhear. He tells me
her symptoms are the same as mine--headac·hes , fatigue,nausea, and insomnia.
Another woman enters. She removes her hands fromthe pockets of her pea coat as she tells us she paints
houses, rooms and boats for a living.
I am so fascinated by her hands, I can barely listen. Her very long
fingers and white hands make me feel weak.
I go up to
her and caress them.
I cannot let go.
Suddenly the room is very crowded and everyone
gets on top of us as we lie on the secret bed u n derneath the table.
Her body is as soft as her hands.
I
can't think.
The pressure of her breasts against mine
is so pleasurable I am almost nauseous with its sweetness.
When everyone goes into the doctor's room, shetakes my hand and leads me outside to the park. There
has been a fierce rain and the ground is wet . She
takes me to an antique car with a high dashboard andwe sit on the stone wall near the car.
Once again she
permits me to caress her long thin fingers.
She thenwalks over to the car and lies down beside it, motioning me to come near her as she unbuttons her jacket.
I cannot.
I cannot lie down naked on the cold concretein the middle of winter on wet leaves to make love toeven her.
I do not understand why we cannot spreadourselves on the fallen leaves under a tree on thehill.
I cannot tell her because I want her too much.
My friend comes over to us and gives me a . bug. He
then looks at the woman lying on the wet pavement.
She says with irritation, " I was trying to show her
how to get high on engine grease but she's too dainty
to lie down on the concrete." My friend takes my arm
and walks me back into the doctor's office.
I board the train that will take a ferry which in turnwill bring me to an island.
Instead the train goesover a bridge parallel to the amusement park where I
was born.
A storm is raging and the waves pound theshore with such vengeance it is as if I were watchinga cartoon where the waves hit the beach like a greatfist.
I am about to laugh when I see the bridge collapsing.
Instantly we reach the park where the sun isshining.
I phone a friend to tell her I am walking down to
the far end of the beach to meet the very highest
waves.
I am very anxious to ride them.
I can barely
stop myself from undressing as I am talking to her andas I continue to walk to the bathhouse.

25

The bathhouse is a large Grecian building with multiple sets of steps which have been washed b y thewaves that have left purplish sandy residues in thecorners.
The sand has a livid, ominous quality.
As I
climb the steps I realize I am in a country where thewomen perform unspeakable acts on each other with
their small beautifully tanned bodies.
I change quickly with them in the common dressingroom.
As I go out of the building , I turn my ankle on
the staircase and the waves beat their purplish foam
up to my step.
The waves continue to rise and ebb forabout a half hour while the sun is beaming mercilessly.
When I finally get to the beach, it's cloudy. The
women warn me there are giant eels in the water.
The
water is killing the eels.
Even as I watch the eels
thrashing themselves to death on the shore, I cannot
believe the water can kill.
As I move closer to theshoreline, I am overcome by the stench of the eels
dying on the shore.
-E ZZ e n Mar ie Bissert

26

NOTES FOR A MAGAZINE II

The Title:
We call our space sinister Wisdom because the root
meaning of "sinister" is "from the left side." The Lawof the Fathers equates right-over-Ieft, white-overblack, heterosexual-over-homosexual, and male-overfemale with good-over-evil.
Sinister Wisdom turns these
patriarchal values upside down as a necessary prelude
to creating our own.
The left, the genuine Left, means revolution.
Wechoose "sinister" because we mean, we intend revolution.
Revolution that destroys the structures of oppression
as we seize power over our own lives.
And the left side connotes intuition, the bringing
into light of all that has lain dormant within us.
Sixmonths ago I wrote this about the right and the left ina letter to lesbian friends:

The right side, the anaLytio side of my body, is as
deadLy as it is neoessary for my survivaL. From its vantage point, I tr>u.St no one, Least of aU myseLf. When I
rest aLone on my right, when I Lie on the outting faoeof the doubLe-axe, I oenter in death. From the oenterof my own reourring deaths, I reoognize the deathdeaLingof others--eaoh moment the oppressor denies the oppressed,
eaoh moment the oppressed deny themseLves and eaoh other.
Remembering her knowLedge of who's-doing-what-to-whomwhen makes a drastio dyke drastio; remembering distinguishes her from humanists, mystios,and UberaLs.
From another vantage, Looking at you and at myseLf,
we unfoLd into animaLs breathing, huge as the universe
and refLeoting a universe in our eyes. From .the Leftside of my body, I oan bareLy form words to desoribe what
my mind knows as flux, what it senses as streams, the. flowing we are aLone and as we oonverge. Everything Living and hoping breathes in my Left side; it's the dark
onLy spring of eostasy, Love, and wiLL. From the Leftside of my body, I hoLd you. From the dark part of myhead, I know you without the words to say it--some intimateLy, some by flashes onLy.
Finally, a sinister wisdom is reversal.
Show theunderbelly, praise the underbelly, and the beast rolls
onto its back.
Thereby baring its throat to the fangsof the Furies.

27

Who-o-o-o is a Lesbian?
The content of Sinister Wisdom grows out of a lesbian consciousness.
Lesbian consciousness marks astyle of the body: a leaning toward women; it marks astyle of the mind: the female mind swung like a winnowing fan, sifting the chaff of terror for the broken
remnants of grain.
(The winnowing fan was used not
only to winnow grain but also as a cradle for babes andthe fruits of the earth.
In Demetrian cults it symbolized purification and rebirth.)
But lesbian consciousness is also a process thatbegins long before a woman comes out and is never completed, only strengthened and enriched.
No one lives
with it all the time. Personal example: I couldn't dothis magazine if I weren't a lesbian.
The energy andthe vision come from women--and the loving needed forworking. But there were moments and pages before I became a lesbian when I anticipated.
Some few times,
still living with men, I wrote out of a consciousness
characterized by sinister wisdom.
And there are times
now, whole days often enough, when I'm straight and stupidly scared in my head.
Consciousness, its spectrum
and its process, cuts across even the divisions of timeand identity.
Consciousness expressed in printed work has its own
peculiarities.
Compare a magazine to a concert: lesbianmusic played for lesbians generates higher energy thanlesbian music played for a general women's center audience because the energy and art of the music come into
being somewhere between the audience and the performer.
Words, too, come into being somewhere between the writerand the reader, but the immediacy of group emotion islost and has to be carried by the communal nature of
the language.
Any lesbian reading Sinister Wisdom
reads probably alone or in a group of her own choosing,and her experience is not affected by the possible factthat at the other end of the continent a curious feminist, husband clutching her arm and babe clutching her
skirt, is skimming the magazine in a bookstore.
A magazine is not a poetry reading; it's a public document,
not a public event.
Not all the women who subscribe are lesbians; wedon't think that makes this any less a journal devoted
to the creation of a lesbian imagination.
And we dothink that creating a specifically lesbian imaginationin politics and art is the most important gift any woman can give to all women, whether it's recognized as a
gift or not.
A consciously radical lesbian is a radical
feminist with "oomph".
The consistency of her politics
does NOT make her morally superior, but it does give her
freedom to ima~ine and freedom to lead.
She has broken

28the Big Taboo, freely chosen Monsterhood; she's thus
better able to call up and focus energy.
(Heterosexual behavior is so ritualized that it requires enormous energy for a woman to retain independence in a marriage or an affair.
And the single celibate woman, if she holds herself back from being
touched by women, loses the energy that's generated bystroking, the physical acts of caring that give a woman
support in a world intent on breaking her spirit.
Manylesbians are notoriously energetic for good and simple
reasons. And most lesbians exist outside the structural ,locus of female oppression: the family.)
Not all the women who've contributed to this issue
are lesbian-identified.
In part that's because many
women who write or draw work ahead of themselves; theyprophesy.
There's a tentative license (easily revoked)
to put forbidden parts of oneself on paper, as long as
it's called "art."(Why else do you read things in women's poetry that you don't find for another five years
in their political statements?) Now, what we mean by"lesbian consciousness" is really a point of view, aview from the boundary.
And in a sense every time a woman draws a circle around her psyche, saying "this is aroom of ~ own," and then writes from within that"room," she's inhabiting a lesbian consciousness.
Eachwoman represented in the magazine is moving outside
patriarchal culture.
All are boundary dwellers; itshows in their visual language and in their words.

Sinister Wisdom speaks primarily to and for lesbians
because most feminist boundary-dwellers are lesbians.
We didn't conjure up that fact, as a check of local militants will show; we simply want to recognize it as afact.
But Sinister Wisdom ' also leaves the ninth door
ajar.
(This is a queer, enticing little door at theend of a narrowing passageway.)
Class:The only real intellectuals I've known personally,
people for whom ideas are bread and wine, the sustenanceof their lives, have been people from the working andlower middle classes.
The people in this country withthe greatest reverence for the power of the word havebeen rural Southern Blacks. The most moving poetry andmusic written in the United States roots itself in therhythms and passion of the original Blues singers, thedaughters and granddaughters of enslaved Black women.
We don't think we're being "classist" by wanting themost beautiful and articulate writing we can lay hands
on. We insist on the political relevance of philosophy,
scholarship, drama, experiment'a l fiction ... all that has
been claimed by those who want to keep "the masses" ignorant.

29

As lesbians, we know with only a moment's reflectionthat our lives are our art, pregnant with revolution.
We who have fallen between the rungs of the class ladder know that we need an art that makes art of survival,
that song alone makes labor in isolation bearable, thattheory for us is never abstraction but a thread spunout of our bellies to guide us through the labyrinth.
Yes, we want art and yes, we want theory expressing
the depths of lesbian experience ... but with emphasis on
the words of the lesbian who is without Daddy-privilege,
without resources, the lesbian who faces each morninga renewed battle for food, shelter, and pleasure.
She'sreality-check.
Racism:A central part of our V1S10n has been to exorcise
the unconscious and therefore most deadly forms ofracism in the feminist movement.
But here we are with
Issue I, birthed white as the day is long. Meridel
Lesueur said this about a white woman and an Indian woman: "The two women had lived a parallel life curiously
knowing each other, but the Indian was the knower.
something in the white woman willed not to know ... willed
to evade the final knowing."l And so it is with whitelesbians.
We need material from Third World women, especially
Third World lesbians.
We can't do what we set out to
do without it.
We're not asking for support, we're notasking for endorsements, we're asking for SOMETHING TO
PRINT.
These names off the top of my head: Audre Lorde,
Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and before them Nora
Zeale Hurston. Have these women not come closest to a
new language that is sensuous and intellectually powerful and female in its voicing? Who has travelled sononchalantly onto the edge as Toni Morrison in SuZa
where, with a flick of her wrist, she renames good andevil? Third World women tend to be more firmly ensconced in the consciousness of the boundary dweller.
At this point I feel no shame in saying who my Musesare.
"They say, take your time, consider this new species
that seeks a new language."(Monique Wittig)
We are lesbians; we are boundary-dwellers.2 How do
we manage to survive/subvert/create on the boundaries
of patriarchal reality? Boundary space by definition
is a boundary relation: we exist in the interface between a death culture and the faint beginnings of aculture of--not humans--but life-lovers, a culture thatembraces animals, plants, stars and those women whochoose the future at the risk of their "sanity" and security.
30

