Whose Reality is on These Pages?

“Science is about knowledge … it is only a tool - a tool for actualizing what we desire and defending against what we fear. Human tool makers always make tools that will help us get what we want, and what we want has not changed for thousands of years, because, as far as we know, human nature hasn’t changed either. How do we know? We know if we consult the myths and stories. They tell us how and what we feel, and how and what we feel determines what we want.” (Margaret Atwood).

HOMES

During the year and a half of the art course my psychotherapy practice had expanded to include art therapy, which was especially helpful to people who had a hard time talking about themselves – as did June, who came to therapy not “really knowing why I’m here. I’ve been miserable for more than a year and nothing I do, courses, journaling, social life, trips, makes any difference … someone told me about you … thought I’d come and see.”

            The first few sessions were full of her life’s facts: family, career etc., and then came silence. “There’s nothing more to say … I guess you can’t do anything?” It took a while for her to agree to try painting: “Well I’m not an artist, I’d be no good at it … too embarrassed.” I explained that a finished product wasn’t the point, and that the paper would be damp to discourage straight lines, easily recognized objects and preconceived artistic goals. Still protesting, she began.

For weeks she painted the happy meadows of her childhood, green grass at the bottom, flower and tree-like shapes, struggling for forms she was familiar with. There were no people. Then a brown blob she named “barn” grew and grew over the weeks, eventually dominating the page. The grass grew darker and darker, and as it did June became very uncomfortable, and then angry: “You’re making me feel worse … I’m here to start feeling good again, to get better … I don’t know what I’m doing here …” (When someone is feeling terrible, and scared, it’s hard to believe that feeling worse can be part of getting better.) Then the dark green became black and June shook whenever she painted, sometimes cried, often ached. With the physical manifestations of her emotions she began to trust that I “knew what she was doing.” For several weeks she painted black with increasing intensity, and although she still had “no idea where all this is going,” she had no more doubts about being there, or about painting. Then one day spots of red emerged from the black. The next session, big confident swirls of red streamed out, no tears or trembling but a voice strongly certain: “I know what this is.” Painfully the memories came, a few more each week, until finally she was uncovering and talking about the makings of her misery.

THOUGHTS

Just as it was for June, my illness was in part an unconscious practice of sensations and feelings I was not allowed, and eventually not able, to express, revealing how my body enacted a physical and emotional record of the choices absorbed in childhood which I had unconsciously carried with me all my life. Artwork was a nonviolent, nonverbal way to uncover and express some of those forgotten choices, and re-member them into my daily life. My art work had allowed me to recognize the deep split in my personality that seemed to have dominated my life: a split between sensations and emotions, and my intellect. Drawing in black and white revealed how violently I experienced the suppression of my sensations and emotions. Painting and clay work showed me the split right before my eyes, in the finished work, or in the process of creating it, and began to help me see relationships among these aspects of myself and how their repression had affected me. To shape clay is to work with the forgotten, seeing her in an image first, as a way to then bring her into conscious practice “in all the activities of my daily life.”

            I had vowed on Monhegan to keep in touch with the dark, self-destructive aspects of myself which artwork had revealed. But I was also very excited about the layers and depths of memory I had found in myself through this process and wanted to reconnect with the people I had interviewed to find out if they had similar experiences, especially with sensory memory, and if so, the context for their experiences. As well, I was committed to advocacy, to writing a thesis that could at least disturb the stereotypes of memory and aging. And I had made an earlier promise to my grandmother: to write her story as a way to illuminate the oppression of women. Who was the audience for stories like this told in paint and clay? If there was one, I didn’t know how to reach it, since I had never been a part of the art world, especially not film, which might have been a possibility. And so I returned to the academic world as the best place to legitimate our stories, and where writing is the only acceptable medium.

