Hillary Clinton’s speech in Beijing at the UN Women’s Conference in 1995. It gives me that righteous quiver.
10/24/10
I am hooked on Willow Smith’s first single, “Whip My Hair”. Because in a country where black women are pretty much the bottom of the totem pole, it’s thrilling to see a black girl rocking a “I <3 ME” t-shirt and exuding mega-confidence and ferocity. Yeah, she’s celebuspawn and privileged in a lot of ways, but she’s still going to face the challenges of living in a racist patriarchy.
And it’s heartening to see a girl being confident and feeling powerful and it’s not through being sexy. I’m all for feeling powerful and confident about and through sexuality, but the problem is that it seems to be the main and sometimes the only way women have visibility and are allowed access to power in popular culture, and, hell, even in our own private social circles. It feels like pretty is a rent you pay for occupying a space marked “female”, and if you don’t pay it–which ironically includes you paying for the right make-up, the right clothes, the right conditioner and/or hair straightener, the right surgeon if you can afford it, et cetera–well, you shouldn’t take up the sliver of space allowed for a woman’s body. I’m not commenting on Willow being pretty or not–but that’s the point. The video doesn’t feature her as pretty or not. She’s not sexualized. She’s not even very gendered; a lot of her outfits and hairstyles could be just as easily and acceptably worn by male- or female-identified kids. It’s about her voice, her shine.
Also: notice the varied racial/ apparent ethnic background of the people in the video. The main dancers she’s featured with also have varied body types. And I managed to pause it on the close-up of the blackboard (2:29):
I pledge to be brave
I pledge to always give my best
I pledge to respect myself and those around me
I pledge to be willing to learn and experience new things
I pledge to not be afraid to dream big and go for it
I pledge to warriorette/ warrior
It’s really the confidence, the power, the sense of self that mesmerizes me. It also reminds me of work done by Carol Gilligan, Peggy Orenstein, and the like about girls’ psychosocial development. Girls, their research shows, tend to be, as a group, much louder, much bolder, much confident, much more spoken and outspoken, when they are young. Around puberty, they start to lose that confidence. And, unlike boys who might also have a rough time of puberty, it never comes back up to pre-puberty levels. They get quieter. They start getting judged more by their appearance, their attractiveness to boys. They try to please. Their role as the guardians of relationships kicks in. Their role as caretakers. And their selves go underground. Adulthood, for many women, requires a laborious work of excavating pieces of the former self, learning to cherish them again, going against the stream. To have adult selfhood for a woman in our culture is necessarily countercultural.
To put it more simply, Willow fascinates me because she is pre-subterfuge. In my own life, my childhood was pretty quiet. Secretive. I tried not to make noise, literally or figuratively. It’s probably not a surprise that I was anorexic later–it’s an extension of the same idea. And so the bursts of confidence I had often came from connection with other people because those connections made me feel, for once, effective (this dynamic–needing to be needed–is the root of a lot of female “codependence”.) Sometimes they came from achievement in school. They came from sex and ability to attract people. But that coveted thing, that thing that Ms. Smith so flaunts, that sense of inherent worth or value–this is only coming in small pieces, with a lot of work. I’m reminded of June Jordan:
I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect. It means I must everlastingly seek to cleanse my self of the hatred and contempt that surrounds and permeates my identity… It means that the acheivement of self-love and self-respect will take inordinate, hourly vigilance…
From the book of Genesis:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… God said, let there be light, and there was light.
From Audre’s “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”:
I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That this speaking profits me, beyond any other effect…
I was going to die, if not sooner than later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences…
And of course I am afraid–you can hear it in my voice–because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation and that always seems fraught with danger… In the case of silence, each one of us draws the face of her own fear–fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the visibility without which we also cannot truly live…
And it is never without fear; of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death. And I remind myself all the time now, that if I were to have been born mute, or had maintained an oath of silence my whole life long for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die…We can learn to work and speaking when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired.
The fact that we are here and that I speak now these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.
The first book I loved was Anne of Green Gables. I removed the plum stone that locked down my tongue and repeated sentences over and over to myself, luxuriating in the weight and shape of the words, of L. M. Montgomery’s “flowery” language. But I still can’t quite figure out my passion for words, and I keep circling back to this question of language and power. I confess that I have trouble coming at this question without defensiveness; I have been mulling it over in response to a friend who often complained about my need for and love of words, who saw it as a stand against or willful ignorance of other sources of knowledge or ways of communicating. Defensive position aside, the question is important. I want to save writing and speaking from their anemic image, the idea that the pen is the coward’s sword. Audre’s passion and conviction affirm my felt-sense of their importance, but do not dissect it in the way I want. What is it about speech and writing that are so vital, so nourishing, so transformative? Maybe it is something about how using language makes a creative space. A sacred pause. It allows considered response. It moves without the assumption of violence, and thus creates the space to respond without violence. Maybe it is that words are often a finer tool than larger actions, or even touch.