To avoid cooptation, our moving center must remainin the new feminist time/space, despite our necessary
relation to that which is still dying.
Our aim, theimmanent logic of our practice, must be to create ourselves, a new species with power of presence to eachother and power of absence to the old, the patriarchal.
The distinctive mark of a new species will be new waysof thinking.
We will speak in mermaid tongue, the renewal and transformatiqn of a once universal language.
Language begins with its subjects, the ones who
speak.
To begin again is to begin within the body/mindof the woman who speaks to women.
But the only words
to hand are the words of the male body, the only known
heritage a trail of blood.
In The Lesbian Body Monique
Wittig centers in this historical contradiction andspins a way out.
She splits the French subject je because i t is implicitly male.
"J/e is the symbol ofthe lived, rending experience which is m/y writing, of
this cutting in two which throughout literature is theexercise of a language which does not constitute me asa subject.,,3
After tearing apart the body of male language inorder to constitute herself as herself, she sings thewords of the female body, spinning out of her viscera
a lesbian universe.
" ... let those who call for a new
language first learn violence."4 Wittig fires the oldbones; a phoenix leaps from the ashes ... the crimson
purple female tongue.
The Bakweri women of Cameroon 5 also exercise a kindof violence--the power of absence; they constitutethemselves as non-human mermaid women, generating among
themselves a magical language which expresses the subjectivity of the female and the animal. Mermaid language is the vehicle and sign of their bonding together
as a sisterhood on the boundaries of the male-dominatedvillage.
The Bakweri are a small Bantu-speaking people living on the slopes of Mt. Cameroon, the highest mountainin West Africa, an active volcano rising next to thesea.
The patrilineage controls residence, the inheritance of land and cattle, and political office.
But,
though the women are bound in marriage, they control
their own bodies, and they are the ones who farm outside the village fence while the men stay inside, caring for the pigs and venturing out only to hunt ~lephants
or to labor on plantations.
"Ethnographers report that women cannot be reachedso easily as men.
They giggle when young, snort whenold, reject the question, laugh at the topic and thelike." The Bakweri woman is as unfathomable to Bakweri
men as she has been to European scholars; she is regarded uneasily, and the men admit that the ethnographer's31difficulties are "simply a caricature of their own
daily case. ,,6When a Bakweri girl reaches puberty, water spirits
attack her.
A mermaid doctor must administer vomiting
medicine; otherwise, she'll be lured away into the wild.
After she has vomited up the seeds of the wild banana(a female fruit), an older woman sponsor gives her amermaid name and teaches her the secret mermaid language.
Dressed in fronds and bark, she's secluded in aroom of her own.
All European goods and dogs must be
kept away from her.
She's forbidden to kill rats, whom
she regards as her "husbands." When she goes out, she
carries a rattle that makes any man who molests her permanently impotent.
After seclusion, the girl is either immersed in a
stream or "killed" in a mock tug-of-war.
In the latter
rite, nine calls in the mermaid tongue revive her.
The
men then regard her as immune from the water-spirits,safe to marry; but the women regard her as a familiarof the water-spirits.
She carries her spirit name andspeaks mermaid language with the initiated women therest of her life.
She is in effect reborn into a womanidentified culture that is half wild, half human; she
becomes the untamed female who lives necessarily near
males but who is uncontrollable.
The initiation rites
are now being revived by Bakweri women in the cities;
for them, the wild is a state of mind.
The analogy between the untamed mermaid women andthe untamed lesbian is irresistible. Both accomodate
the two logical sets, male/female and human/non-human,differently from men.
Males even in pre-literate societies bound themselves from nature in the European
way.
Their model for "mankind" is man; women are placed
ambiguously at the boundary of "mankind." The male solution to ambiguity has been to enslave women, bringing
their "wildness" under male control.
And the male reaction to nature, the non-human, has been to destroy
all links leading back to his original association withother life-forms. , Men hunt, and they also make war onother "men." The metalevel of categorization, "ourselves-and-our-women/other men-and-their-women" slips
back imperceptibly into the fundamental male dichotomy"human/non-human." War and genocide become inevitableconsequences; it's easy for a male of any nation to regard other nations as sub-human, to be dealt with as hehas dealt with nature, by killing.
On the other hand, many pre-literate women, including Bakweri women, seem to distinguish primarily between
life-lovers and death-lovers.
Men are included in the"community" of women, plants, and animals only insofar
as they refrain from ignorant violence. Pre-literate
women make few distinctions between "us" and "them";

32the Bakweri women are notorious for consorting withother tribes.
They're warriors only in the sense thatwitches are.
The Bakweri wife feels more akin to fish than to herhusband.
Though she does not deal with what is alien
to her by ridiculing, enslaving, or killing it, neither
does she forget who the killers are.
The B~kweri woman,unlike her "liberated" sisters in industrialized societies, does NOT allow male control over her body, herperceptions, or her language.
Artemis March has said
that patriarchy is an escalating system of control, in
which increasing levels of female energy are coopted
with increasing levels of female consent. 7 In our society, women are largely tamed: men determine the available methods of contraception, and all women are subject
to rape, murder, and dismemberment.
Perhaps worse, mostWestern women have succumbed to humanism, even regarding
it as the ideological basis of our fight for "equality."
The mermaid-women are laughing at us.
"Winged words make their own spiral,--caught up in them,
we are lost, or found."(H.D.)
If "humanity" is constituted by its language, a new
species composed of life-lovers will be created withand expressed by new language.
And what better place toexperiment with new naming than in a magazine? We do
this by wrenching the old words out of their patriarchal
contexts (tearing apart the body of male language) andusing them, reborn, to speak to women out of women's
shared experience. We rename the universe out of a subjectivity that is female and animal; and the violence
we practice by doing so is the violence of leaving thedead to bury their own dead.
Our curses are "to eachhis due" ... let the evil be destroyed by his own evil andthe innocent sheltered by her innocence.
New naming requires exaggeration, misstep, frequent
plunges into absurdity, and a close attention to process.
June Arnold writes in Ptexus that the lesbian
feminist genius is a collective genius, expressed here
and there in a phrase, a chapter, a new tactic, sudden
revelations.
For this reason, we're not claiming thatwhat we print succeeds as revolutionary art or theory,
only that it reveals process.
(A critic might notethat SW is neither very sinister nor very wise.)
We're interested in attempts at cracking the shellof genres. We're interested in letters, riddles, fragments, responses to what was in the last issue, andatways in histories of how a certain piece came to be.
We want to document the process of dealing with the
Strange.
For lesbians, who have been without faces, without
voices, without a validating herstory, the urgency of33

speaking is the urgency of surviving. We need to think
our way out of an entire universe. We need to end female self-sacrifice by developing imaginatively andpractically an Amazon culture.
Amazon culture means
thinking the unthinkable, doing the inappropriate, andthereby learning how to survive/subvert/create.
SinisterWisdom wants to be an Amazon Culture Center on paper.
-Harriet Desmoines

FOOTNOTES:
1. "Journal Excerpts," The Lamp in the Spine (Summer/Fall
1974), p. 119.
2. Mary Daly, Beyond God t he Father: Toward a Philosophyof Women's Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973),
pp. 40-43.
3. Translated by David Le Vay (New York: William Morrow
and Co., Inc., 1975), pp. 10-11.
4. Monique Wittig, Les Guerilleres~ translated by DavidLe Vay (New York: The Viking Press, 1971), p. 85.
5. All information on the Bakweri from Edwin Ardener's"Belief and the Prol;>lem of Women," The Interpretationof Ritual~ edited by J.S. La Fontaine (London: Tavistock Publications, Ltd., 1972).
6. Ibid.~ p. 137.
7. Speech given at GAU conference, Columbia University,
November, 1975.

For coming, coming, Coming ... see p. 72.
34

Catherine
HOW RAGE MOTHERED MY THIRD BIRTH AND EXPLODED ME
OUT OF THE UNIVERSITY INTO A NEW TIME/SPACE ON
THE BOUNDARY WHERE, THANKS TO MARY DALY, ON A
CLEAR DAY I CAN NOW SEE JANE HARRISON

The foLlowing piece is in no way intended to be a model for the
New Woman's scholarship. It is the process I went through in orderto break out of traditional patterns of approaching scholarshipwhich had inhibited me for years. I suppose that printing it
could be considered unwarranted self-indulgence. But I enjoy
reading or hearing about how women, once they see that they havebeen exploited and enslaved by patriarchal values, claw their way
to a different and better place. Most of the time we are presented
only with the finished product, and my burning curiosity about how
it came to be is left burning. So this exercise in rage is included here to quench the fires of others like myself who probably
hid True Confessions under their mattress when they were kids.
(In the interest of space limitations footnote documentation has
been omitted, but it is available on request. please enclose aself-addressed, stamped envelope and allow nine months for delive~.)

I don't think I will begin this piece by explaining who
Jane Ellen Harrison is.
Because everyone ought to know
who Jane Ellen Harrison is, goddamnit! Her name should
be a household snake, and the reason it isn't is thesame reason that enrages me whenever I become consciousthat I'm standing in the stacks of the university library tower and looking up at the topheavy shelves ...
In 1947 I was sitting in a reading room of a small women's college library, a spanking brand new one, watching - the staff busily stack shelves with the old books
from the old library.
The head librarian, a little
middle-aged spinster--I was watching her because I had
never seen her move with such quick grace--was silently
singing and dancing those old books onto the new shelvffi,
pirouetting on a ladder stretching to squeeze the lastbook on the top shelf.
From where I was sitting I
could see the stack begin to topple, but it was too late
to warn her.
I can still hear her tragi-comic wail as
those thundering books stampeded her to the floor.
Back in blind 1947 I ran out the white Georgian
door of the library and threw up on one of the boxwood
bushes guarding the entrance and wandered around sadand empty for the rest of the day.
Now that I am a35

middle-aged spinster, I flash in menopausal rage when I
recall that image of violent betrayal: I bulge out myeyes, stick out my long broad tongue, shake my graysnake hair, and for a moment anyway the half-shelf ofbooks at eye-level fossilize forever.
I feel better for a little while.
Until I find in
the current periodical room a three-year-old copy of
APHRA: A Feminist Literary Journal, and read:Jane Ellen Harrison was one of the great classicists ofher time. She died in 1928, the year Virginia Woolf
wrote! Room 9L One's OWn, and was for Virginia Woolfand the feminists of her generation the woman scholar
par excellence, who had succeeded against great odds ina male academic world. Though her work reflects Victorian
thinking and does not appeal strongly to the modern imagination, she has influenced several writers whose work
does--among them Robert Graves and Joseph Campbell.
My rage leaps again, but I can only howl in frustration
because as far as I know Medusa spells don't work on
women.
I push through the turnstyle between the electronic eyes that guard this latter-day library mutterirg:
How "modern" is . the imagination of a feminist in 1973
who still casts a woman in the role of a muse for men:
Graves' White Goddess again, Ger~rude-Stein-was-Heming­
way's-teacher again! ... "her work reflects Victorian
thinking and does not appeal strongly to the modern
imagination ... " indeed! ... indeed Jane Harrison was bornin 1850, and indeed her two important works: Prolegomena
to the Study of Greek Religion and Themis were publishedin 1903 and 1912 respectively, and indeed she was a"Victorian" insofar as the span of her birth and death
dates indicate, but she did not stay home like a proper
spinster (yes, spinster she was) and listen to Papa--no,indeed; instead she educated herself into Cambridge in
the '70's, where she was called "the cleverest woman in
England," repapered her room with William Morris papers,
worshipped George Eliot-By this time I had reached my study, and lying
around in my little piles of notecards, xeroxed sheets,
acorns and seedlings were comments by her friends, admirers, critics, students, readers--a fairly distinguishedlot, all told--all telling me how anti-Victorian she
was.
Here's an example from Prince Mirsky:.•. the intellectual work of the generation that saw theturn of the epoch could only be revolutionary and destructive.
More consciously perhaps than many of her contemporaries
Jane Harrison was a revolutionary .•• an intellectual revolutionary who by the end of her life work had emancipatedherself--and others--jrom all the eidola that had presided
over her coming into the world. She did this work ofliberation with the times, but in her own way and aheadof others--and with that sense of the coming age which is
the hallmark of the revolutionary mind.
36

