Saturday's Child (74 page)

Politically, I paced through months fixated on the question of how women could so betray women. Who
was
this person I had loved so, those many years? How could she—how could anyone—change so drastically? Or had I never really known her? Had she always been the woman of the
cruel, final year? If so, how could I have managed to ignore seeing that? Again and again, I circled the question obsessively: if women could so harm women, then who were my people? This was the bitterness of the long-distance runner turned toxic. It would take many months to relearn a politics the other side of that particular despair. Truths I'd known intellectually before would have to be engraved on my flesh this time, like the point of Kafka's story “The Harrow,” teaching me a feminism that persists while
truly
understanding what gratuitous cruelties one woman can enact on another—not only because of powerlessness but because of simple human imperfection.

Emotionally, I'd never felt at such a loss. I'd deemed myself a good survivor with the capacity to love life fiercely, and believed experience had trained me for a fairly intelligent willingness to face and grapple with despair. This then was a humbling process, in which certain aspects of my arrogance were finally engaged. The challenge was to relocate energy as separate from that arrogance, because so much of my stamina was braided with the attitude “No matter what it is, I can handle it.” Now that certainty was lost. Losing became, in fact, the defining activity of my hours, as if I were an embodiment of Elizabeth Bishop's superb villanelle “One Art.” I was learning how to lose: love, pride, sleep, health, weight, hair, bone, time, heart, voice.

Voice was the worst of it. I couldn't write.

In every previous life crisis, I'd survived by writing my way through, around, about it. Now, for the first time: emptiness. I'd left the magazine with the naive assumption that I'd explode with pent-up creativity, as if my voice were a whipped dog that could be starved and ignored but would return whimpering at the first beckon. When that hadn't happened during the six months at the farm, I'd chalked it up to the personal pressures and my physical inability to remain in one position for long without pain. But now, in the safety of my own home, and with proper medical treatment, still no words would come—at least no significant words. I made myself function every day (except for two spent curled fetal-like in bed). I read everything I could find about writer's block. I wrote recommendations for other people's grants and fellowships, forewords and blurbs for other people's books. I wrote
A Woman's Creed
, but had to steal lines from one of
my older poems to make it work.
¹⁷
The debt skid was gaining momentum, so I hacked some journalism to pay the bills. But poetry lodged in my throat.

The creative impulse bubbled forth everyplace but where I needed it to be. I gardened vociferously, even before my body and doctors would fully allow me to. I baked bread and cooked dinners for friends, pouring myself into satin sauces instead of onto the page. I concocted seven feeders for wild birds, with home-melted suet, peanut butter, and six different kinds of seeds. I confessed to Blake that I was in danger of becoming the Martha Stewart of the Women's Movement and that he had to swear if he saw me start to string necklaces out of Fruit Loops, he'd stop me before they carted me away. But the poems lay strangled.

If I couldn't write poems ever again, I didn't want to take up space on the planet. Prozac worked for a while, but made me sleep fifteen hours a day. While it was nice to be buffered from acute heartache, coma didn't seem the solution. I opted for being awake. Friends were dear. They endured the early months when, still in disbelief, I talked nonstop about the relationship, and they tolerated the later months, when I sleepwalked through social occasions. Blake was the greatest source of love and, when I could manage it, laughter, but even he couldn't always penetrate the
miasma. (Andrea, with her typical gallows humor, claimed this meant he wasn't doing his part. When I protested, she noted that if only he were robbing banks or sharing needles like a
considerate
son,
those
activities would instantly focus my mind.) I cleaned and recleaned house, walked for hours on end, rented movies. I read, retracing every word of Shakespeare, all of Donne. That was more solace than anything else; it was an astringent consolation to tour the despair of my betters, expressed back when sorrow had stature as a part of existence not to be hurriedly tidied by Zoloft. I sat at my desk doing five-finger exercises, writing maybe a hundred self-pitying, banal sonnets reeking of catharsis. No voice.

