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January 17 - January 26, 2020
only a person who has experienced, accepted, and acted the entire human condition—the essential quality of which is Change—can fairly represent humanity.
I eliminated gender, to find out what was left. Whatever was left would be, presumably, simply human. It would define the area that is shared by men and women alike.
Narrative is a stratagem of mortality. It is a means, a way of living. It does not seek immortality; it does not seek to triumph over or escape from time (as lyric poetry does). It asserts, affirms, participates in directional time, time experienced, time as meaningful. If the human mind had a temporal spectrum, the nirvana of the physicist or the mystic would be way over in the ultraviolet, and at the opposite end, in the infrared, would be Wuthering Heights.
Modern science fiction begins with H. G. Wells, and as far as I know, it is also with Wells that the apocalypse, the end of the world, becomes a subject of fiction.
Where a Tolkien prophetically faced the central fact of our time, our capacity to destroy ourselves, the present spate of so-called heroic fantasy, in which Good defeats Evil by killing it with a sword or staff or something phallic, seems to have nothing in mind beyond instant gratification, the avoidance of discomfort, in a fake-medieval past where technology is replaced by magic and wishful thinking works.
The future has become uninhabitable. Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an inability to face the present, to live in the present, to live as a responsible being among other beings in this sacred world here and now, which is all we have, and all we need, to found our hope upon.
Why did we look up for blessing—instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.
that. Then the Ancestors sent Mircea Eliade riding on the east wind, and he said, “In myth the Cosmos is articulate: the world reveals itself as language.”
It seems that the Quechua-speaking peoples of the Andes see all this rather differently. They figure that because the past is what you know, you can see it—it’s in front of you, under your nose. This is a mode of perception rather than action, of awareness rather than progress. Since they’re quite as logical as we are, they say that the future lies behind—behind your back, over your shoulder. The future is what you can’t see, unless you turn around and kind of snatch a glimpse. And then sometimes you wish you hadn’t, because you’ve glimpsed what’s sneaking up on you from behind…. So, as we
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People crave objectivity because to be subjective is to be embodied, to be a body, vulnerable, violable.
And the men who can talk, converse with you, not trying to talk through the dummy Yes-Woman, the men who can accept your experience as valid—when you find such a man love him, honor him! But don’t obey him. I don’t think we have any right to obedience. I think we have a responsibility to freedom.
being. I am an aging, angry woman laying mightily about me with my handbag, fighting hoodlums off.
this. I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.
There is no more subversive act than the act of writing from a woman’s experience of life using a woman’s judgment.
