Going Through the Door — thoughts on reaching 39 and celebrating the first birthday of my last child (Birth-days)

 

            The next person that I must give birth to is myself.  I have just passed my thirty-ninth birthday and I know that I have no more time to waste.  Either I will bring my creative being into existence, i.e. “go through the door,” or I won’t.  If I don’t, as Adrienne Rich suggests in her poem “Prospective Immigrants Please Note,” it is possible that I could live a worthy life, but always with the feeling that much is evading me, and that I am at risk for taking a heavy toll on my soul.  On the other hand, I am scared to death of encountering what is on the other side of that door.  I am terrified of taking the risk that I might “remember my name,” as Rich puts its, or in my own words that I might have to confront that dark, formless, inchoate abyss at the core of my being.  That I might have to let out the powerless little girl that I suppressed thirteen years ago when I decided to stop playing at being a hippie and to go back to graduate school to get my Ph. D. and become respectable.  I know in my bones that the source of my creativity and power is embedded within that core.  But so is the source of paralysis and confusion.  And since, as Rich says, the door is only a door, there are no guarantees that once I’ve faced all that I’ve actively avoided all these years, my life will become more actualized and fulfilling. I still could be a dud.  It still might turn out to be the wrong door.

            Although I have lived a good life while following the respectable path I chose, ultimately it has led me to a state of psychic alienation.  I am sick of professing.  I am bored, frustrated, burnt out.  Each day finds me less excited by the job that I was hired to do.  I am getting sick of standing up in front of a class, day after day, year after year, extracting  meaning from the formal structures of buildings and paintings.  I feel more like a used car dealer than a teacher.  How much longer can I take the stress of trying to sell art to the great unwashed?  I never was very enthusiastic about spending my evenings and weekends with undergraduate prose, and always resented the necessity for evaluating it.   Now I feel a shudder of revulsion when faced with a stack of papers, and I have achieved new pinnacles in the history of procrastination, if not the history of art.  Even worse, I am no longer enthralled with studying medieval illuminated manuscripts, my very own “field.” It’s been over a year, now, since I’ve done any serious work on them and three years since anything I’ve written has been published.  I’ve pursued a scholarly career for at least thirteen years now and it has brought me to a stalemate.

            Teaching both frustrates and tires me.  Although I rarely show it in the classroom, I feel frustrated when it seems as if I am talking to the proverbial brick wall.  Yesterday, sitting in my seminar for art history majors trying to help them make sense out of the articles we read felt like leading an expedition through the jungle, chopping through the overgrowth with a machete.  They could not seem to understand even the simplest sentences; for a moment I wondered if we were really reading texts written in their native language.  It was excruciating.  As the class progressed, I became aware of an ache in my chest which could only be dissipated by a half bottle of wine and a good cry.  “Why should a person who loves art have to spend her time reading papers by people who hate it,” asked my colleague.  I know where she is coming from.  I am tired of the pain of having the works of art I love so well, butchered by the uncaring philistines.

            But it goes deeper than that.  Even when I read the glowing testimonials, “this course changed my life,” in the student evaluations, I can’t restrain a rueful grin.  A part of me no longer cares if they want to learn or not.  Part of the magic of teaching is caring passionately, fervently believing that it makes a difference if students understand, for example, the impact of Charlemagne’s educational policy on manuscript illumination.  Lately I’ve begun to feel that it’s their education, or lack thereof.  If they think art is irrelevant, an impediment to their ability to get out of school and make millions — screw them.  Of course, I’ m also appalled.  If they can’t understand what they read, how can they possibly gain formulate their own theories?  But I ask, why should I eat out my n’shuma as my mother would say.  If they want to wallow in their ignorance, that’s fine with me.  It’s not my problem.