I took to the road. I accepted an invitation to speak at a conference in Bologna, and went on from there to Venice—my first visit, walking for days amid the masks and magic. That helped. I went to the 1995 UN Women's World Conference in Beijing, to speak and also cover it for
Ms
. and, at greater length, for
Women's Studies Quarterly.
¹⁸
A year later there was Italy for a book tour, then Spain to promote
Mujeres del Mundo
, the Spanish edition of
Sisterhood Is Global
, and to speak at a Basque women's conference.
¹⁹
I went through the motions, but felt I was treading tissue-thin ice and might crash back down—often did—into the icy, inky depths just beneath the surface. Poetry is not just a genre. For a poet, making poems is a way of viewing the world, being in the world, breathing. Without that, I was suffocating.

In a long, thoughtful phone conversation, Adrienne got me to admit that Marilyn, who'd reveled in having love poems written to her, had expressed fear at what poems I might write should we ever “divorce.” Was I now letting that fear act as proscription, letting her silences infect me,
self-censoring?
Write
it, Adrienne chanted, you can revise fairness in later. Get it
down
. Trust your craft.

How to
do
that? I had so lost touch with my own powers that I lacked a sense of hope, which I believed necessary in order to start anything—but I had that backwards. Yet I discovered I was at least curious. All through this sickness of soul, humor never abandoned me, though it turned caustic. Strength never left me, but it was the strength of a dullard: mulish endurance. The first sign of life to return was that intimation of curiosity. Then heightened functioning. Then the supreme comfort of again appreciating art. Then health returned—very slowly, at least in part. Only at the last, shyly, in tiptoed hope. They say what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and I could almost hear Marilyn claiming credit for having inspired that process.

For financial survival I needed to write prose—journalism, nonfiction. My publishers had patiently waited since 1989 for the memoir they'd signed up then, despite my having warned them I wouldn't be ready to write it for years. Now they were beginning, understandably, to nag a bit. So I tried to start the memoir, dreading the idea of revisiting my life and sarcastically titling it
Ideal American Girl
. I accepted an invitation to be a visiting scholar, the Block Professor at the University of Denver, for three months, and shipped the memoir files out by Federal Express, swearing to write and teach but
not
to get tempted to organize.

Federal Express lost the files. All of them.
²⁰
At first I plummeted again, feeling as if the memoir and I were both hexed. But there's always politics. The Denver women were both inspiring and eager to be inspired, so by the time I left, the campus was organized, with separate groups for women undergrads, graduate students, faculty, clerical/administrative, and even the few women with (relative) power on the board of trustees or in senior positions. But Bran—who'd traveled with me in his cat carrier, frail but game at age twenty-one for a new adventure—succumbed to his kidney condition and died a month into my stay, facing the Rockies at sunset, purring in my arms. A small death, but another loss. At least he hadn't
been left behind, and I was with him at the end. Returning home, the emptiness returned with me.

This time I let it in.

Ancient alchemical texts defined the separation and dissolution of substance as forming the test of alchemy, that moment when base metal would be reduced to chaos so higher energy might melt into it, the precision of that instant when the mind would be forced to free itself from all routine. This phase alchemists called “the ruining of the work” or “the abyss.” Only from such ruin, they wrote, comes gold.

The poems—despaired of, financially useless, “unpolitical”—started trickling back. Memoir be damned, practicality be damned, they'd be the first to return. I was afraid of looking too directly at them, as someone who's been in a dark cell winces at the light. To my awe, they emerged simplified, matured, from a craft quietly sure of itself. As they unfolded, I noticed that the incantatory poetry I'd written for years had been conceived in part to be presented at readings, the actor commissioning the poet. Now, though I liked the sound of these new poems aloud, I recognized they issued from a deeper source. They were written for the page, and for some voice other than mine—an older, wiser voice. How strange to discover that
is
my voice now. Once grief was baked in craft's kiln, the unexpected emerged: poems about far more than the death of a relationship.
A Hot January
contains the best work I'd done so far. It's also more descriptive of that period's journey than I could ever approximate in this chapter's prose.