When they are used to form questions, words are implicitly also saying: I do not know. I respect your mystery and inpenetrability. Please tell me. Any true question contains this humility. And words are not just bridges between people, but also within the self. They make a structure, order the input, emotion, impulses into a story. They make the world sensical. They give acknowledgement to the gradations of experience. They form the units that we think, breaking experience into blocks that can be rearranged at will.
But there is something else, too, that I haven’t got in words yet– (yes, meta).
Writing of Camus, Susan Sontag once said that the most dangerous emotion a writer’s texts can evoke from the reader is love. That’s because, she went on, when we fall out of love with a writer, we feel betrayed; we feel that, indeed, we were fools ever to have been taken in by them in the first place… [O]nce we are through with a writer whose work we once honestly and directly loved, we really are through. If we do go back to those texts, it’s only to explore the more or less painful (or, indeed, sometimes charming; but always, ultimately, unsatisfactory) traces of our earlier vulnerability, naïveté, and immaturity. And that writer’s new works, to the extent they have not grown as fast (or in the same direction) as we have, return us to all the torture of our own earlier failings and blindnesses.
-Samuel R. Delany, 1984: Selected Letters, p. 224
Part of a letter Chip wrote to his friend Mog, in response to a letter she wrote saying that their friendship was becoming more painful than pleasurable and that maybe they should declare “a moratorium” on it. He had included her name in the dedication of his most recent book, dealing directly with the then-recent outbreak of AIDS, a book which had not yet gone to press, and she had taken issue with some of what he’d said in the book and wasn’t sure she wanted her name in the dedication.
His response is an impassioned and (true to Delany’s form) very lengthy sharing of all his relationships that have ended during his writing career, and how surprisingly violent the endings have been. The saddest, and the one that hits closest to home, was this :
Well, there were people who asked to be disassociated from Dhalgren too, because they Didn’t Approve. While I was working on the middle drafts in the Albert Hotel, I had one friend whom I saw almost every other day for nearly a year. He kept insisting – often when I would urge him not to, because I thought he was forgetting his own concerns for the sake of my book – on reading all my new pages, and discussing them, and being very supporting and offering many helpful criticisms. (I was using his last name as the book’s title, back then, though there was nothing of his character in the book, save an exchange he’d once told me about between him and his therapist, which I’d changed some…) One night, as I frequently did back then, I took him out to dinner at a little Greek restaurant above 14th Street. I thought we’d had a perfectly pleasant time. But the next morning, I found a letter waiting for me at the hotel desk. He wanted to break off all relations with me, disassociate himself from the book, and wanted me not to use his name as the title. He felt that I was sapping all his energies from his own life and his own work. Though I wrote a letter back, bowing to his wishes, I was very hurt. As I had often told him, I would have been quite willing to do without his reading and criticism, but the withdrawal of his friendship was wounding. For the next three-and-a-half years, he refused to see me again or speak to me – though several times, I later learned, when he found himself outside a mutual friend’s loft apartment door and he heard my voice inside (and several other times when he only thought he heard it), he turned around and left. (p. 219-220)
Among the rest:
A friend’s lover. The lover accused Delany of never having liked his work as much as the friend’s, and having always condescended to him. And as much as Delany swore, honestly, that he’d always found the lover to be the better writer, the lover would only believe Delany was lying. He and the lover still had no contact, despite Delany staying close with the friend.
Fellow sci-fi writer Thomas Disch. He stated after the publishing of a certain of Delany’s books that, if they were to remain friends, he needed to never read any more of Delany’s work.
Multiple editors and publishers. A recurring theme was people demanding to know, what, just what was this book (whichever new book it happened to be) about? People, usually people who had loved Chip’s earlier books, seemed offended by a newer work, could not fathom where he was going with his career, and often thought he was ruining himself, or becoming an arrogant navel-gazer.
After laying all this groundwork, he got to his point with Mog:
I don’t wonder if – I know that – rehearsing all this, here, now, is a self-protective strategy on my part. But to write about anything at all, Mog, is to risk losing people who are close to you – because you’re not writing the right things about it; while the new audience you get comes to you precisely because you’re writing about that and not something else, regardless of what specifically you are saying about it. Indeed, the new audience is as happy to disagree as to agree; that’s what makes you a rich writer for them.