UNDERGROUND

How pervasive is the value placed on words. I doubt my very existence when I have no words for her, remember my mother telling me to “use my words,” and that only when I could express myself in words could I be understood. I keep on insisting that somehow my body should BE words, that memories be located in mind-words. But now I know they are not, that they are located in all of my body. (Journal, 1991)

I certainly had plenty of questions about the supremacy of intellect and words in my life and their claim, via our cultural values, to be the most efficacious way of expressing thoughts and ideas. However, I still felt that words were my most familiar and practiced medium of expression, and that writing was the path to memory I most relied on. The theme of my thesis remained the same: to explore the contradictions between the ways people’s memories functioned in their daily lives, and what they believed about memory and aging. I had no more idea how to explicate a thesis in paint or clay than I knew how to paint or sculpt a story. In fact it never occurred to me to even attempt such a project. Drawing, painting and sculpture were so fresh that I still had to anchor my discoveries in words before they seemed wholly real and I could feel complete. It was as if I was carrying two homes on my back because I hadn’t yet found one place that would hold all the furniture. However, the focus of the thesis shifted to talking about that art work house, to telling my story of how the nonlinear, nonverbal voice of artwork had shown me how our memories are embodied. Instead of being at the centre, older people’s stories would now be a chorus of wisdom and experience guiding me to look further into sensory memory as a possible clue to the discordances we all experienced.

It was a great plan. My supervisor liked the shift and promised to help in winnowing and clarifying the many themes I had uncovered, assuring me that she thought I “could pull it off.” I was exhilarated, and the pain of the artwork years seemed productive as well as enlightening, the intensity gradually receding. I not only stopped asking questions of myself, I even stopped paying attention to how I was feeling, except occasionally in therapy sessions when a client’s discoveries elicited a responsive twinge

STANDING UP 

In the first chapter of the thesis I told the story of my puzzlement and dismay about my own forgetting, and my wondering about how to remember my life. At that time, words seemed to spill effortlessly from my pen like a river in full spate. I didn’t realize then that because the story had already been limned in my drawings, paintings and sculptures, it could now move much more easily into word-consciousness. My supervisor reviewed the chapter and wrote: “This is exciting work,” and urged me to: “Write from your heart, mold as you would clay, then shape, cut … the other stories will come later, I will help you weave them in.” But as I wrote the elder chorus became more and more muted and my story began to take over with an urgency that plunged me back into the world I had been holding at bay. No fragment this:

 Demands … fatigue … conflict …I feel overwhelmed by what I have rediscovered of my life. There is so much here! I am noticing my absence and re-membering myself. To say “I am so much” is to come from a very different perspective than “there is too much of me,” is to feel how much all of us want to be here, to be re-counted. Knowing why I forget myself doesn’t stop my feelings of fear and grief and rage … they crowd in all the more urgently. My habit has always been to rationalize such sensations as “nothing but” and wish them away. Now I cannot; having been recognized they are not going to be docile, to fade away into the background, no matter how hard I try to keep them from taking over – and I do try. I want to draw or paint or sculpt right now, and I want to write what I know. Right now, turning to wordlessness is because telling my story, and making the connections between my experience, and the experience of other people whose lives are usually ignored, is so … daunting. When I go public and place myself in relationship to other people I feel uneasy again, fearful of not/being seen … or heard…. How many stories can be told in one work? (Journal, 1991)

THOUGHTS

These fears of speaking out and then of being erased are not a fantasy. In the first three chapters of this book I wrote about how they are grounded in a personal and public story of not being seen or heard, or of being ignored or slapped down. And so the issue of what is recorded and what is not, when and by whom, taps into a deeply felt place of being discounted, as in my first attempt to do graduate work. What to include, and what to leave out, is also a social and cultural issue, because I feel a shared rage about women’s suppression and oppression as in epitomized by my grandmother’s story. And so records, recording, whose they are and who writes them, is not just an intellectual issue; it is loaded with the emotions and physical sensations which have emerged during years of research and writing that led to my realization that my own body is itself a record of suppression and conflict. I also sense the heaviness of my responsibility to the older people who shared their experiences with me in deeply personal ways. While the emphasis in the thesis shifted from their stories to mine, I know that in telling even parts of their stories I reveal a great deal about them. More important, choosing what to include and what to leave out, of them and of me, begs the question of whose reality is on these pages. I became preoccupied with the issues of leaving out and including, with the what, how, when, why and by whom of forgetting and remembering … which ultimately is what we all are all about. In working with clay I had begun to ground these issues in my own body-life, asking: “What fits where and when for this piece, for me; not just what/how I fit in/to for others? How much can I hold in my hand, in myself ... deal with at one time ... how/where is this material constituted?”