            Actually, it’s interesting that I should think of my mother, who died prematurely, a frustrated person for never having stopped to give birth to her own self, to figure out what it was that was eating out her n’shuma.  She, too, was a teacher, of high school English, and I still hear reports from ex-students of how she influenced their lives.  But it exhausted and drained her.  She had her first heart attack at 43, only four years older than her daughter is today.  Although she lived for another 18 years, she didn’t stop working at her job till she was in her late fifties, until the damage had been done.  She was cynical and depressed, convinced that the world no longer valued what she had to teach.  And in the end she stopped valuing it too.  During the four or so years that she lived after her retirement she never found out what else she really wanted to do.  Locked in silent battle between her mother and her husband, after an active life she was never content to define her days by the parameters of the morning delivery of the New York Times and an afternoon game of bridge.  I wonder whether or not I am destined to repeat the pattern of her life, disillusioned with teaching and unable to get beyond the terrible bitterness.

            On the other hand, when a class is hostile to an obscure, obfuscating writer, when they won’t tolerate the use of scholarly lingo, I can well identify.  In part, that’s my dissatisfaction with the scholarly mode of discourse too, a big piece of my alienation. Another way in which the role of professor is antithetical to my current psychic state is that I have absolutely no interest in vaunting myself in front of the masses.  But this has always been the case.  Unlike so many of my (male) colleagues, who seem to thrive on it, I never got a “frisson” from producing a room full of fawning, cowering disciples.  Unlike the guys, I don’t believe that I have a corner on truth, that I’m an “expert,” that my way of telling it is the only right way.  For a professor, one benefit of the profession that compensates the lack of monetary reward is access to a podium, weekly, daily, from which to preach one’s message.  I don’t have a message to preach.  I don’t want a soap box.  I just want to be left in peace.

            The aspect of my disaffection that is most difficult for me to talk about is my estrangement from studying medieval manuscripts.  It’s a sore topic, one that makes me feel defeated and incompetent.  It’s not that one day I woke up and simply decided that I was no longer interested in being a medieval scholar.  Rather, every article and every proposal that I’ve submitted in the past four years has been rejected. On one level, my macho tells me to tough it out and not let externals such as mere rejection deter me from my path.  But the externals have brought me face to face with something else.  That is, I don’t really want to be writing analyses of miniature sequences in Romanesque psalters, and I’m not entirely sure whether I want to be studying the autobiographies of women artists, either.  This, too, was not a conscious decision.  It’s just that for over a year now, in the few spaces I have where I can open my consciousness sufficiently for words to flow forth, those that do seem not to have anything  to do with the area in which I received my academic training.   In other words, not only have I not published anything lately, but I also have not written anything except for the unscholarly sort of personal essay that you are reading right now.

            This does not bode well for my future in academia.  The cardinal sin is to not do your work.  People who “don’t do their work” are reviled as the lowest form of life.  Dead-wood.  A universal term of oppprobrium for someone who produced just enough to get tenure, and then never achieved anything outside the narrow confines of the University for the rest of his or her career.  I have a new sympathy for such alleged cads, whose stories seem so similar to my own.  At a party just last weekend I had a lengthy discussion with a friend in the psychology department about some of his colleagues whom he had described as dead-wood.  First, although I knew the answer anyway, I asked him why he had described them that way.  As I expected, he said that these were people who hadn’t published anything in years.  I pressed him further:  I wanted to know if they admitted to it.  Of course they didn’t.  On some level the charade must be played that you are still working on your Book, and that it might be finished some year.  But then he added scornfully, “Except for Professor X.  He’s just a clinician.  And he doesn’t try to hide it.  A couple of his articles were rejected.  A couple of his grant proposals were turned down. After a while he just said ‘fuck it’ and turned to his clinical practice.”

            Uh-oh, I think, this sounds familiar.  So I asked naively, “But isn’t that what psychology is about?”

            “Not in an academic department,” my friend explained impatiently.  “Our purpose is to advance the field of psychology.  Private clinical work will never be on the cutting edge.”

            So what will they say about me in the Art Department?

            I’ve heard the warning.  I’ll never publicly admit to turning from my scholarship, but sooner or later my attrition is bound to catch up with me.  And if a clinical practice doesn’t seem relevant to the field of psychology, then how does confessional autobiography relate to the advancement of art history?