I was a bit calmer now, and I laughed at the echoof " JEH was one of the greatest classicists of her
time ... " Jane Harrison would have laughed, too.
Flattering, but untrue.
Great classicist she wasn't andnever pretended to be.
True, she was the first woman .
to take the Classical Tripos at Cambridge, but the
Examiners after serious deliberation placed her second
instead of first.
The men pronounced that her Greek
was never quite good enough because she lacked the solid
schoolboy grounding in the language (she was selftaught) that her male colleagues had acquired in theirEtons and their Harrows.
But I occasionally envy anyone who can easily label her a classicist or an archaeologist or an anthropologist or a linguist or anything...
He or she must sleep easier every night because to classify her glibly is to dismiss her, and the root of myrage is that she has been mostly dismissed or overlooked.
I cannot with good conscience label her, and that ofcourse is why I did not begin this piece with a correctand easy statement about who she was.
She was not an
archaeologist, although she visited Athens when Dorpfeld was digging and correcting our conceptions of thefifth century B.C. Acropolis and (at his request) published his findings in English; she was not an anthropologist because she never packed her portmanteau andwent to live with the natives in Africa or Australia;
she was not a linguist because, although language washer passion (and she knew 17 of them) the science of
linguistics was just aborning.
In the four years that I have spent studying--living
intimately with Jane Harrison's life and work I havebeen continually frustrated with the problem of labelingher until it finally hit me that "labeling" is a maleprocess: men are very uneasy about living in this world
and they must control it the only way they know how by
naming people, animals, objects and ideas. They started
out with naming, and since naming wasn't enough to givethem enough control, they "progressed" to categorizing
and began to "label" (a word which originally meant"rag, shred, tatter. " ) Labeling suppresses fear andincreases one's power because it packages people, objects, ideas, etc. and therefore enables one to sell,enslave, play games with or file them away--that is,imprison them in metal dungeons so they won't sticktheir tongues out at one and fossify one.
I don't recall Jane Harrison ever using the word"label"; she certainly never thought it. But she did
use the word "name ; " and she named--re-named--new named
people and objects and gods (ideas) when they involved
her enough to love or hate them.
In her search for theorigins of Greek religion, which was the focus of her
major scholarship, she became outraged at the atrocities
committed bv the invading patriarchal Achaeans to the37old matriarchal Earth Goddesses.
In her eyes the Olympian Zeus and his arrogant son Apollo were goddessrapers, child snatchers, shrine pillagers and usurpers,
and woman enslavers.
She re-named Zeus "imposter" and"the arch-patriarchal bourgeois," and Apollo she calledan "ill-mannered prig." But, more relevantly to thepoint I'm making here, she new-named herself: "Potnia
Keron," later abbreviated to "Ker."
Potnia Keron translates "Lady (Mistress, Goddess,
ruling power) of the Keres."
In a chapter of the ProLegomena entitled "The Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites,
Bogeys," she explains what ker means.
According toJane Harrison, there is no English equivalent of the
Greek ker: it means ghost, or the soul that escapes the
body after death, or winged sprite, and its home is theunderworld.
In ancient Greek art and literature keres
are depicted as evil: as sources of pollution and disease ("Eating is highly dangerous because you have yourmouth open and a Ker might get in." p. 168); as well as
madness, wars, suicide and all the other evils flesh isheir to. When Pandora opened her "box" (pithos or jar-Jane Harrison renamed that, too) what escaped were
keres. Keres evolved into differentiated bogeys: gorgons, sphinxes, harpies, sirens, Erinyes (furies), etc.
Why should Jane Harrison identify herself with suchmonsters by signing her letters to her friend Gilbert
Murray Potnia Keron or Ker? Just a whimsical little"in" joke, you say. You call yourself a "witch" to yourfriends, that's true, but if Mary Daly would call you awitch the irony would be more profound, for she sees
the witch, among other things, as an adherent of anolder religion denigrated and persecuted by the Christian
Fathers. When the heretic Jane Harrison calls herself
Ker, she speaks wittily from a "sympathetic imagination"
which enables her to "think back the 'many ' we have so
sharply and strenuously divided, into the haze of theprimitive 'one. '" She knew that the ker undifferentiatedhad a double nature--both good and bad--the bringer oflife and creativity as well as disease and death. And
she knew too that "when we find the good, fruitful, beneficial side of the Keres effaced and ignored we must
always remember this fact that we see them through themedium of a conquering civilization." Another victimof the patriarchal Zeus. Perhaps, then as Potnia Keronshe saw herself in the dual role of destroyer of established values and creator of a new life-enhancing world.

38

TRANSITION
This was not the end of the rages--or the ragewriting.
Women's rages are like women's orgasms: they
are multiple.
And there must be some correlation between their beneficial effects .. At any rate, when I wasspent, the air had cleared and I could see Jane Harrison.
The exercise in labeling Jane Harrison had been
the result of my second spate of rages.
In 1975 myfirst spate against the academic pricks had resulted in
my resignation from the university (from all universities
but most particularly a new university that has as its
center a bell tower--an unadorned stiff prick which
everyone euphemistically saw as a phallus, but which
Kate Millett more accurately and prophetically saw as aplastic vibrator.) The energy gerierated by my multiple
rages had moved my center to the new space/time boundary
defined by Mary Daly: "Its center is the lives of women, whose experience of becoming changes the very
meaning of center for us by putting it on the boundaryof all that has been considered central. ,,1 But thegravity of that center was weak still, and a lot of myenergy was spent just trying to keep my balance.
When
I tried to complete my work on Jane Harrison I foundthat the noxious vapors of my academic past were polluting the air of my new space, and my remaining energy
was spent fighting suffocation.
It was then that the rages ignited me again and the
hot flashes burned away the residue of the poison.
When I could breathe again, I could see that I had been
naively trying to force the male academics to recognize
the unique brilliance of Jane Harrison's scholarship,and by doing so I had structured my argument to theirmold: I had wanted to please their eyes, so I was continuing to use their categories, their labels, andtheir values. Of course it didn't work.
Jane Harrison would never "make it in a man's
world," as the Aphra writer claimed she had. 2 That is,she couldn't make it for very long.
She did, however,make it through a second edition of Themis in 1925,
where she wrote in the preface that Themis was a dangerous book: "A hand had been laid upon their ark.,,3 And
indeed it had.
Her iconoclastic attack on the Olympians
was essentially an attack on the phallo-centric structure of our culture--humanism upheld by enlightened
Christian theology: Jesus Christ and Apollo had shaken
hands a long time ago, and discovering their mutualhomosexual attraction had never let go of each other.
The male academic by and large ignores Jesus Christ,
but he identifies with Apollo: "castrate him, you castrate me." he warns.
39

So in the mainstream of academia the heretic Jane
Harrison's work is relegated to a footnote, her books
are out of print, and she is omitted from bibliographies;
while Edith Hamilton's paperback MythoZogy and The Greek
Way can be bought in the corner drugstore, because she
was the true daughter of her Father, extolling the virtues of Zeus and Apollo and educating the young for thepatriarchy.
(I can breathe a lot of fire about Edith
Hamilton, too!)Now from the boundary I can see that the key toJane Harrison's creative scholarship lies in the factthat she was always the "Compleat Outsider,,,4 Zudic
cerebrator par exceZZence, woman-identified woman. Now
in the calm after the rages I am free to write about
Jane Harrison, addressing myself to myself and other
women.
The following piece is not about Jane Harrison, although
it includes references to her; it is about the necessity
for women to leave the university.
It is addressedprimarily to women academics, a lot of whom will disagree with my argument.
I would very much like response--both from those who dispute and those who support
my thesis.
Also, I do not include here any positive
speculation about the nature of women's scholarship as
it might evolve in the new time/space.
But Harriet andI have talked at length about some possibilities, andwe would like to hear your thinking on the issue.

-Catherine NichoZson
THE THIRD BIRTH
REDEEMING ATHENE'S REPUTATION
In order to become a scholar in this man's world a woman must be born again--from the male womb of the university Graduate School.
Some women are seduced inside-others claw their way in. But in either case they must
suffer the initiation rite of passage, gorging on theforbidden fruit of tribal secrets and undergoing a grotesque sex operation, until the Daddy-mother's time isfulfilled and they can issue forth with a rolled diploma
grafted to their vagina, which fools nobody , least of
all their new Daddy-mother.
Now that these bright-apple, clever women haveachieved their second birth they are privileged to growup in the Man's House, tidying all the thunderbolts(which look and feel like double-axes when you carrythem in your hand) and capturing all the worms and cooking them for dinner.
Until they run out of recipes forworm casseroles. Or until they are eaten by the worms .
40

Or until they walk out leaving a note to their professors and male colleagues: You deal with the worms.
Those few who walk out have probably been houndedby the Furies protesting their traitorous second birth :the birth of Athene, which in mythology was a co-opted
first birth, defined by Jane Harrison as "a desperate
theological expedient to rid an earth-born (maidengoddess) of her matriarchal conditions."lNow I realize that there is nothing original in myuse of the Athene myth to symbolize the academic woman's
situation. But there is an important point about the
reaZ mother of Athene that has often been overlooked,
and I believe that if you're going to use a myth you
might as well milk it dry.
So bear with me.
Daughter Athene sprang full-grown from the head ofZeus after he had swallowed her mother Metis, the goddess of wisdom, who was pregnant by him (he had raped
her). Why did he swallow Metis: it was not because he
was hungry, greedy as he was, but because an oracle ofMother Earth had said Metis' first child would be agirl and that her second would be a son who would depose
his father Zeus as Zeus had castrated Cronus and Cronus
had castrated Uranus and so on back to the beginning of
patricide (there was already a museum of balls).
So
the imposter Zeus was protecting his power.
And Athene
became the prototype of Daddy's girl: " ... a sexless
thing, neither man nor woman ... manufactured, unreal,"
protested an outraged Jane Harrison.
"Nowhere is thisartificiality, this unreality of Athene ... so keenly
felt as in the famous myth of her birth from the brainof Zeus ... It is all an unreal, theatrical show, andthrough it all we feel and resent the theological intent.
We cannot love a goddess who on principle forgets the
Earth from which she sprang; always from the lips of
the Lost Leader we hear the shameful denial:"There is no mother bore me for her child,
I praise the Man in all things (save for marriage)
Whole-hearted am I, strongly for the Father.,,2
But perhaps Mother Earth knew what she was about(after all, one shouldn't muck around with oracles; lookwhat happened to that mother-fucking Oedipus). By
allowing Zeus to turn himself into a mother and suffer
the pangs of childbirth (he had a raging headache andHephaestus performed the first pre-Caesarian caesarian
on him by splitting his skull) to deliver a daughterthat was actually a pseudo-son--by this grotesque reversal of sex roles, the prophecy of wise Mother Earthwould be fulfilled some day.
The pseudo daughter-son
would destroy the Father: someday the woman scholar
would pack her bags with all the thunderbolts and walkout on the worms.

41

And with all that rage packed inside her she would
demand a third birth.
In order for a woman scholar to live in a woman's
world she must be born again for the third and last time.
But this time she must conceive, mother and midwife
herself.
One classical myth which could possibly depict a
woman giving birth to herself is Aphrodite rising out of
the sea.
Jane Harrisontells us that this sea birth myth
is a late and patriarchal version of the rising or theritual bath of an earth goddess, which would make it
actually a rebirth.
This would be acceptable, but somehow Aphrodite's popularity with male artists has layered
her myth with connotations that repel me.
I prefer the"Bringing up of Semele" myth, which Jane Harrison restored to an earlier version.
In Themis she presents a
reproduction of a vase painting which pictures a woman
rising out of the earth.
The significance of this particular version of a common art motif is that the woman,an earth goddess, is not being brought up by a son: she
is rising on her own:

