Missive the Thirty-Ninth
American Woman.
DATELINE: Wednesday, November 29, 2000, at 0700 hours CDT.
Conway, Arkansas, USA
By D. Ebenezer Baldwin Bowles
CornDancer & Company
Someone I know was caught, red-handed. They caught her wandering 'round in her past. Who caught her I won't say, but I will tell you they were a rabble, secretive and opposed to evolution.
Their spokeswoman, however, sure was a talkin'. She was holding forth with aplomb in the hallway of the hovel. Each of us in the motley, makeshift audience was caught-up in the Age of Dissolution. We had come there to shoot-up adrenaline. The gossip was an unforeseen bonus. We were more than willing to listen, maybe even participate.
"The more you slice and dice it, the more choppy and convoluted it becomes," said Oskob de Opposite, my confidant and diligent watcher from the Opposite Loft.
Some Wounds to Lick,
Several Accounts to Balance.
The rabble's dirt, well sifted by now, had been dug-up on the shadow-self of Carolina, famous writer and seasoned activist, who had retired for a season to contemplate her gains and losses. She had some wounds to lick and several accounts to balance. Her momentary absence from the fray inspired the Committee to dig and distribute.
Let me tell you. Now listen. Some time ago, Carolina delivered a well baby, a nine-pounder with thick black curls. Caring for the new thing clashed with her artistic sensibility. Carolina decided to defer the care and weaning to the Others, who were eager to comply. They didn't have no babies. They wanted one bad.
"I refuse to accept anatomy as my destiny," she declared. "I will not be identified in the first blush as Mother. I will build my identity on a different standard."
Carolina was the Artist, a recognized master of her craft. Her first novel was an acclaimed model of emerging feminine power. "I have discovered there is more to life than men and their self-serving awareness of my womb, their obsession with the gateway to it," she announced at a news conference on worn marble steps outside the Hall of Academia. "I will not fit myself into their maleness. Stand with me, Sisters, as I exploit my inherent femininity."
Her outrageous poetry moved some of the feminists to emboldened self-confidence, others to righteous outrage. They became the women who can.
Don't Throw the Art Out with the Bath Water.
To Carolina, the new daughter stood for loss - not the mystical loss of sensibility and creative power, but rather the prospect of lost time and deflected vision, the draining away of psychological energy from her Art into the psyche of the baby and its daily demands.
Carolina's mentor, the weary official feminist, a damnable bull-dyke hussy ("that's what they call me now that I've separated from my husband and struck out on my own"), the wise old woman on the hill, nodded her understanding. "Take comfort in the fact that you shall never be accused of telling your daughter the abominable 'wrong things', of teaching her to compete with other women for the attentions of men, of showing her the way to scrub and wash, to prostrate her identity on the immaculate ceramics of their masculinity."
"I know," one of the listeners interjected. "My husband willingly does housework! I can't get comfortable with it. Watching him wash the dishes, sweep the kitchen floor - it's creepy, makes me feel guilty."
The folks in the hovel shifted on their feet, leaned and shuffled. An old fart in the corner, his adrenaline fix taking hold, cried out, "I don't care what you say, the Viet Nam War was a male experience! The women were Donut Dollies, scrub nurses, whore dawgs and hangers-on."
The Thunder of a Dozen Rocket Attacks.
"Screw you," one of the old broads in the audience retorted. "I mean, I was there at the Ninety-Fifth Evac, one year running. I caught the thunder of a dozen rocket attacks in my ears. I muddled through the blood and the muck. I could fit into the madness with the best of the men."
"Blood, it don't bother me," someone said. "Shit does, especially baby shit."
How swiftly dialogue can degenerate into profane chatter, I thought.
"I don't believe it is true, I don't believe it is true," the old soldier man said. "I don't believe it is true that there is no fear in women." He sucked-in a breath from the dense air, deeply and noisily. I could see he was a mouth breather. "And you!" he shouted to the reporter. "You're an old bull-dyke! You have rejected the role of mama. You're a lesbian. You have failed as a woman. Damn you, you bull-dyke hussy! Go hose yourself down. Go clean yourself up."
Do you love your oppressor?
Do you revel in your separation, configure it daily into a living art form?
Be Immodest, Delight in the Imbalance.
So you want balance, do you? Forget about it. Delight in your imbalance. Be immodest. Tap deeply into your roots, your sense of self. Embrace and exploit your native culture. Do you come from the frontier? Are you able to walk lightly on borders? Do you long for the enclosure of the mountains, or would you rather roam the expansive openness of the delta?
"I just want a schedule," one of the interveners demanded.
I would prefer to pursue reconciliation.
A balanced view of the sexes, you say. Ha! We'll never reconcile the differences 'tween woman and man. Your can throw your brass balances out the window.
"We should count each of the ballots with a hole in it. We shouldn't be divining these dimples." A radio was playing in the kitchen. I listened with one ear out the other. I'm sure that's what he said. "Well, we're always going to wonder if we did the right thing."
A Famed, Somewhat Macho
Gynecologist Draws a Crowd.
We were breaking away from one another now. The adrenaline poppers were beginning to wander into other rooms. I guess that's why I could hear the radio. I noticed that some of the women had gathered in a loose circle around a famed, somewhat macho gynecologist.
The spokeswoman, having lost her audience, was trying to stare a hole in the old soldier. "I don't know if you've got a good side at all," the woman's lips mouthed at him. "If you don't have one, then try to find it."
Then she turned her hard eyes on me. "Half the women are lusting after him," she said, pointing toward the doctor and his circle of sirens and harpies. "They're deaf to his agenda. They can't hear him singing the backward-masked songs of doom, the sly ditties about safe IUVs and tasty birth-control pills."
"Well, he is a well-known gynecologist," the old nurse said. "There may be some validity to it."
"You're just amazed because the doctor looks like a Greek god. You think he's the god of your womb. There's nothing you can do about it. He's going to make his mint."
Look!
See the Incompetent Men Who Have It Made.
I handed the spokeswoman a note. She scanned it, picked-up her pen, slashed one of my words with a big red X, then dashed the note back to me. "You can't even spell chauvinistic. (Maybe not, but my spell-checker can.) Everywhere you look, you find incompetent men who have it made."
Some time later, the old feminist sage came down from the hill to meet with Carolina and help her balance a particular account.
"American women are the freest women in the world," Doctor B. said to her. "The irony is that we have done so little with our freedom. I can't get you to go out there in the world and take possession of it."
Their freedom provided them a bounty of leeway. I could listen to them talk about it 'till kingdom come. Most of these women were looking around for something. Their legs were swingin' like pendulums in the earthquake, not smoothly from side-to-side, but quivering in the rattle.
They Were Glorious, Thinking Women.
The soft, soft ripple of their laughter soothed me. They would laugh that way only when they were comfortable in a group. I liked how they rested their chins on their fists in a classical pose. I liked how I could readjust my eyes to see their auras bend and weave in the pressing winds of change. These were glorious, thinking women, most of them; not foxes, but owls. Yes. Fine, swift owls. I can't rightly explain it, but I know it's there, this empathy, this notion that the world is sinking into insanity.
"I've always been struck by the fact that people turn their backs on each other and turn off," Edward Albee said.
"When they came out with ovens up on the wall, I kept on thinking: how much easier to get your head into," Sylvia Plath said.
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