            Maybe one day I will be thankful that my work was rejected for four years straight, like the guy I read about who used to be a stockbroker but lost his job and is now selling hotdogs out of a cart in a small Connecticut town.  When the interviewer asked him if he had any regrets about the turn his life had taken, he replied, “None whatsoever.  I was lucky to lose my fast track job and finally get to look at how I really wanted to live.”  I hope that’s what I will say about all these rejections someday.  Perhaps my mother would have been better off if she had listened to what her first heart attack was telling her about how she was living.  But I haven’t gone through the door yet and I am not looking back.  So mainly I feel confused.  I thought I had already figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up.  I don’t know for sure, any longer.

            I do know that my need to push my consciousness, my very way of being onto another level is very real and very organic.  I sense that I am at a turning point, that once more I need to figure out what I am doing with my life.  That once more I have to reconcile the rebellious hippie that I used to be with the contented bourgeoise that I have become.  These thoughts began to creep into my conscious mind last year at this time, shortly after the birth of my last child, around the time I turned 38, that is when I began my thirty-ninth year, and crescendoed as the year progressed.  It was somewhat later that I realized that my need to change the direction of my life coincided with my age.  The shock of recognition came when I told a student who was complaining that she wouldn’t begin her career until she was 40, that at least she wouldn’t have to go through a mid-life crisis.  Just as the words left my mouth I comprehended that this dissatisfaction, this soul-searching on so many levels related to my being at the midpoint of my life.

            Although it was a relief to have a familiar label that came from the media culture to apply to the battle within my soul, the pain and agony of coming face to face with one’s self does not diminish just because it can be related to a sociological phenomenon of privileged westerners in the late twentieth century.  And, in fact, it was Dante in the fourteenth century who wrote that “midway upon the journey of our life we find ourself in a dark wood.” Fear of death, of not having time left.  At his mother’s funeral a friend said recently, “We count forward to and backward from 40.”  At 40, my own mother had only 21 years to go.

            At first I had thought that the reason I was welling up with resentment against my position in the university was that I had returned to work too soon after the birth of my last child, showing up for a day full of meetings with babe in arms when he was only a week old.  In retrospect that was obvious folly, and the sense that I really didn’t want to be doing what I was doing might well have been precipitated by the unrealistic expectations I placed on myself.  It has occurred to me, however, that perhaps I overloaded my circuits deliberately, to find out where my limits lay by pushing myself.  I have been trying to do a juggling act for too long with too many pins.  Wife, mother, professional, friend, kook, writer, scholar — I’m not superwoman and all that noise has kept me from my true self.  I have ignored the lyrical voice within for too long.  Like Yeats, “I must go back where all things start/ to the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”

            The epiphany in which I conceptualized my alienation from my chosen profession, when these previously vague dissatisfactions shifted into clear focus, occurred while I sat in a darkened room, listening to presentations during an art history conference.  I felt antsy, fidgety, and knew that I didn’t want to be there.  “I have a cause,” said the speaker, an eminent scholar in the field.  As I heard his words, I realized that my cause was no longer teaching art history nor unravelling the meaning of medieval manuscript illumination.  A tight knot at the base of my skull began to vibrate throughout my head, making it even more difficult to concentrate than before.  I felt even more disoriented after the speaker had stepped down and I was approached by a manuscript specialist, a woman whom until that very moment I would have described as an arch-rival.  Speaking from that context, she asked suspiciously, “What are you working on now?”  I had to search and dig to find a suitable cover.  Could I admit that I really was not working on very much art historically speaking?  Could I tell her that she didn’t have to worry, I was no longer even the slightest threat, that the field was now wide open to her?  That I have been unable to think about anything concerned with the middle ages for at least the past year.  All the way home from the conference I brooded about my new, clear understanding of my disassociation from art history.  In particular, I asked myself how I had become so disillusioned and what I was going to do about it.