Tradition said that Dionysos fetched his mother up trom
the underworld•.. "Finding that he was a god~ men paid
him worship~ but he went and fetched his mother up outof Hades~ gave her the title of Thyone and went up with
her into heaven." The hasty Asswrrption of the mother~viewed as history~ strikes us as abrupt and unmeaning.
It i s of course simply an Olympianized saga-mythos of
the old ritual of the "Bringing up of Semele." Semele~
Earth~ never cou~ or did go to heaven~ but she rose up
out of earth. She needed no son to bring her~ her son
was indeed the fruits of the earth~ the child Ploutos.
But when patriarchy came in~ and the Mother takes thelower place~ someone has to "fetch her up."JNow if we can place this ritual of the rising Semele
on the boundary of patriarchal territory, in the newspace/time located and named by Mary Daly,4 surround her
with expectant sisters, and place in her hand the thunderbolt/labrys, we might incorporate this myth in the new
feminary.
The thunderbolt has a two-fold symbolic significance: (1) The lightning energy of rage that "isrequired as a positive creative force," according toMary Daly, to blast our waS out of the "inauthentic
structures" of patriarchy.
(In the patriarchal versionof the Semele myth, Dionysus renames his mother "Thyone"
after he fetches her up.
Thyone means "the raging one,"an appropriate epithet, for the earth goddess was obviously violently protesting this unnatural Assumption
forced on her by the son!)(2) The double-axe weapon
and tool (sceptre of the Cretan Mother Earth emblemizing
42the thunderbolt 6 ) that should come in handy to t he woman
who must excise her misbegotten loyalty to the academic(and other) fathers as well as carve a space for her
new center of life on the boundary of patriarchal territory.
.
When the woman scholar sees the phoniness of her
second birth and experiences the rage that is provokedby her exploitation, why must she leave t he Man's
House? Why not seethe and remain to subvert the university through "affirmative actions, " AAUP Committee
W, or threats of EEOC investigations? Why not teach a
Women's Studies course and focus all her resea r ch on
resurrecting forgotten heroines and their deeds? Why
not form a woman's caucus in the learn e d societ y of her
discipline to demand great er e s teem f r um her malecolleagues?
I believe there are three good reasons for notstaying:
1) The air there is· bad.
"In universities," according to Mary Daly, " ... are poisonous gases which arealmost invisible and odorless, and which gradually stiflli
women's minds and spirits.,,7 In her new infant state
she might not be strong enough to survive.
Or if shedoesn't succumb to the poison, she might develop a paralysis of cynicism, a death-in-life that neutralizes
her energy--which is exactly what the enemy wants.
2) Scholarship is political.
Regardless of theacademic's claims for objectivity, the facts of thepast and present are viewed through the filter of thecultural preconditioning and unconscious value-assumptionsof the scholar.
As long as her center--or her desired
center--is in the university, she participates in avalue system which demeans and ignores women as a group.
And even the fiercest feminist fighter is vulnerable tothe lure of seeking male approval for her scholarship.
She wants those bastards to accept the fact that she isjust as intelligent, just as capable of using the skillsof scholarship as any of them, and she is damned wellgoing to be recognized and rewarded for her work.
But
she· may be unaware that she's thereby accepting theuniversity's male model for the research and writing
she is doing.
Her choice of inquiry, to dig up women's
contributions to history, is not enough.
If her material must be shaped to the mold sculpted and preservedby the enemy, the impact of her research will be dulled
and distorted--which is exactly what the enemy wants.
Moreover, fighting male-hardened structures can consume a major part of her energy.
And that's all welland good if she recognizes that she is making creative
scholarship her second priority--perhaps giving it up
entirely to make a space for younger women to work in.

43But if she chooses this apparently noble role, she . isrunning the risk that her women-student scholars, having
no female model to follow, will continue to conform toestablished inauthentic standards of the prick university--which is, a~ain, exactly what the enemy wants.
3) Suppose the female scholar succeeds in moving
her center to the boundary of the university, inventsan effective gas mask to protect her from the noxious
fumes, and chooses to remain inside--not to fight, thistime, but to create authentic women's scholarship.
She
still cannot be an effective force for change.
FOR SHEWILL BE CONSIDERED INSANE BY THE MALE HEIRARCHY THATCONTROLS THE UNIVERSITY.
This seems like a drastic
statement, and it is, but I believe that it is true.
Let me explain:
In the patriarchal world woman is an outsider--more
aptly put an "undersider." She cannot possibly view
the phenomena of that world directly from the perspective of the male dominant insider--or "topsider." Theview of the oppressed and the oppressor are dangerously
different.
In the theatre if you use footlights as
your principal source of illumination, the actor's faceis considerably distorted by the upward angle of light.
She or he appears unnatural to an audience conditioned
to viewing people illuminated from over-head lightsources.
Similarly, if a woman must view the realityof the topsider's world, she is forced to use a mirror
to achieve the male angle of vision, like the periscopeused by the submarine captain to view the surface ofthe ocean. As long as the woman scholar is content touse a periscope, she is safe, tolerated because she is
not threatening.
But once she begins to use her own
eyes--once she insists on expounding her own vision of
the male (or female) world, what she publishes willappear distorted, inaccurate, and irrational. The maleidentified audience can only pronounce her insane andeither mercifully ignore her rantings or lock her up.
Which is exactly what the enemy wants.
So the woman-identified scholar has really no valid
choice.
Once her eyes are opened to the inauthenticityof her second birth, and she experiences the rage thatmothers her third birth, she must leave.
And if herleaving inspires her sisters to leave and if there is amass exodus of women from the university "toward awoman-centered university" (Adrienne Rich's phrase),8
the mass absence of women from the male-centered university at this point in history could precipitate aholocaust that would redeem Athene's reputation by fulfilling the oracle of Mother Earth.
And the woman
scholar with all the women scholars on the boundary
would be free to create a vital new scholarship that iscontinually growing and becoming ...

44

And the ghost of Jane Harrison would reJOlce.
In
her Reminiscences of a Student's Life~ written near theend of her life, she said:

If I had been rich I shouLd have founded a learned community for women~ with vows of consecration and abeautiful rule and habit ... 9-Catherine Nicholson

FOOTNOTES FOR "THE THIRD BIRTH":

1. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (New York:
Meridian Books, 1955), 3rd ed., p. 302.
Ibid.~ pp. 302-3.
Quotation is from Aeschylus'
Eumenides~ 11. 736-8.
3. Themis: A Study in the Social Origins of Greek Religion (New York: Meridian Books, 1962), 2nd ed.,pp. 419-20.
4. Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's
Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), pp. 40-43.
5. Ibid.~ p. 43.
6. Harrison, Themis~ p. 171.
7. " "The Qualitative Leap Beyond Patriarchal Religion,"
Quest~ I (Spring, 1975), 24.
8. "Toward a Woman-centered University," The Chronicleof Higher Education~ July 21, 1975.
9. (London: Hogarth Press, 1925), p. 89.

2.

FOOTNOTES FOR "TRANSITION":
1. Beyond God the Father~ pp. 40-1.
2. Leah Zahler, "Matriarchy and Myth," Aphra~1973), 25.
3. P. viii.
4. Daly, "The Qualitative Leap," pp. 28-9.

IV (Surrme:r;45

JtlIlI am going to tpY making a ~-lesbian statement without sounding
anti. I am not sure this is possible.
The statement does not come from any passionate need to disassociate myself from my lesbian sisters (if that were the case~my work would not; appear here). Rather~ I feel that my "radical
feminist" politics bring me close (but not uncomfortably so) tomany political lesbians I know. That~ however~ does not make mea lesbian. (I am referring here to self-concept. How societychooses to label me and/or my politics is non-relevant to me andto this statement.)
What is important to me is that there be shared space within
the collective radical consciousness for both lesbians and nonlesbians (and for women who consider themselves something else orneither). I do not see lesbianism as necessarily the "ultimate"in my own thinking process. Lesbianism seems only one of many
desirable self-concepts for women who seek to undo the patriarchy.
In making this statement of distinction among radical thinking
women~ I do not seek to create any division of purpose~ only toopen a space for any non-lesbian woman who wishes to have ideas~
scribble~ write~ create~ laugh~ cpY~ or scream through~ for~ orin publications such as Sinister Wisdom.
I do not believe that I occupy this space alone.
-Jan Millsapps
WATER AND FIRE
when the sto~ hit
it tore your book to shreds~
the vepY words you had open~ reading~ripped savagely from your head.
your chair is still warmand holds your impression.
mapY , s cat was deadand mine were missing.
we began searching through puddles
for survivors.
there were no words left
to bleed from wounded vo lumes ~wrinkled and drowned~
white pages glaring from the wreckage~a blank mocking death-stare.
we closed them~ carefUL morticians
not knowing what else to do.
we gathered the flooded rubble
into a mass casually said~
crossed ourselves and set a match.
46

mary is a fire signand I am water.
your ahair is stiLL warmand hoLds your impression.
it wasn't so muah
the aats being gone as you~abruptly wi th the storm
without so muah as a aLue
to the sphere or aLoud or universe
where you aame apart.
your orphaned words aLutter the aosmos
with no books to Live in~and you strangLe yourseLf with siLenae~
disjointed in your quiak departure.
we used to Live in soundLess nights.
we used words sparingLy.
you kept them in reserve on book-Lined waLLs
to prime my passion by withhoLding.
you buiLt a furnaae deep within my boweLs~
then offered onLy the surfaae of a brain for aomfort.
my fingers sLid over the smooth aonvQLutions~a gray diLuted Landsaape your onLy prize
when I wanted to saaLe mountains
and Leap into your thighs.
you Left me dangLing in the worLd~
retiaent in water and fire.

TO THE MAN WHO DID IT IN MY GAS TA.NK~ 10/31/75

why hetook advantage of my aar
I'LL never know
and sureLy his penis wouLd rather
enter openings eLsewhere
but the shame-faaed meahania mumbLes"there's your-ine in the gas tank~ ma'am"
as if it were my own
imagine that
now the message here is obvious:
mixed with gas
it not onLy smeLLs bad
but fouLs my pLugs and suah
and gets very poor miLeage
this unexpeated additive47

by unscpewing the gas cap he had
quite the opposite
effect on me
and I must pay fop his
priviLeged papeit's possibLethat this man made an eppop
men do that I know
supposing it a new shape of shiny gpeen urinaLand eLegant paPking Lots
may even be equipped with suchthough I doubt it
assuming then the wopstthat he peaLLy meant to do it
and now pefuses to cLaim his own
I must aPpange fop the extpaction
it's LegaL but expensive
and most mechanics don't Like to dothat kind of thing
demanding instead
to know why I usedno protection
though it seems I heaPd
Locking gas caps may cause cancep
at any pate the thing is
to get it ovep withpropepLy exopcisedof its infection
my cap seems somehow wisep
as we speed to pecovePy on cpowded bouLevapds
and swepve to avoid
hitting men-Jan MiLLsapps48

Deenafrom SCARS ON THE BODY POLITIC

Saars ~ the Body Politia is the fifth novel I've written. Eaahof the books I disaover in retrospeat ... aonaerns itself with theissue of relationship--how two aome together to end the agony ofisolation and solitude~ and how everything in the soaiety aats toimpose isolation~ solitude~ separateness. The metaphor of Saars
was the Adam/Eve myth--beaause Eve~ being built upon a rib~ wasdual; inaorporated another within her; knew~ therefore~ profoundly
what relationship means. Adam~ on the other hand~ has a hole inhis side~ is solitude. The theme of the novel is that solitudeleads to power and power leads to war. That relationship andaonneation are modes whiah are antagonistia to power~ to heirarahy~
and to murder.
A few years ago~ I might have been unsure when answering aquestion regarding my vision~ but no longer. It has been formed
to a great extent through three airaumstanaes. One event was astay in Chile during the Unidad Popular~ the Allende government~
when I saw for the first time a government for the people~ notagainst them~ and I understood that there was some possibility
that institutions and governments might be humane. Seaondly~ myinvolvement in the movement (teaahing women~ helping to areate the
Woman's Building and the Feminist Studio Workshop) and my researah into Woman's euiture (whiah has resulted in 'a monographI've just finished--"In Her Image: Woman's Culture") led me not
only to a sweetness and a life-sustaining~ 'death-defying view ofexistenae but helped me to identify new forms of being~ of relationship~ of art~ of work •.• whiah seem intrinsiaally healing
and humane. And finally~ my own relationships~ whiah are deep
and' wonderful and verify a possibility of inte~aation--emotional
and intelleatual--whiah I aan use to sustain me against all thedarkness. The vision as it guides me now is two-fold. On the
one hand--torture~ war~ napalm~ atomia weapons~ rape~ poverty~
oppression; and on the other--aompassion~ understanding~ relationship~ the imagination~ the dream~ the ahild~ the work of art~ themoment of loving. When I reaently delivered a paper on rape ("Itis Always the Woman Who is Raped") to the Ameriaan Psyahiatria
Assoaiation~ I wanted to stress two ideas: first~ that rape was asoaially~ aulturally taught aativity; the other~ that aommunity
aould heal the rape viatim. I don't have any diffiaulty seeing
the world where rape exists--Daahau~ Viet Nam~ eta. are always in
my aonsaiousness--but I also see the other~ what we are ate whiah
opposes suah brutality and madness.
49One of the reasons I write is to communicate the experience~the voice of being a woman--it is a world rarely entered. Even
now~ when we have pe~ission~ still the voices of women (despite
the content) often sound like the voices of the dominant culture.
r think that there is another voice~ another sensibility~ whichcomes out of an experience which has been part of us~ yet somehow
not only unexpressed in the public world but unexpressed often
even within ourselves. My desire has been to create language~ tofind the content which exists in the secret core of ourselves andwhich must be uttered and known.
About my life ... much you know from the above. I have twosons~ a lover; I teach at the Feminist Studio Workshop at the
Woman's Building; I write fiction~ poetry; I teach among otherthings journal workshops and am now developing writing/healing
workshops.
Lastly~ Scars ••• began as a novel which developed the male/female relationship against the background of political development.
The struggles between the man and the woman in the novel weresimilar to the struggles to set up a committed society. On one
level the novel depicted the story and events in the lives of a
man and a woman who were traveling to and then living in Chileduring the short-lived socialist government. The personal andthe public were analogues of each other. Then the brutal coupcame. The novel broke in half. Those friends that I had made inChile~ dear friends though we had known each other for only ashort time~ were now dead~ or underground~ or in jail~ or in
exile. At first I thought of abandoning the book (going on with
it as if nothing had happened was impossible); but (abandoning it)
was also impossible. So the book interrupts~ incorporates thecoup~ incorporates murder. Moments which I had just noticed
become omens as the fascist stain seeps to the surface.
So you see~ my concerns repeat themselves--fascism and woman's culture as two poles~ the dark and the light~ alienationand community~ how to work it out~ how to make the revolutionthat will stick~ how to overthrow power .••.•• It is not powerlessness that keeps (women) from being crimvnals. It is something else--and I care about making that public
and bringing what we know of light into the public world~ before
they kill us all.
-Deena Metzger