I think the voice will stay. But I'll never again take it for granted.

In the final January of the twentieth century, I turned fifty-eight years old. What new emotional and erotic surprises amused me this past year or so are not for
this
memoir. They need time to mellow into understanding. But I can relate that I retain my (now skeptical) romanticism and that sex, like wine, improves with the vintage. I now
dance
on thin ice, feeling free and hilariously serene.

Actually, to mix my metaphors, it's more like ballooning. Once aloft, you feel no whoosh of speed, because you travel
with
the wind. Everything is absolutely quiet except for the occasional poof of flame from the small oven, to warm the helium. Floating above trees, you see and listen to each
distinct bird. Drifting over a town, you hear people talking on the street below, their words curling upward like smoke. What a different way of being on the air! When you descend, you dally down, rocking gently, with no lurching. But not even the balloonist can be certain where you'll land.

I'm ballooning all the time now. It's taken me decades of theatrics to grasp what I suspected right along, that life is a comedy far darker than drama. It just takes time to learn what to smile at.

I should have realized this earlier, because every actor knows that tragedy, being linear and inevitable, is taxing—but comedy, which depends on the element of surprise, is the hardest act of all.

¹
See
Sisterhood Is Global: Dialogues in the Philippines
(full transcripts, photos, and reports), edited by Rosario Garcellano, Elizabeth Lolarga, and Anna Leah Sarabia (Quezon City, Philippines: Circle Publications, Printworth, Women's Media Foundation, 1992). The Filipinas had requested specific nationalities because of their own priority issues: Keiko regarding Japan's exploitation of Filipinas as mail-order brides and for sex tourism; Madhu for India's regional similarity, solidarity, and democratic structures; Mahnaz because of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Mindanao; Marilyn because New Zealand was a Pacific country and a model nuclear-free zone; and me because of my work on global feminism and my opposition to the U.S. military bases in the Philippines.

²
See “Women in the
Intifada
,” in
The Word of a Woman
.

³
She'd previously published a short book of essays—
Women, Politics, and Power
(Allen & Unwin, 1985)—in New Zealand and Australia, for which she'd asked me to write the foreword. That foreword, so unambivalently breathless in its praise, is the work of a doting lover who has, for the duration of its penning, ceased exercising what faculties of literary criticism or political analysis she might ever have possessed.

⁴
In A
Hot January: Poems, 1996-1999
(W. W. Norton, 1999).

⁵
In most heterosexual relationships, classically, the man is the taciturn one, the woman the one performing “the whole of love,” playing “the full dialogue, both parts,” as Rainer Maria Rilke put it in
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
(translated by M. D. Herter Norton, W. W. Norton, 1964). Rilke called on men, who had been “spoiled by easy enjoyment” to “learn the work of love, which has always been done for us.” In common parlance, this phenomenon could be described as the “Herman? Honey? Is anything wrong? Please?
Talk
to me!” syndrome.

⁶
Mahnaz, an elegant woman and devout fundraiser, had been a cabinet minister under the shah of Iran, a connection she unfortunately has not renounced to this day. Awash in sisterly sentiment, I'd chosen her as the Iranian contributor to
Sisterhood Is Global
because she was an exile marked for death by the mullahs who'd seized Iran, and she seemed to be a feminist. I'd defended her to Institute members, even backing her for the post of executive director when the Institute's term in New Zealand ended. So the ensuing debacle was my fault. Mahnaz turned out to have quite conservative politics, to function autocratically in disregard of the Institute's democratic procedures and original vision, and to get highly defensive about the treasurer's regard for fiscal transparency. The moral might be “Once a cabinet minister under a dictator, always a cabinet minister under,…” or, in my case, “Sisterhood is stupid.” But there's good news. In January 2000, the headquarters moved to Montreal—becoming again democratic, inclusive, and multi-issue under the leadership of its new president and chief officer, the distinguished Canadian feminist Greta Hofmann Nemiroff. Its Web site—
www.sigi.org
—remains the same.