            I was always a reluctant student, anyway, so it is curious that I ever ended up on this side of the podium.  In junior high school, my friend C. commented to me in judgmental disgust, “How can you go to bed every night, knowing that you haven’t finished your homework?”  That was the year I decided that I wouldn’t be a veterinarian because the guidance counselor who spoke to our class told us that girls needed to have a 95 average to get into veterinary school.  Then, when I was in my sophomore year at Flushing High School I was called down to the Dean of Girls’ office to have a chat about my underachieving.  Not that I was a radical underchiever.  My friend B. was that, barely pulling C’s with an I.Q. of 150.  No.  I was a middle-of-the-roader then, too, coasting on my slightly lower I.Q. to barely get B’s.

            My 9th grade teacher had told my mother that I would come into my own in college. But it wasn’t until I had practically finished my Master’s degree that her prediction proved accurate.  My years at Queens College were the most miserable in my life.  I think I was suffering an existential crisis.  Nothing seemed to make much sense to me in those days.  Living at home, exceptionally young, my thoughts were decidedly fuzzy.  My feelings were fuzzy, too. I felt that I was on the brink of having a life, but that there was something like the Colgate toothpaste invisible shield between me and experience.  Here, too, I was about a B student.  And I surely deserved no more than B’s.  The me of those days certainly wouldn’t have gotten an A from the current Professor Witzling.  But in the Fall semester of my junior year I took the big risk and let my grades plunge.  I even fell asleep during a final exam.  That would certainly seem to have been a clear signal that something was wrong.  And believe me, I knew what it meant.  I desperately wanted to drop out of school.  But I couldn’t deal with it.  I spent January break in a daze, escaping reality and avoiding a decision by dozing and reading novels on the couch in my parents’ sun-porch.

            And being brainwashed by my mother.  She made me go back.  Perhaps a person can’t be forced to do something that is totally against their will. The problem was that I didn’t have any will of my own to resist with.  She brought out all her cannons and I dolefully surrendered by resigning myself to starting the spring semester as scheduled.  But I knew that if I couldn’t drop out I would have to get it over with quickly, like closing your eyes when swallowing medicine or having blood taken.  I decided to take twelve credits during the summer and I graduated the following December, a whole semester early.  The funny thing is that as soon as I decided to just get it over with my grades improved, not that they ever were straight A’s  But my grade-point average for my last three semesters was higher than it had been before.  It was in that last year that I started to take more and more art history courses.  But never with the intention of pursuing graduate studies in that field.  So I ask myself now: isn’t it time that I finally dropped out of school?

            I actually have dropped out of school twice, and once I was kicked out, so to speak.  But I returned to the academy each time. After graduating from Queens (much to the shock of my mother) I stayed out for a whole year before returning.  I returned by default, only because I was homesick for that familiar milieu.  Showing up at Cornell the fall after I had graduated, as a grad student wife of 21 (Mom was able to keep me from dropping out of school in January, but not from getting married in June), I applied back to graduate school in self-defense.  “What is your field?” was the cocktail party opener.  I could only take the dismissal that came with my answer, “I don’t have a field,” so many times before beating a speedy retreat.  After all, I thought, I am surely just as smart as all these people with fields.  I can have one, too.  So I put in an application to the art history department, since my art history courses were the only ones that I had halfway liked as an undergraduate.  But then my return to school was something of a fluke.  Two weeks into the winter semester, I had already adjusted myself to being what my mother derisively had described as a “hausfrau” (after all, although I was working fulltime it was still at what we called a “shit job”), and being exiled from the academy.  In fact, I had just decided to wash the kitchen floor, and I remember running across it on the tips of my stockinged feet, cursing the phone which always seemed to ring at the most inopportune times.    It was one of those phone calls from fate:  someone had dropped out of the graduate program in art history, they had a fellowship dangling, and they wanted to know if I would be willing to accept it. 

            Initially, I didn’t distinguish myself academically at Cornell, receiving inconsistent grades and barely passing my Master’s exam.  I redeemed myself, however, when I handed in what my adviser described later on as “the best Master’s thesis this department has ever seen.”  This was the first time in my life that I understood what writing a paper was all about. I felt proud and my adviser was surprised by its completion and competency.  So surprised that he was willing to dismiss my past marginal performance on the basis of this document. Thus I forever entered his pantheon of star students and became his blue-eyed girl.  The promise my junior high school teacher made to my mother had been finally realized.