And Eve is the enemy of God and when He takes her, He
takes her by force.
He takes in the night and without
knowing He takes her in silence and invisibility.
And when the son breaks the flesh between her legs,
when she can no longer protect him, God leads him toslaughter.
What are Eve's names? Gita and Mary and Sara.
50

*

Who is the Lamb? It is Eve's son.
And God rejoices
in his dying.
The lamb is Eve's son, is always Eve'sson. So God hates him and devours him.
Adam is obedient.
And he loves God.
They areblood brothers.
And they make offerings to each other ;Placations. Booty.
And Adam is a thief and steals
the child from Eve's legs, even as it is covered withher blood, he smears the blood on his mouth and calls
the son, his.
And Cain cannot bear her name and she
mothers him in secret because Adam claims him.
Adam has his son's blood on his mouth from the beginning and he likes the taste of it. And when God
calls for blood, Adam is obedient and gives up evenhis own son.
And Eve is powerless for she will notcome to death.
She does not put out her wrist to God.
She will not kill Adam. Though God seduces her, shedoes not acquiesce.
She is not blood sister to him.
She pours her own blood out on the ground.
And when she extends her womb around Cain, she
makes an ally of time.
It is not possession; it isdesperation.
And Adam mocks her because he is impatient to murder.

*

So Eve is the first to know desire which is loss.
she is in mourning.

And

*****

Afterwards when she can t 'alk about it, he asks her,"Do you want me to kill him?"
There is a long silence. She thinks about wiping
the blood away which is seeping out from between her
legs.
("Blood again!" you say, "again!"
Yes, again and then again.
But you see, she
didn't invite it, or create it.
It happened to her
and then again and then, alas, again.
So you cannot
turn your back anymore than she can.)But she wants him also to see the blood; now it is
no longer necessary to hide it. He must know.
"Are you serious?" she is startled by his question.
"Oh, yes," he answers.
"It will not be hard tofind him.""Whom are you going to kill?""Him.""Which one?""The one that did it."
"Which one?""Don't worry," he says, "we will find him.""Him?"She is continuing to bleed. The hemorrhage does
not endanger her and it is not the kind of bleedingthat pregnancy stops. Otherwise she would suggestthat they make love. But love is not a poultice atthis instant.
"Him?" she asks.
"There have been
thousands."

51

He probably wants her to douche, use a tampax, orcall a doctor or put a bandage between her legs.
"How
about infection," .he asks, "isn't there a chance of
infection or disease.
Aren't you going to do anything
about it."
"Maybe women should organize," he says.
"Of course,
it offends you that I should want to kill him. An exchange of weapons. Maybe you should do something.
Make him an example. You and your women friends could
do it. You could join together.
If he knew you werearmed, if another knew you would retaliate, if you
left him swinging from the tree with his genitals severed, it would not happen again.
Look, he says, it's
because you've never had a gun, that he does this to
you .. . He thinks you're helpless and he hates you.
Well, even I've had a gun.
I didn't go into the service, you know that, but at school, we trained.
And
now of course, we all need that training, you know
that. Otherwise we're at the bastards' mercy.
As youwere.
Look, I'll teach you.
It isn't difficult.""It isn't difficult," she repeats.
"Isn't it odd.
It isn't difficult to kill a man . "He turned his entire body into a gun to assauLtme.
what an advance on technoLogy.
The blood flow diminishes, after all it is only
symbolic.
She turns her back on him.
"What are you going to do?" he demands.
"You can't
just sit here!""I'm going to see a woman, women friends, Jane,
Barbara. We'll talk.""And then?""Nothing.""And him?""He is your problem, your burden because he's yourbrother.
I have nothing to do with his crime.""Shall I kill him for you?""For me? For me? Kill all or nothing.""That isn't an answer. What shall I do? Whatshall I do?""Promise not to do it again."*****

Eve names the children who will be taken by God.
Cain
was the first that God stole. After that she became
wary; she hid her son in the bulrushes but God discovered him. She was not deceived when' God spared her
son in the terrible bloodletting of the firstborn.
She did not distinguish between one child and another.
She bides her time under the rain of plagues; she islearning how to make her own war without murder.
Soon
she will bring him down and end the bloodletting.
-Deena Metzger

52

Elsa
"What needs to be understood is that erotic love between women is not a deviation from some presumed"normal." The Lesbian, to use a designation with anhonorable history, is not a spoiled, failed or diverted so-called heterosexual woman.
Neither is she a
pseudo-male frustrated within female flesh and bones-the few who feel so are frustrated by society's ignorance and persecution.
She is from birth and perhaps
prenatally an essentially different being with different needs and desires.
She is constituted as she isbecause Nature has made her so.
After lifelong meditation on the matter (I am 74 years old as this is
written), after observation of and discussion withothers who do not fit the crude male-female categories,
plus wide reading, I will go a step further and say,Nature needs the Lesbian as she is.
She needs me as I
am.
" ... Nature has kept on producing women like her.
Why? What is the Great Mother up to? ..
"Who instructs the dolfin or the pine, the cloveror the bee, how to grow and function? How should theyneed instruction, being cells of the being of the
Universal Mother, carrying within themselves her desig~
And is it not so with us? . . I have never observed anyargument to the effect that among butterflies the 'fritelary is abnormal for not conforming to the patternof the monarch; nor is it suggested that the male sea
horse is a shame to his sex for nurturing the young of
his kind within a pouch in his abdomen.
"In the sub-species woman of humankind there likewise emerge different types ...
" ... Nature is sane and produces what can sanely be
used.
Nature wastes nothing.
Shall we, humans, besane enough not to waste her gift of women "more pregnant in their souls than in their bodies" and use themto recreate societies more sanely, more spiritually
informed?"-ELsa -GidLow

These exaerpts are from Ask No Man Pardon: The PhUosophiaaL
Signifiaanae 9i Being Lesbian. We're printing them to entiae you
into reading the bookLet, avaiLabLe from: Druid Heights Books,
685 Camino del, Canyon, MiLl, VaLLey, Ca. 94941, $1.35.
For a fuLl, review, see Womanspirit, Box 263, WoLf Creek, Ore.,
97497, pubLished quarterLy at equinoxes and soLstiaes, $6/yr.
Diana Press wi'll, soon be issuing a new book by ELsa aidLow.
53

MandyJournal, Entries 3 1975:
I ... sti'l'l am putting art & the sense of achievement invoLved withart & the time that is invoLved in art in the way. First of a'l'l3
the sense of achievement from it has been unsatisfactory comparedto that of seeing myse'lf--not 'less but 'less compLete. My art isn't
number one. I am. I wiU do my art out of me & me can't be madeout of my art. Now that I am taLking about art in this way I don't
want to caU it "art" anymore. Because that word is meant to separate a part of myseLf from myseLf•..
When a baby spits oatmeal, in its mother's face 3 that's a 'loveLy
statement. When the baby gets big though3 it just gets up from thetabLe angry & frustrated. We are aU denied our outs. Se'lfpresentation never stops. It's refinding the means that is my becoming an artist ... It takes a virtuaLLy constant attention to the
dynamics of yourseLf to ..• grab a piece of that seLf & formaLize it.
It's 'like unLoading a moving boxcar from the ground ...
... a radical, rightist •.. has taught me a'lot about what is goingon in this country. He said ... that t 'he more goods a person can
produce the happier they can possibLy be--that the goods themseLves
are not important but the power from producing them and exchanging
them is & that that's why a capitaList chooses to produce & profit
toward infinity. This power3 now that L have repeated his words
to him3 he describes as a sense of achievement. And finaLLy I see
women's art. It is without the artificial, patriarchal, factory ofcreation. It is the real, thing. It is dynamic in process; it isorganic. It is in groups or not in groups. But it is not a construction of identity. It is seLf-presentation .••i have seen man's time
as it captures my knowing
and seen it wind and run'like a fool,:a pinning wings to the tabLe contest .

•.• My work aLways has a degree of meLanchoLia about it. Nobody
knows what it means. I don't know what it means until, after thefact--just 'like everything I do. Margaret is a Moose Maid. A book
caUed Margaret is ~ Moose Maid after the first drawing. Then
White Goose ~ for Jane. I insist on doing these things for
peopLe. That is where my impetus 'lies or at 'least they are connected in a quite origin-type pLace ...
•.. and I'm free to 'let myseLf 'loose with a'll, these kangaroos
hopping through taLl, grass.
-Mandy WaUace

54

iV-'ll55

Kris
ONCE UPON A TIME ...
.. . there was a little girl named Jane J. Jessie Juder,
who lived in a big house by the woods.
In the woods
there was a big hill, and at the bottom of the hill
there was a big haunted house. But the little girldidn't know it was haunted.
She loved to go down there
every day.
One night she went in the haunted house.
She looked out the window and saw a graveyard.
She went
down to the graveyard to read the tombstones. There was
one tombstone that said, "Jane J. Jesse Juder." Thelittle girl bent down to the ground and said, "Hey, myname's Jane J. Jesse Juder too!" When she got up,
someone else came up too, up from the ground, and said,"You big bully, you just woke me up." Then the spirit
fell back on the ground and went, "~~ . ,, Jane J.
read the other tombstones.
Then she looked up at thehouse.
She heard a noise and saw some smoke.
Then avoice said, "I'm the witch of this house and the stew I
make never gets rotten." Jane J. ran up to the houseand ran up the stairs as fast as a wink and stared at alittle old woma.n.
The little old woman said, "There's
something new to put in my stew!" And she pointed herbony finger right at Jane J. Jesse Juder.
Jane J.
burped and then she fainted.
Nobody knew it but she wasa burping hero.
She could even burp when she was dead.
The old woman put her in the stew and she burped andburped and burped and burped and burped and burped andburped and burped and burped and burped! ! ! ! I! The oldwoman picked her out and said, "This is a burping trick!"and threw her out the windo~.
Jane got up and read asign that said, "~JII~" She walked three more
feet and read another sign that said, "The Haunted House!"
She ran and ran and ran and jumped in her mother's arms.
But she missed the target and the witch caught her instead. The witch said, "Now I've got you, and if you
burp I'll put you under the tombstone that says Jane J.
Jessie Juder." So Jane didn't burp but she farted.
The witch said, "All right, all right, all right, allright, I'll let you go." So she did.
And Jane Jessie
kissed her goodbye and snored all the way home.
-Kris Gray
Kris Gray is seven years oLd and attends the Stone Soup
SchooL in CuLLowhee, North CaroLina.
She makes up her
stories as she goes aLong.