I care, deeply, about the world; about AIDS; about language…; about art. And no doubt because of what I care about, I pick friends who care deeply about the world, AIDS, language, and art too. I write what I can, and I bust my ass doing it. And part of the ass-busting means being as honest as I can bear to be with myself. And that’s often painful. (Where you read “self-critical” in my various discussions of series stories, if you want, you can simply substitute “personal agony” and/or “angry friends.”) I do the very little I can do – write the very little I can write – because I care (and because I couldn’t stand not to); but because my friends also care so much, and because they would like to see it done their way (and often those would be very good ways), what I do has always been painful to them. Part of my own pain, if you will, is to listen to their angry and articulate criticisms and, the ones that I can understand down in my language pit…, try to do something about them, even if it means forcing myself to grow into a different kind of person… (p. 223-224)
Not all creative relationships are collaborations. I’ve known many artists and many brilliant creative people of other stripes as well, but in only one relationship has art, and the making of things, been absolutely central to our friendship. We rarely made things together, but we’d known each other more than half our lifetimes, discovered that we wanted to be creative people in each others’ presence, and shared everything we were working on with each other in a kind of peer review. I would say that the reasons we became who we are now, both in terms of being, both of us, artists, and in the rest of it as well, had much to do with each other.
Relationships where creativity travels back and forth, one feeding on and into the other, are relationships built on a kind of tension. Between one person and the other, between friendship and creativity, and between what you make and everything else. You get your art into your friendship and your friendship into your art.
The breaking point is the moment at which you stop growing in the same directions, but keep growing.
I’m no expert, but I feel like these tensions are at the heart of some of the most famous creative collaborations we know, like Lennon and McCartney. Reading about how vitriolic The Beatles became during the Let It Be sessions, I see four brilliant people who used to feed off of each other, but somewhere they became less of a unit, turned into four individuals, and doing what they used to do became agonizing. They brought their wives and girlfriends into the studio for the first time, because those were the relationships that mattered to them now. Those bands that snap, years later they maybe have a reunion, and the only way the reunion can happen is with that tension gone.
At least, that’s a way of looking at it.
Objects under tension eventually (usually, maybe not always) break or go slack. Too many stories of bands that put out brilliant music and lead pained, miserable lives. The first album where they say “for the first time, it’s coming easily, we’re all getting along, it’s all coming out so fast and so free,” that’s always the album where something integral is missing from the music. They went slack.
Mine broke. And I felt like it nearly killed me.
Sometimes I wonder if I can still call myself an artist. Because I doubt, if situated again between what I make and who I care for, that I would choose the art over the relationship. And I feel that may be why I invariably work alone; when I’m in a collaborative situation I do not assert my perspective, I pick a subject that neither side is terribly invested in, and I try, mostly, to make the other party content with what we made together. It’s easy, because there’s very little at stake, and what is made in the end doesn’t have “my stamp” on it.
But I question whether I can go it alone forever. Something will probably have to change, and it will change when I accept that it may mean more breaks along the way. So the time would be now to cultivate a skill at maintaining a perfect tension, one that doesn’t break, but doesn’t bend.
(He wrote me a letter. He wants to come to Providence. We shall see how this goes.)
h/t Nick
From “The Body’s Grace: Matthew Sanford’s Story” on Speaking of Faith:
Matthew Stanford: There
‘s a reason why when my son who’s six is crying, he needs a hug. It’s not just that he needs my love. He needs boundary around his experience. He needs to know that the pain is contained and can be housed, and it won’t be limiting his whole being, that he can—he gets a hug and, mmm, he drops into his body. And when you drop into your body, paradoxically, typically pain is less. But it’s when pain gets more intense and more…
Krista Tippett: And when you’re afraid and try to keep it at bay.
Matthew Sanford: …and then pull out of it, it really denies freedom. And it’s a great short-term strategy. That’s what I did when I was 13, I pulled out of my body to get it, but it’s a short-term strategy. And a lot of the process of my life is like embodying again and letting — and surrounding what’s going on so I can be part of the world.
And from the chapter “Falling Gracefully” in his memoir, Waking:
If nothing else, my life has taught me one thing: The mind and body that I have are the only mind and body that I have. They deserve my attention. And when I give it, I receive so much more in return. Learning to fall gracefully through one’s mind-body relationship is not a submission. One learns to fall gracefully in order to roll.
There is still so much to realize. My experience tells me that the silence within us can be experienced energetically as a nourishing sap. When this happens, consciousness changes shape. For example, I have never seen anyone truly become more aware of his or her body without becoming more compassionate. A mental state like tolerance can deepen into a three-dimensional state of true patience. Nonviolence can become more than a moral principle, it can become an integrated state of consciousness that includes the body. And, of course, for good or for bad, the silence within us also contains the opportunity for choice.
By Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Bly:
The Man Watching
I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister.The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers’ sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively
by constantly greater beings.