            But receipt of my Masters degree marked the end, not the beginning of my academic career, for awhile, anyway.  One month later my husband and I sailed to Morocco on a Yugoslavian freighter to begin our hippie odyssey across Europe.  Upon our return after six months of camping out in caves and woods, we moved into a communal house, he to finish his dissertation, me to knock around and join my first consciousness raising group, both of us to look for teaching jobs for the following fall.  The cosmic joke, as I heard him describe it to a friend, was that I landed one and he didn’t. 

            This, like my acceptance to grad school was also something of a fluke and also involved a fateful phone conversation that pulled me from one reality into a completely different one.  The school, a tiny, remedial even, liberal arts college in Vermont, had already rejected me, because they were “afraid of what I would do if my husband accepted a position elsewhere.”  But better they should have been afraid of what the person they ended up hiring would do — for he received a decent offer and reneged on his agreement.  I later learned that there had even been a third candidate who had done the same.  When they called me in July, however, I had no intention of spitefully reminding them of this.  At the time I knew that a real job was what I needed more than anything else.  I was miserable in my marriage, and still felt that my life had not quite begun.  My penchant to seek health, fortified by six months of consciousness-raising, enabled me to accept the job unequivocally on the spot, despite my usual indecisiveness.  One month after the phone call, I moved up to Vermont alone, to teach four courses not one of which I had ever taught before. And to become the hero of my own quest story.  For by the time that I finally left Vermont I had no doubt that my life was really being lived  — and that it was mine alone.

            Maybe my getting that job was something of a cosmic joke anyway, for when I had applied, I had no idea of why I thought I wanted to teach, except some remote idea that it would be better than working, say, as a hamburger slinger at McDonald’s, my other alternative as a liberal arts graduate with no marketable skills.  I certainly did not see myself as conforming to the model of “professor” as had been presented to me by my ex-teachers.  Instead, I was a Vermont hippie. 

            To my surprise, it turned out that I loved teaching.  When I stood up in front of a classroom I found that I was able to access and project a very deep part of myself. I felt that teaching and learning were complementary parts of the same process and saw myself as basically no different from the students (and in fact we were of the same generation). I defined my task as that of leading out of the student a capability that was already there, by teaching them to “see better.”  Saturday nights when we weren’t boogeying down at one of the local tourist pubs, I would grab a bunch of slides from the college’s collection, Bosch, Bruegel, and flash them on the classroom screen while my students sat around emoting things like, “heavy-duty,” and “far-out.”  I took to wearing long flowing skirts (after all, they were cool in the summer, and in the winter they hid layers of the long underwear necessary to survive those Vermont winters) and moved in above the health food store with a local fellow, a high-school drop out who played leprachaun to my hippie art teacher act. 

            After a year or so of this, I thought I was doing great  — I worked hard, played hard, was an incredibly popular teacher.  When asked by the authorities to evaluate my performance I naively wrote that I felt really positively about my teaching and its influence on my own development as a creative and visually aware human being.  As if they could care about such things. I might have felt that I had really achieved something; nonetheless I lost my job.  The administration couldn’t fire me because I was a popular, somewhat flaky, colorful character who smoked dope with students and lived in sin on Main Street.  But they could fire me because I didn’t have a Ph.D.

            I was powerless. But I knew I couldn’t stay in Vermont, scene of such a major rejection of my person.  And I finally realized that if I wanted to keep teaching I’d have to get that Ph. D., after all.  It was similar to my initial decision to acquire a graduate school field.  I got tired of explaining why I didn’t have a doctorate, and really didn’t need one to do the kind of teaching I enjoyed.  I knew that I was smart enough to get a Ph. D. of my own.  And that I needed one if I wanted to be in control of my own life and continue do the work I had discovered I loved.  I decided to go back and get it.  But with that decision was also a decision to straighten up, to play the game.  And it turned out that I didn’t have to pretend.  I found that I was better at it than I ever thought I would be.  I felt competent and actually enjoyed it.  Away went the flowing flowery smocks and the jeans with colorful patches.  Away went the ten pounds I had gained while living in nature, plus ten more besides.  Away went my leprechaun lover.  There I was, back in the academy again.  And this time with a vengeance, for I finally got serious about school and was determined to work to my alleged capacity.  I went back to Cornell where fortunately my adviser only remembered my scintillating Master’s thesis, not the rather faltering two years prior to it. On the local level I was something of a star. And no one was at all surprised when I landed a tenure track position at a respectable state university in New England, nor when six years later I received tenure.  Least of all me.  I had become quite convinced by my performance.