56

Merrilfrom SISTERWORLD

Editors' note: The following is an excerpt from an unpublished science fiction novel Sisterworld.
We readthe novel one charmed and lazy Sunday morning in'Tennessee sprawled on Merril's livingroom floor.
The
story ' is a simple one: an expedition of men from apatriarchally organized planet lands on Khaton, a planet
inhabited solely by women-loving women.
Blessed byHylantree, their living Mother Tree Goddess, the women
have spun a nurturant culture without power, without
money, without bloodshed.
Their lives are their art,
and their names are the names of flowers.
Their technology is organic; they weave their homes from thebranches of still-living plants.
The male invaders
expect resistance or submissiqn.
How they react when
they're instead ignored might be predicted by any aware
Earthwoman.
As the selection begins, the Khaton woman named
Hyassa is flying alone to her death.
The "vehicle" sherides is a natural "airplane," a giant pod filled with
developing seeds.
Hyassa had begun her life within the
opening heart of a flower; she ends her life on thewings of potential flowers.

Harnessed securely to the great pod, Hyassa rode thewinds of the fourth season. Pink strands of her hairstreamed out behind like a company of banners against
the sky, against clouds tinted lilac with changing amber shadows. Her mouth grinning into the wind squeezed
up her cheeks, crushing them beneath her eyes.
The pod drove into a small spiral breeze, an updraft which spun them swiftly high, leaving Hyassa's
breath momentarily beneath. Then she cried out, as thesurge thrust her hard against the straps of the harness; spun cloud and sky, ground and leaf in a whirl
before her vision, snatching her thoughts from her.
She leaned her knees and inner thighs hard against theresilient flesh of the pod.
The pod swelled to herpressure, singing its gorge of seed, glutted with newlife to the point of bursting--and burst it would,
spilling seed and perhaps Hyassa, too, into new life,
new song.

57

But not yet. Hyassa stroked the pod's skin with her
Not yet. First we must reach the forests;
then we both may have our Time and the Zuxury of singing. The pod dipped and soared, borne and bearing, erfingertips.

ratic motion carrying always toward the forests andaway from all pasts, away, and away.
Hyassa rested her chin on her chest, and sudden
tears of her weeping briefly silvered the air.
It is myTime.
She threw her head back, facing into the rush ofwind. Breezes blew through her open jaws scouring her
tongue dry. Her lips curled high over her teeth, wide
apart, spread to expose the pink scream of her throat.
Mine. My Time.
Air a gale in her mouth seared theprivate places inside her cheeks and the soft flesh at
the base of her gums.
She gagged, epiglottis glued against the back of her tongue, parched flesh sticking toitself.
I go toward.
Forward. Her lips floated together, quivered.
Peeling skin reaching for moisturestood high, brushed closing surfaces like butterfly
feet.
Saliva began to flow again, and Hyassa licked her
mouth around the inside and then out and over her lips.
She tilted her head to one side, and the warm gush ofsorrow spilled down her cheek.
So why am I grieved?

Why, then, do I weep?
Hyassa slept, her form draped over the body of thegreat pod.
The pod continued forward, bobbing on, supported on air by the buoyant gas that was expelled by
the seeds developing inside it. Hyassa dreamed--swift
recollections, brief pictures flooding through her mind
and then away, fleeting remembrances of childhood andyouth, budding dreams of puberty, questions, mindreaching; and Hylantree:... DEAR MY CHILD, TO LIVE IN HARMONY AS KHATON, AS
ALL THAT IS AND IS OF THE MOTHER ...
Hyassa Zived, growing in Khaton, sharing, exchanging, singing joy in chorus with her sisters. Lifeis bZooming, touching, being; and HyZantree:•.. THIS WORLD FOR YOUR DELIGHT, AND ONE ANOTHER ...
Leucothae, smiling through pasts, smiled in Hyassa's
memories--Leucothae, who dreamed her, Hyassa, into being; then plucked her as fruit from the soul of a flower.
Leucothae was, as were the others--as was Arbey,
with great plum-colored eyes and melon breasts; as wasdusky Vitis; as was even Ixoray, sister of her, Hyassa's,
heart, whose Time came early.
All were, as Hyassa rodeforward toward the forests of her own Time; and Hylantree:... WHEN YOUR TIME IS BEFORE YOU, YOU WILL KNOW, AND
YOU MUST MAKE YOUR PREPARATIONS.
CHOOSE YOUR POD BEFORE THE FIRST CHILL OF HARVEST SETS IT FREE, AND SECURE IT WITH RIBBONS OF YOUR OWN. WHEN YOUR TIME IS UPON
YOU, YOU WILL BE READY. THEN YOU MAY MOUNT YOUR POD,
FREE IT ON THE WINDS, AND SEEK THE FORESTS OF THE GREATER CONTINENT TO FIND YOUR TRUTH ...
58

The pod ascended, and Hyassa woke, light-headed fromthe thin air and fasting.
They rode above clouds
streaked with purple and orange.
They flew ahead of thetriple suns, but slowly; so that the great cluster oflight moved closer to them until it passed them andcontinued ahead, moving around the planet to leave thesky darkened for the paler show of the moons--one lilac,
one amber--which orbited twice and thrice around theplanet Khaton in the course of a night.
The air cooled, and the pod flew lower.
Brush tipsof shrubbery reflected light in pinpoints far below, as
the moons chased each other by the pod, crossing thenight with pastel shadows.
Lilac and amber phosphorescence caught in sudden movement from a rippling surface
of water. Moonslight played on it for a space of time
until the rising of the three suns illuminated miles ofdeep turquoise color which their combined light pulledfrom the sea.
Hyassa dozed and wakened until conscious thought nolonger distracted her from being.
She was, and she was,and the pod carried her on over the sea toward thegr~ater continent.
Again stretches of land were beneath them--starkand rocky land with only occasional patches of vegetation.
In the distance, beneath streaks of clouds colored pink, mauve, and pale orange, shone the jeweledcolors of the forests.
The suns rose high in the sky,shining on treetops in patches of red, purple, andgreen.
Hyassa saw, and then she slept again.
She was jolted awake by a sharp c~acking sound, andthe pod lurched suddenly, throwing her against thestraps. With a pop, a large fissure opened in the surface of the pod near Hyassa's thigh, and a series of
black seeds, each perhaps the size of her fist, shot
forth.
Tiny filaments of golden silk blossomed fromeach seed, catching in the currents of the air and carrying the seeds away from each other and the pod.
The
pod dropped sharply.
There was another crack and pop,
and another stream of seeds spurted, this time from theunderside of the pod, followed by a third and a fourth
break.
The air became golden threadwork dotted with ebony
through which shone the light from the suns, broken into
occasional rays of pure color by the brilliant web ofseeds . Hyassa watched, enthralled, her face reflecting
the glory of color.
Then the entire pod exploded frombeneath her, and she fell.
Shreds of pod trailed fromthe harness which she still wore, and black seeds clungto the scraps and sprouted golden floss which snatchedat the air to slow Hyassa's fall.
Then the universe
erupted into blinding no-color, sucked her in, and swallowed her.
59

Cathy"Opening Conclusion" is the concluding section of a book I've
It's the product of thinking about climaxes--about hOllJ
maLe-created work tends to move in an ever upward fashion tOllJard
a singLe earth-shattering cLimax. I Like the idea of repetition
but found the singLe cLimax approach an aLien one. It occurred
to me that women Live in .cycLes--that this is the underLying
mo"tivation for attacks on things Unear~ especiaLLy Unear thinking. So the "progression" in this piece is tOllJard a center~ theUnes peeUng away in what I hop~ is a tho~htfuL way tiL theheart Line is reveaLed. The use of thirteen Lines and thirteen
syLLabLes is for women's Luck. It seems to me that the process
of gI'OlIJth is through Layers: Layers of recoLLection (the past)~
Layers of senses (the present)~ and Layers of imagination (thefuture). Movement. is away from or tOllJard a center--in itseLf
circuLar and changing~ sometimes one of fusion~ sometimes a centerof fission. And there is the center of the seLf~ knOllJLedge of
which is after aLL the point of everything.
ALso~ it is I think woman's Long aLienation from herseLf that
more than anything eLse oppresses her. Or to reiterate Atkinson's
provocative question: why didn't second generation sLaves haveto be chained?
wri tten.

-Cathy Cruikshank60

OPENING CONCLUSION
In my solitude the sea was a consolation.
I lifted myfeet from earth and cruised the first frontier; small
memories and gust~ of oxygen balanced me.
The calmwater exposed the magician's heaving hands and thenpurified I watched the mysterious tides.
I visited
the ruins of my father's temple.
I found my own
bones, I found my self-created soul.
I used my mother's
words like boosters to rocket me and from invisible
space I admired the earth, I aimed my laser and mademy fears conspicuous.
The sweetened air, a dozen
dreams a week gave me life.
Reentry focused my shadow
and we became friends.
In the ocean women were swimming like astronauts.
I lifted my feet from earth and cruised the first
frontier; small memories and gusts of oxygen balancedme.
The calm water exposed the magician's heaving
hands and then purified I watched the mysterious tides.
I visited the ruins of my father's temple.
I found myown bones, I found my self-created soul.
I used mymother's words like boosters to rocket me and from invisible space I admired the earth, I aimed my laser
and made my fears conspicuous.
The sweetened air, adozen dreams a week gave me life.
Reentry focused myshadow and we became friends.
Small memories and gusts of oxygen balanced me.
The calm water exposed the magician's heaving hands
and then purified I watched the mysteriqus tides.
I
visited the ruins of my father's temple.
I found myown bones, I found my self-created soul.
I used mymother's words like boosters to rocket me and from invisible space I admired the earth, I aimed my laser
and made my fears conspicuous. The sweetened air, adozen dreams a week gave me life.
The calm water exposed the magician's heaving
hands and then purified I watched the mysterious tides.
I visited the ruins of my father's temple.
I found myown bones, I found my self-created soul.
I used mymother's words like boosters to rocket me and from invisible space I admired the earth, I aimed my laser
and made my fears conspicuous.
And then purified I watched the mysterious tides.
I visited the ruins' of my father's temple.
I found myown bones, I found my self-created soul.
I used mymother's words like boosters to rocket me and from invisible space I admired the earth.
I visited the ruins of my father's temple.
I
found my own bones, I found my self-created soul.
I
used my mother's words like boosters to rocket me.
I found my own bones, I found my self-created soul.

- cath y Cru ik shank61PllceLATTER-DAY CAMPFIRE GIRL STORIESIPURPLE PASSAGE
THE LAST MELODRAMA
I dwell in the halls of my father.
I sigh, I cry, "I
am bored, I am hungry, I must have something to feedon--to read on," I say.
I moan, I groan.
I bite myfingernails to the bone.
"I am lonely," I say.
I brood.
I cut a hole in the roof of the house and I take all
the furniture of my father and heap it in the middle ofthe occidental rug.
And then, using all of the booksof my father for faggots, I light the fire and sit down
beside it.
I mull and muse ...
I wonder what C. Sirius Dogstar would write if she wokefrom her coma-Come out of your coma
dear Connie
dear Sirius
dear Dogstar

Dear Dogstar is a pathetic creature, very low life, very
ambivalent--a lover and a fearer of words--ooh--ohConnie Canoodling Dogstar is so afraid of words that
she can only play jacks with them.
Puce is a color very much liked by Connie Sirius
Dogstar.
It is a dull purple--brownish, dense of hue,no, not dull, too rich and mysterious to be dull.
It
is not, however~ bright and shining and glowing, oh nosiree, it is not one of your exhibitionistic flaming
barfly colors. Puce has its own protective coloring:it opts for being overlooked except by the most sensitive, the brightest eyes, because only in certain sideglances of light is it vibrant.
An indescribablemixture of brownish and bluish and reddish tones, theformula for the proportions of brown, blue, red is aselusive as a flea: it is some unfindable blend of eggplant and old-fashioned English postage stamp; "thepenny puce."