…I will send you this Gandhi quote that I’m absolutely loving:“Truth (satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement Satyagraha, that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence, and gave up the use of the phrase ‘passive resistance’, in connection with it, so much so that even in English writing we often avoided it and used instead the word ‘satyagraha.’”I’m head over heals for the idea that the very
word “truth” implies love. Seriously, this is all my mind has been focused on for the last 48 hours.
Also this:“I have also called it love-force or soul-force. In the application of satyagraha, I discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one’s opponent but that he must be weaned from error by patience and compassion. For what appears to be truth to the one may appear to be error to the other. And patience means self-suffering. So the doctrine came to mean vindication of truth, not by infliction of suffering on the opponent, but on oneself.”
I’ve been reading a great blog written by a friend-of-a-friend, and generally I appreciate her insight but was a little taken a back by a couple entries about “warriors“. The warrior is one of the male archetypes that our culture most glorifies and celebrates, which is by (a quarter of an inch of) extension celebrating the will to power and the will to do violence. But the idea that you can condone or celebrate that out there and not bring it back here just doesn’t make sense–not that it’s okay to do violence out there, either.
This is from Shepherd Bliss’s essay, “My War Story“:
The warrior image has damaged us. As we move into the twenty-first century we need to mature beyond wars and warriors. I disagree with those men’s movement writers and activists who speak so highly of the warrior. I appreciate some of his traits–like courage, teamwork, loyalty–but the archetype itself is bankrupt at this point in history. We surely need guardians, boundary-setters, husbandmen, and citizens. If we are to survive on this planet, so threatened by war and warriors, we must get beyond the obsolete archetype of the warrior and value images such as the peacemaker, the partner, and the husbandman who cares for the earth and animals.
Letting go of a rape culture, hierarchy, violence, means celebrating men who fill roles other than “the warrior”. The process of self-re-creation and the revolutions in self-imaging are greatly supported by alternate images and archetypes that aver our new aspirations. After all, the brain doesn’t get rid of neural pathways, but it can create new ones.
So–Yes! Guardians, boundary-setters, husbandmen. I especially like the last, the farmer (in my mind, vegetable farmer) who tends the land, nurtures growth, knows the balance of active and receptive, work and rest, shows patience, persistence. This concept of tending is key–caring for, supporting, rather than controlling or forcing. And what about the dancer who has an exquisite ability to respond to circumstance, bending when the moment calls for it, and staying firm when that is what is needed? The dancer works with energy, resilience, and grace; grace being, as Pablo puts it, “… the balancing opposite of power. It means rolling away and landing on your feet instead of bruised ribs, and small hand movements letting a stronger person tie themselves up when they try to hit you.” In other words, resilience, self-protection and disarmament that are firm and assertive, but not aggressive. And there is the healer, touching, mending, with the courage to open to great suffering. Again this theme of working with, supporting, rather than controlling, or being even a “benevolent patriarch”. And there is the poet whose work is the honoring of the inner life and creation of language; the teacher who is a guide to and within new knowledge; the bread-maker who creates and then relinquishes his creation, day after day, to nourish self and others. These are just a few in a plethora of alternative roles we can imagine self-actualized people of any gender filling–the seeker, the student, the scientist, the lover, to name a few more. Showcasing and celebrating these roles, creating them in our conceptual, social, and visual imaginations, is one important way that art and social media can work as a forces for positive social change.
bell hooks, in The Will to Change, p. 113-115:
Many of the New Age models created by men reconfigure old sexist paradigms while making it seem as thought they are offering a different script of gender relations. Often the men’s movement resisted macho patriarchal models while upholding a vision of benevolent patriarchy, one in which the father is the ruler who rules with tenderness and kindness, but he is still in control…
Clearly men need new models of self-assertion that do not require construction of the enemy “other”, be it a woman or the symbolic feminine, for them to define themselves against…
Undoubtedly, one of the first revolutionary acts of visionary feminism must be to restore maleness and masculinity as an ethical biological category divorced from the dominator model… we must define maleness as a state of being rather than as performance. Male being, maleness, masculinity must stand for the essential core goodness of self, of the human body that has a penis. Many of the critics who have written about masculinity suggest that we need to do away with the term, that we need “an end to manhood.” Yet such a stance furthers the notion that there is something inherently evil, bad, or unworthy about maleness.
It is a stance that seems more a reaction to patriarchal masculinity than a creative loving response that can separate maleness and manhood from all the identifying traits patriarchy has imposed on the self who has a penis. Our work of love should be to reclaim masculinity and not allow it to be held hostage to patriarchal domination… those of us who committing to ending patriarchy can touch real men where they live, not by demanding that they give up manhood of maleness, but by asking that they allow its meaning to be transformed, that they become disloyal to patriarchal masculinity in order to find a place for the masculine that does not make it synonymous with domination or the will to do violence.