            In the past when I recited the story of my fall and restoration to grace I endowed it with mythic proportions.  I saw it as a happy story whose conclusion was today’s beginning:  the development of a self-actualized, successful, achiever, from an unfocused, insecure, confused little girl.  In short, I always saw it as a story of empowerment, sung to the tune of you can make it if you try.   But now, once more, I am not sure.  All that process, all that earth is seeping through the cracks in my education, eroding my professional persona, and begging to be reclaimed as part of me.

            Ultimately, I think it was the contrast between the demands of my personal and professional lives that did me in.  There was a time when what I liked about being a medievalist was its remoteness.  I liked walking out of the noise of the daily fray into a quiet and removed space. I used to say that it was like higher mathematics, utterly useless and only vaguely related to shadows of this world, yet exhilarating in its very heights.  But the contrast — and the necessity for bridging it — seems more and more taxing as the years go by. 

            For example, I attended the aforementioned epiphanic conference along with my seven month old baby and a sitter.  But even with a babysitter, I was hardly insulated from the reptilian mode of relating to a human baby.  He grunted and groaned throughout the night, waking at two hour intervals.  He gulped down portion after portion of little servings of cream, dribbling them on his creeper.  He shot pee all over my “professorial” suit.  And, as I sat and tried to listen to the ever so erudite speaker explain his theory of allegory and metaphor I could still smell baby poop on my fingers.  That’s the texture of my daily life.  Sitting in a lecture listening to a discussion of biblical exegesis and images in manuscripts, driving home and picking half-digested noodles that one of the kids threw up out of the green shag carpet in their room.  Or, the opposite, quickly quartering a chicken, dowsing it with garlic powder and soy sauce and throwing it in the oven, serving it all around, gulping down a piece and running off to stand up in front of a class, all dressed in tweed, and talk about Justinian’s relationship with God, smell of garlic in my hair.

            I even sensed the contrast two years ago when I returned from my sabbatical research trip, at the time not consciously doubting that I was a genuine scholar.  I had just spent three weeks alone, hopping around the continent and the British Isles looking at psalters for my study of prefatory miniature cycles.  I thought the trip had been a success.  I survived.  I worked intensely, and felt very close to myself.  And I thought that I had gathered lots of good data.  About two nights after I got back I had a dream. I dreamed about the last manuscript I had seen, which I had felt was the most resplendent of the bunch, the best preserved and the most elaborate in terms of its illuminations.  It also had been recently rebound in stark white leather.  In my dream I was sitting around a dinner table with my family .  We were eating roast leg of lamb.  The Glasgow Psalter was on the table, and I was trying as hard as I could, but not very successfully, to keep from getting it all covered with grease stains and splashed with gravy.

            At the time I was baffled, since I thought that I had been successful on my quest.   But now it is clear that the dream showed how the earthy, intuitive, uncontrollable side of myself that used to be expressed in my rebelliousness as a hippie is now embodied in the chaos and unpredictability of my family life.  Once more I have been made to confront the necessity for humanity, compassion and change. Only now have I realized the incredible contradiction in my current situation.  That is, I have obliterated from my post Ph.D. style just what I liked best about teaching when I began and what made me feel that it was worth returning to school in order to keep doing: the color, the excitement, the opportunity to closely touch other human beings.