62

Puce is also a word very much relished by Connie
Sirius Dogstar: the persimmon pucker of the lips to sayit--"pu---u--ce--ssc", and the nice prolongable hiss at
the end.
She feels sophisticated, veddy, veddy superior,awfully, awfully Brit-tishh--the possessor of a secret- ·superior-elitish PUCE.
Constance Serious puts on her thick spectacles, unboxes the oblong lens, opens the BOOK, and places thelens over a square of tiny print:"Flea-colou:£'ed"; pUYple-brown or brownish pUYple; "Dipa feather in aqua fortis, put it on the ash, ... and it
will make it a cinnamon, or rather a puce or flea colour." (l8th century)"
Connie S.D. is crushed, deflated ... then angry: whoever
but whomsoever knew the colour of a flea?!!
Connie Sirius Dogstar sat around and thought about purple in all its manifestations and ramifications: purple
in all its shades and tints is the color of perversion:
mauve (the mauve decade, shade of Oscar Wilde); magenta(flashy, vulgar); lavender (soft, pungent smells); lilac,
plum, orchid, violet, heliotrope, amethyst. Yes,
there's enough there, she said, a purpurescent plenty ofsights, smells, tastes, touches, sounds--sounds? No
sounds.
A silent community of purple, with here andthere accents of yellow and green (perhaps the sounds
would just come later, no need to worry about that now,
just begin). Connie Sirius Dogstar starting out withthe deep eggplant shades of her closet (the empty one
with the naked coathangers and the dust and a musky
mildew odor), starting out to build a community of
purple--(Purple and green, purple and green and white,shoulder to shoulder Suffragettes ... old ladies wear pu~
ple, it looks good with their white hair .. . Connie Sirius
Dogstar has been dreaming lately about old ladies--demented senile old ladies whose nails want trimming,
whose fingernails grow not just longer but broader andwhen Connie Sirius trims them they bleed and the oldlady Janellen Dogstar (long dead) cries and crumples tothe floor, and Connie S.D. is wet with the anguish ofJanellen's real pain and both of them are purpled inblood. And while Connie Sirius Dogstar is wondering why,
why, WHY do and how can fingernails bleed and what does
the dream mean---}Connie Sirius Dogstar starting out within the deep
eggplant shades of her empty closet to build a communityof purple (with here and there accents of green andorange, but nowhere accents of blue and red and yellow)
Connie Sirius Dogstar Puce, who sometimes was a timid
63

serious scholar, sat in the corner of her eggplant closet in a small pool of flashlight with a pad of 4x6
cards and a timid, fineline lavender ballpoint with her
friend Daisy's new crispy copies of the fore-shortened
Oxford English Dictionary squinting through the Bauschand Lomb rectangular reading glass at the potentials
and limitat~ons of purple, lavender, mauve, violet, magenta, orchid, plum, lilac, puce, heliotrope, grape,amethystine, solferino, livid, and cyanotic (med.),Connie Sirius Dogstar sat--eyes and legs crossed, mouth
gaping, waxing sodden on the purpurescent juices of the
OED:

Lavender: "things to be washed" ... "to l.ay up in l.avender";"to put out of the way of doing harm •.• by imprisoning him
or the Uke" .•. "What woman has not the bridal. favors andraiment stowed away~ and packed in Z-avender~ in the inmost
cupboards of her heart" (Thackeray~ 1858); "the l.avenderof memory" .•. "the viol.et paths of pl.easure" ... pl.um: a goodthing~ one of the best things to be found •.. "This Tenche
was so pl.umme and fat that she might serve him for a goodmeal." ..• pl.um: "to sweU up~ to become spongy as dough" ...
heUotrope: "green stone streaked with bl.ood" •.• purpl.e:"Shoul.d my passive Body be pregnant by the purpl.e ViUain" ...
There she would have "purpled and died away in grey
and mourning shadow," asphyxiated by lavender mists,
laid out livid in her amethyst-encrusted eggplant vertical tomb, had it not been for the violent hand of
Daisy Eyebright Bellatrice, who boldly without knocking
threw wide the closet door and demanded of her bestfriend and sometime doppel.ganger Connie Sirius Dogstar
that she come out and account for herself.
For Daisy E.B. knew perfectly well what was goingon and she was going to stomp a lot, threaten thundersdo anything short of drastically smashing the Bausch &Lomb (Daisy E. was not going to do anything that stupidly violent, because the OED and the Reading Glassbelonged to her, after all, as a result of the daring
con game she'd played and won with the Book of theMenses Club), but this time, THIS TIME she was not going to let the pansy-livered Connie Sirius get awaywith it.
For she had seen it all happen before and before and before: that Connie Sirius Dogstar would flash
brilliantly with a bold idea for a new world (one Daisy
desperately wanted to help build and live in) and thenretreat to books, shrink like the violet she sometimes
was to a puce flea with a big mbuth drinking the bloodof her dead betters and swelling to sodden immobility,
sleep, and dream away her vision.
Connie blinked up at Daisy and down at a 4x6 card:"I have read of a woman with an orchidaceous face (1864Miss Yonge TRIAL I 84)." she read.
64

Daisy Eyebright Bellatrice snatched the card from
Connie Sirius and READ IN A LOUD VOICE: "Orchidaceous:
Resembling an orchid in some way; (mumble, mumble, mumble) "The simple old type of manhood is lost long sincein endless orchidaceous variation"; (babble, babble,
babble) "ENGAGED TO BE ORCHIDACEOUS AND FLAMBOYANT AS
THE IMPROPER PERSON OF BABYLON.""BABYLON--BABYLON! !" Daisy Eyebright kept screaming,and yanking Connie's wrist as she tried to pull her outof the closet.
Connie's fingers tightened on the handleof the Bausch & Lomb Rectangular Reading Lens. Daisy
tried to pry the fingers loose and snatch the lens, but
it hit the doorjamb of the closet and smashed.
"I--I--eyeI--eyeI!!" Daisy screamed and stared ather right hand.
"The red blood flowed fr ~ sh/ that underneath (her)feet soon made a purple plesh, " Connie quoted breathlessly as she tried to rescue her stack of 4x6'es fromthe purple drippings and the broken glass.
Daisy, holding her cut-up right hand, was screaming
now without making a sound.
She closed her eyes andfled, leaving Connie Sirius babbling in the wallow ofher closet.
Unable to close the door because of the glass fragments and the empty coathangers that had clattered down
during the struggle, Connie Sirius Dogstar crawled
cautiously out into the half-light of the hallway, andbegan shakily to order her note cards, beginning with
two on side-edge--end-edge to end-edge--two more on
side-edge--end-edge to end-edge, · they stood alone likefour walls; carefully she added a ceiling, another room,
and another, ceilings and storeys and rooves--Connie
Sirius Dogstar was scarcely breathing at all now,
afraid to disturb the thing.
Her face was turning purple from her effort to hold her breath.
She drew her
knees up to her chin, locked hands around her legs, androlled several feet away from the card-tower.
When she began to breathe easily again, she unrolled
herself and lay flat out on her stomach.
She realizedthat there was only one card left in her hand.
Shelooked at the tower: it would be perfect! she crowed-everything coming out just right--no leftover droppings
to clean up : this one card would lid the tower andsquare the edifice complete--no loose ends--everythingneat, perfectly proportioned.
There it stood: uprightstanding by itself; all it needed ,now was for her tospray it evenly and lightly with transitional-phrase
lacquer, punctuate the panels with period plums, thentissue-wrap in quotation marks, box in lavender manilla,
and mail to the PMLA!
Connie Sirius Dogstar froze.
She belched a badtaste, swallowed too quickly, and began to hiccough inwhat-if's: WHAT-IF the last card were too heavy? WHAT65

IF it were too small to roof the thing? WHAT-IF herright pinkie twitched and disturbed the balance? WHATIF the sweat from her now very wet palms dripped andweakened the fabric? WHAT-IF it needed a steeple?
WHAT-IF--WHAT-IF--WHAT-IF--she hiccoughed--she sighed-she cried--she wept--she slept.
She awoke finally inthe deep purpie gloom and looked at the ugly, livid,
grotesque, ill-proportioned obscenity still standing
waiting to be lidded--the last card still in her still
sweating shameful hand.
She deserved it: how had she
Connie Sirius Dogstar dared to disturb the universe by
begetting and midwifing this monster--this pathetic
mongoloid idiot.
With her own hand (still holding thelid) she must complete it and box it away in her closet,
to be dismantled later when she felt stronger.
She began to slither weakly across the floor, stillon her belly, holding high the last white card like aflag of surrender-A door opened suddenly at the end of the hall and awhite light was suddenly there, like a powerful ellipsoidal spotlight catching Connie downstage center:(SCENE: A smaZZ room with a high vauZted oeiZing; Zotsof gothio arohes Zike wishbones everywhere; thiok stone
waZZs oovered with shieZds oovered with ooats-of-arms,
swords, and trophies of the ohase. There are no windows and the room is Zit by a sZoppy, drippy, smoky
oandZe perohed on the high sZanting writing tabZe stageZeft. There is a thiok door up oenter, whioh has justbeen boZdZy thrown open introduoing into the murky rooma great swatoh of dazzZing white Zight siZhouetting
DAISY EYEBRIGHT BELLATRICE, oZothed in bright red papiermaohe armor fashioned Zike Jeanne d'Aro's.
(She is,however, not riding a horse.) Distant sounds of abattZe in progress: oZashing steeZ, shouts, trumpets,
grunts, eto.

Downstage oenter, oZothed in a bZue medievaZ sohoZar's
robe with matohing mortar board (Zike Dootor Faustus's),
Zies CONNIE SIRIUS DOGSTAR fZat on her stomaoh with hand
upZifted hoZding a ZittZe white oard. In front of her
is an un topped high tower made of white 4x6 oards.
DAISY strides oonfidentZy forward,

her soarred righthand fisted and Zifted high. She stops upstage rightof CONNIE and with a graoefuZ swoop removes the oard
CONNIE has been oZutohing.)

DAISY (reading the oard): "In the prismatic spectrum
and in our normal spectrum we found no representative of purple, or purplish tints.
The sen-66

sation cannot be produced by one set of waves
alone, whatever their length may be: it needs
the joint action of the red and blue. II(DAISY carefully places the card on top of the tow e r ofstands back~ folds her arms~ looks at the t ower~
steps back up center~ raises her right-scarred fist)card~~DAISY: Childe Rowland to the Card Tower Came!
(Puffscheeks~ blows on tower which collapses immediately.
ALL SOUND STOPS.)CONNIE:(dropshand~collapses): Oh-h-h(DAISY puts her fingers to her lips and gives three long
shrill whistles~ then quickly opens her arms.
From
stage left there begins a small puce breeze which swells
to a magenta wind powerf~l enough to blowout the candle
and spiral the cards into DAISY's arms.
Holding thecards~ she exits~ laughing~ running into the light upstage center.
CONNIE picks herself up and runs after
DAISY~ babbling and crying.)
CURTAIN
The wind behind her Connie Sirius Dogstar, babbling andshivering and stumbling over her blue robe is running
after a whirling red Daisy.
C. Sirius's spectacles ice
thick and lithe wind has reached hurricane proportions
and what is the name (she babbled) of this one? Alice,
Bertha, Caroline, Daisy, Eye--eye--aiyhh--oh, oh, oh
here I am in the middle of--freezing to death, my feetare sticking to the sidewalk--oh, oh, oh, like Eliza
crossing the frozen river--the dogs are barking (shesheds her spectacles and her near-sight can only follow
the gleam of the crazy-Daisy flame licking up lollipop
oxygen ahead of her) if we can only make it to the library (pant-pant) leaving skin footprints on de col.d,
cold ground (pant-pant--Connie Sirius is panting like adawg) with the (pant) little fire (pant) the little(pant-pant) perpetual flame (pant) mem-memorializing
Daddy Dogstar in the rare book room (pant-gasp-pant)ifIshoulddiebeforeIwake (gasp) IpraytheLordmy (gasp,
gasp, gasp) ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes(pant-pant-pant) deeperthandideverplummetsoundi'lldrown
my--no (gasp) His--no, I mean (gasp) her BOOK---"
Suddenly there they are in the quiet eye of the hurricane, and there is the little prickling perpetual flame,
and around them are the leaning stacks of leather-boundbooks, but Daisy Eyebright is tearing off her own phony67red-chainmail armor and skinning off her red leotard
and tights and throwing them on the fire and stripping
off Connie's medieyal blue robe and throwing it on thefire and Daisy is leaping in her own skin and tossing
her Maenad head and Connie Sirius shapes her mouth intoa NO, but she has lost her voice and Daisy EyebrightBall-o'-tricks, leaping and whooping, flings wide herarms, and some of the cards fall into the fat purple
bonfire, and the still unvoiced Connie, flipped over on
her back from the disrobement, her arm and leg appendages flailing "stop it! stopit! stopit!" watches thewhite cards fly' up out of dazzling Daisy's arms, flap
their wings and coo-coo-coo like hysterical doves as
they circle the fat luscious bonfire, and as she blinks
her eyes the cards change colors, click-click-click-like slide projector images: magenta, violet, orchid,amethyst--explode into Catherinewheels, gush and shower
down on Connie Dogstar, prickling and tickling her poor
canoodling body until she sneezes and sneezes and comes
and comes and comes----And Daisy Eyebright Bellatrice bends down andgathers Connie Sirius Dogstar into her arms and holds
her tight and kisses her long and deep and whispers
into Connie's ear as she snuzzles it:"Look over my left shoulder," and Connie Delirious
Sirius opens her eyes and looks over Daisy Crazy Eyebright's lovely left shoulder as she chews on it andsees in the mauve leftover glow of the firewords shower
an angel-band of whitehaired old-lady harpies withorchidaceous faces and long broad fingernails and amethystine wings, wearing purple and green and white ribbons
flapping forth out of the whistling winds--all looking
like Janellen Dogstar and all looking like their own
orchidaceous, precious selves and smelling strongly lavender as they cackle and hoot and snatch all the leatherrare books and chuck them into the spittle-licking
fatfire-And Connie Sirius Dogstar suddenly knows that there
is now space for her purple world to exist and that
Daisy Eyebright Bellatrice knows what the dream meant-has known all along.
She closes her eyes and when she
opens them again there is no eternal flame, no rare-boOk
room, no library and no wind; the moon is shining, thebeach is ash-lilac and empty and waiting .