            Nonetheless, I am loathe to let go of my professional persona.  The woman in tweed suits who went to Europe and was allowed into famous libraries to finger the flesh of million dollar manuscripts, who went on twenty job interviews and landed one at an institution she would have considered way beyond her reach while in Vermont, who was toasted with champagne at her qualifying exams and who heroically surmounted the obstacles thrown in her path while defending her thesis, who even used to take pride in the comprehensive letters of recommendation she wrote because they showed how well she played the game, who put together a professional dossier and managed to get out just enough articles to land tenure —  this woman has also been my friend.  She has helped substantially to keep back the night, although just barely.   If I let her go, then who am I?  Some schlubby hausfrau without any purpose in life? 

            The conflict I am experiencing is not unique to me nor is it only between hippie and academic, intuitive and intellectual, medieval vs. feminist scholarship.  On a deeper level, Mary Daly would describe it as the conflict between my womanish nature, its wild wanton weaving and the pressures of conforming to the bore-ing world of the snools.  That’s Daly’s language.  But in my own words I say, there is a deep core of me that I don’t let out.  I don’t let it out because I am afraid of what would happen if I did.  I fear that I would lose my effectiveness in dealing with the world, and I like to have a semblance of power and to feel a modicum of competence.  I certainly don’t want to give up the power I have gained.  I am afraid that I would be shunned and dismissed in both my personal and professional lives because I don’t believe that any man will accept my female strength either as a lover or as a colleague.  I keep it so well hidden that often I don’t even hear what it is trying to tell me.  I can’t honestly say that I am actively persecuted, that I have been victimized deliberately.  Yet, I believe that the structure of our society has de-valued, trivialized, distorted and silenced the true female voice.  And that I, too, am a victim of this. 

            If I do have a cause it is to find my rightful voice.  And to make it sing.  But what songs?  How can we, I, know that mine is not just the braying of an ass or the baaing of a sheep as society tells me.  That I am dirty, smelly, in-valid.  As I asked so many years ago when I began work on my autobiographies of women artists project, how can we, who are rooted and practised in the tyranny of blood, reach identification with the pure light?

            “Born between piss and shit . . .” We are the pissers and the shitters, the birthers and the bleeders.  Preparing the food we know its texture, we cut away the rotten parts.  We scrape the soggy left-overs into the garbage.  We rinse the diapers and we know the bits of carrot and tomato that swirl down the drain.  Each month we watch our own thick blood flow from our bodies, mingle with water, reaching for the earth.  How can our fingers, dripping red blood and oozing with brown shit reach for the sky seeking oneness with white light.  Our minds, intelligences, spiritual essences have been stunted, robbed, by a cultural heritage that undermines, denigrates, repudiates the living processes with which we have an intimate bond.”

            I wrote that over five years ago.  I was not consciously thinking of myself when I wrote those words.  I forgot about having written them, even. Although I’ve suppressed all that, I need to get it back, let it out to grow some more.  To gain control in the outside world I had to learn to use the power of the fathers.  Now, to gain control of myself I have to be able to tap into the power of the mothers.

            This does not necessarily mean that I am chosing to pursue feminist scholarship, either.  Right now I feel a very real resistance to speaking in the scholarly mode in which I have been trained. And this shows in my work. All my feminist pieces have been rejected, too, and when I re-read them I am disturbed that they are marred by the same lack of focus and punch as my recent medieval essays.   I seem to be talking around the subject, not really saying anything. 

            It has become clear to me that in order to be able really say something I have to reclaim the dark side of the moon.   Naturally the subject of feminist scholarship is relevant to me and my life in a way that the Middle Ages can never be and some day I might be able to get back to it.  But the mode of scholarly speech — the abstracted, detached intellectual observer is not a persona that I can assume these days. I have absolutely no interest in speaking that way, and what is more, I now see that this is a healthy response. There is so much work to be done here and I think that I probably have a big contribution to make.  But before I can do the work that has to be done I have to learn to see with my own eyes and speak with my own voice.  I have to learn how to speak from the heart with real words. 

            That’s what this essay is about.  That is the door though which I must pass.

            I need to give birth to myself.                   

                                                                                                M. Witzling, 1986-87