Puce is a quiet schizophrenic j1ea who spends her days on the inhospitabLe Left j1ank of a tortoise-sheLL cat and her nights
inside the secon4 voLume of the Oxford EngLish Dictionary.
68

"GO TELL AUNT RHODY ... "*1. PATRIARCHY, THE CLASS RULE , OF MEN OVER WOMEN, IS
HUMAN SOCIETY STRUCTURED ACCORDING TO THE LAW OF THE
FATHER. UNDER THE FATHER'S LAW, WOMEN ARE OBJECTS , NOT
SUBJECTS, AND VALUED PRIMARILY AS MOTHERS-OF-SONS. THE
BODY OF THE MOTHER IS RESERVED TO THE USE OF THE FATHER;THE FRUITS OF HER BODY, HER CHILDREN, ARE SEIZED AS
MALE PROPERTY. HER BODY BECOMES THE TEMPLE AND SEWER
AND MAGICAL COMMODITY OF PATRIARCHY.
2. PATRIARCHY IN ITS PRESENT DUAL MANIFESTATION(MULTINATIONAL CAPITALISM AND STATE SOCIALISM) STRUCTURES ALL ASPECTS OF LIVED HUMAN EXISTENCE:
A. PATRIARCHAL BIOLOGY: THE PARTITION OF THE BODY.
GENITAL SEXUALITY IS SEPARATED FROM SENSUALITY AND HARNESSED TO HETEROSEXUAL INTERCOURSE, WHICH IS CHANNELED
BY THE INSTITUTION OF MARRIAGE (AND IN CAPITALIST SOCIETIES, BY THE INSTITUTION OF PROSTITUTION) FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE MALE.
B. PATRIARCHAL ECONOMICS: PRODUCTION AND EXCHANGE
IN WHICH THE PRODUCT, THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION, AND THE
SURPLUS VALUE GENERATED BY HUMAN LABOR ARE APPROPRIATED
BY A NON-PRODUCTIVE RULING CLASS. WITHIN ITS CAPITALIST FORM, THOSE BELOW THE MALE RULING CLASS ARE FORCED
TO SELL THEIR LABOR POWER AS A COMMODITY WITHIN THE
PUBLIC SPHERE AND/OR TO LABOR UNPAID WITHIN THE PRIVATESPHERE. IN ITS STATE SOCIALIST FORM, PRODUCTION AND
EXCHANGE ARE CONTROLLED BY NON-PRODUCING BUREAUCRATS.
C. PATRIARCHAL "CULTURE": MEANING STRUCTURES CHARACTERIZED BY OBJECTIFICATION OF THE OTHER AND "POWEROVER" RELATIONSHIPS. LANGUAGE, DREAMS, RITUALS, AS
WELL AS THE MORE SELF-CONSCIOUS FORMS OF ART AND PHILOSOPHY, EXPRESS MALE SUBJECTIVITY AND CHARGE THE FEMALE
AS EVIL. THE UNDERLYING ETHOS IS ONE OF RAPE, GENOCIDE,AND WAR.
3. THE CONTRADICTIONS OF EACH ASPECT HAVE INTENSIFIED TO A BREAKING POINT. THE PATRIARCHAL CONTROL OF
REPRODUCTION HAS LED TO A GENOCIDAL IMBALANCE OF POPULATION AND RESOURCES; PATRIARCHAL CONTROL OF ECONOMICS
HAS RESULTED IN CONCOMITANT INFLATION/DEPRESSION IN THE
CAPITALIST COUNTRIES, FAMINE IN THE DEPENDENT COUNTRIES,SPIRALLING DEFENSE BUDGETS, THE THREAT OF NUCLEAR WAR,
AND ECOLOGICAL CRISIS. PATRIARCHAL CONTROL OF MEANING
HAS CLIMAXED IN THE ZOMBIE-LIKE CHARACTER OF MASS CUL-

69

TURE. AS A REIGN OF TERROR ACCE~ERATES, PATRIARCHY BECOMES MORE CLEARLY THE FUNERAL PROCESSION OF THE HUMAN
SPECIES.
4. A REVOLUTION GREAT ENOUGH TO RESOLVE THE CONTRADICTIONS OF PATRIARCHAL REPRODUCTION, PRODUCTION, AND
LANGUAGE WILL BE A QUALITATIVE LEAP IN THE WAYS WE MEAN
OUR LIVES, A LEAP BEYOND HUMANISM, BEYOND EVEN THE ANDROGYNOUS IDEAL, WHICH IS THE FURTHEST LIMIT OF THE HUMANIST IMAGINATION. THE REVOLUTION WILL BE IN EFFECT THE
CREATION OF A NEW SPECIES: A SPECIES WHICH REDEFINESSEXUALITY AND REPRODUCTION;-THE PRODUCTION AND EXCHANGE
OF USE VALUES; AND ALL THE LANGUAGES OF THE-CONSCIOUS
AND-SUBCONSCIOU~ - -5. THE NEW SPECIES IS ALREADY EMERGING ON THE BOUNDARIES OF PATRIARCHALLY DEFINED REALITY. UNDER PATRIARCHY WOMEN HAVE LIVED A CHAMELEON-LIKE BOUNDARY EXISTENC~SOMETIMES THE GOOD MOTHER, SOMETIMES THE BAD MOTHER,
BUT ALWAYS THROUGH MALE EYES, THE OTHER. AND IN ALL
KNOWN SOCIETIES LESBIANS ARE A CRIMINAL CLASS, THOSEWHO ARE CAST OUT. THE EMERGING SPECIES ARE WOMEN WHOEMBRACE AND REDEFINE THEIR ASCRIBED BOUNDARY/CRIMINALSTATUS, WOMEN WHOSE LIFE IS WITH AND FOR WOMEN, WOMEN
WHO ARE LESBIAN IN THE OLD AND THE NEW SENSES. "LESBIAN" HAS DENOTED WOMEN WHO HAVE SEXUAL RELATIONS WITH
WOMEN; THE NEW SPECIES, THE EMERGING LESBIAN WOMAN,INCORPORATES THE OLD MEANING WITHIN A FULLER MEANING:LESBIAN, A WOMAN IN TOTAL REVOLT AGAINST THE PATRIARCHY.
*lifted from the song "Go TeLL Aunt Rhody' the Patriarchy isDead" on Alia; Dobkin's al.bum LIVING WITH LESBIANS ($6 from ProjectNo. 1~ Preston Hol.l.ow~ N.Y. 12469)"Aunt Rhody"was written to be used by women as a springboard
for discussion. This notice gives permission to reproduce it.
-Harriet Desmoines

For co.ming, coming, Coming ... see p. 72.

70

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS:ELLEN MARIE BISSERT lives in New York City and edits 13th Moon.
CATHY CRUIKSHANK lives in Seattle~ Washington.
-------ELSA GIDLOW is a poet living in the Muir Woods of California.
KRIS 9RAY lives in the mountains of western North Carolina.
MERRIL BARRIS is a writer living in Knoxville~ Tennessee.
MARIANNE LIEBERMAN is an artist living in Charlotte~ North Carolina.
DEENA METZGER teaches writing at the Woman's Building in Los
Angeles.
JAN MILLSAPPS writes~ draws~ and makes films in Charlotte~ North
Carolina.
JULIA STANLEY is a linguist who lives in Lincoln~ Nebraska.
SUSAN LEIGH STAR is a writer/scholar living near Boston.
MANDY WALLACE is a Drastic Dyke in Charlotte~ North Carolina.

(Editors' note: Merril

Harris~ author of the pornographic
Press~ 1970) and the play
LaMama~ 1970)~ is experimenting withclassic Dirty Alice (Olympia

Quad (presented byremoving the duality based on female/male conflict. She
believes that the basic duality is not between male andfemale but between plant as earth and woman as spirit.
The woman riding toward spiritual rebirth on the swelling
pod is an attempt to create union between embodied
spirit and plant life.
Woman~ because she is both
flesh and spirit~ creates a new trinity of woman~ earth~and plant as she grows into harmony with her natural
world.)

SINISTER WISDOM
3116 Country Club Drive
Charlotte, N.C. 28205
Enclosed is $4.50 for issues 1,2&3, the full---first-year volume.
Enclosed is $3.25 for the remaining 2 issues---of Volume I.
NAME
ADDRESS______________________________________ ZIP___________

71

ANNOUNCING"For lesbians, who have been without faces, without
voices, without a validating herstory ... "SINISTER WISDOM Issue 2

November, 1976
"Lesbian Feminist Writing & Publishing II"
Edited by Beth Hodges
In her introduction to the first colleQtion of articles
on lesbian feminist writers (publishe&in 1975 by
Margins), Beth wrote: "We are witnessing the renaissanceof lesbian literature. And we have much to do, that is,develop a lesbian feminist aesthetic and validate,through criticism, our flourishing literature."
Sinister Wisdom agrees.
In this second collection editedby Beth Hodges (more focussed, more comprehensive, morein-depth than the Margins issue)--

Look for articles on: JUNE ARNOLD, SANDY BOUCHER, MARY
DALY, BARBARA DEMING, JEANNETTE FOSTER, JILLJOHNSTON, KATE MILLETT, PAT PARKER, ADRIENNE RICH,JOANNA RUSS, MONIQUE WITTIG, OUT AND OUT BOOKS,"THE IMAGE OF THE LESBIAN IN THE CONFESSION MAGAZINE," "TRENDS IN LESBIAN FEMINIST POLITICALWRITING," and "LESBIAN THEATRE: A VISION," alongwith many others, of course.
Look for reviewers, interviewers & overviewers: RITA MAE
BROWN, ELLY BULKIN, EMILY CULPEPPER, BARBARA GRIER(a.k.a. GENE DAMON), KARLA JAY, JOAN LARKIN, HONOR
MOORE, JULIA STANLEY, and BONNIE ZIMMERMAN, among
others, of course.
Look for graphics Ex: MANDY WALLACE, TEE CORINNE (thecunt artist), and photographers CAROL NEWHOUSE,PAT GOZEMBA, and ELLEN DENUTO, to name a few.
If you're a book-loving woman, don't miss
SINISTER WISDOMSpecial Issue Number Two.

72

"Like the leaves you flyaway at the slightest
breeze, beautiful strong light subtle andprompt of understanding as you are.
Bewareof dispersal.
Remain united like the charactersin a book. Do not abandon the collectivity."-Monique Wittig