OPENINGS

I began to feel overwhelmed by all the questions and the way they occupied my emotional and physical life. I wanted to take a break, let things lie fallow for awhile, but I was afraid to paint or sculpt. Once I started that, I was pretty sure I would have even more to deal with and I didn’t want more coming at me. So I walked a lot and read a little, looking for ways to refocus.

            Then I re-read Charlene Spretnak’s feminist retelling of the myth of Demeter and Persephone and knew that the images of the myth were what I needed: my art work years had taught me their power to ground speculation in daily life and to clarify uncertain hunches. Her revisioning of the familiar Greco-Roman myth helped me to see glimmers of a possible coming together of what seemed like disparate ideas, but which I knew were somehow related.

In the version of the myth that I had been familiar with since childhood, Persephone wanders off from her female companions. Hades, the lord of the Underworld, is attracted by her innocence, sees her isolation as his opportunity, rises up through a chasm in the earth and entices her with romantic fantasies to follow him. He then drags Persephone, weeping and unwilling, down to the underworld. While there she eats nothing, knowing that if she does she will never be able to leave. Her mother Demeter, who controls the earth’s fecundity, searches everywhere for her, neglecting to care for the earth. When she finally discovers where her daughter is, she is enraged and devastates the earth. People are so appalled, and so angry at the gods, that Zeus, the sky-counterpart to Hades below the earth) is forced to send emissaries to plead with Demeter. Eventually there is a bargain and Persephone is released from the underworld on condition that she return there every year for four months. Ostensibly, the story is one of spring and new growth, birth, death and renewal, but a feminist reading sees this as conditioned on the male God’s desire.

“The pathological idealism of Romanticism continues to murder the feminine that cherishes life, when women are betrayed, and then overcome, by male violence.” Marion Woodman.

Spretnak’s version of the myth seems to be based on the earlier story of the Sumerian goddess Innana and her descent to Ereshkiegel in the underworld; a version which speaks about the generative power of women, rather than the authoritarian power of men tacitly accepted in the Greek version. In this version Persephone hears the cries of the lost, sad souls in the underworld and knows that for their suffering to be relieved she must go down to welcome them and initiate them into their new home. Demeter, goddess of both the living and the dead, acknowledges that she has been too busy caring for the living to receive the spirits of the dead, and agrees that Persephone must go. She knows that Persephone is creating growth below the surface unobserved, but misses her daughter terribly and expresses her loneliness in a period of mourning so profound that the world is plunged into the depths of winter. In Persephone’s descent, she dies to her old self and is reborn (initiated). When her task is done for the time being she makes her way home, signaling her return with a ring of purple crocuses. Demeter sees the flowers, alerts the women and they join Persephone in celebrating the renewed, exuberant life which grows from her work and their reconnection, knowing that Persephone will return to the underworld whenever there are lost souls to welcome into their next stage of life. This version of the myth is a metaphor for the organic cycle of birth, death and renewal, all phases interacting, and of a society where women can live independently and generate their own expressive experiences.

MOTHER AND DAUGHTER

Did you ever stop to wonder whether Persephone

might have left home of her own free will,

to answer another call? The story I heard

is that one day,

while caring for spring’s new sprouts, she heard the restless spirits of the dead hovering around their earthly homes,

bewildered and in pain, with nowhere to go.

Her Mother, Demeter, has been so busy looking after the living, she’s had no time to take them

to their underworld home.

Persephone, knowing that the seeds stored there

must be fertilized by the spirits of the newly dead,

decides she must go with them, show them the way.

A chill passes through Demeter, frosting

the air around her.

She must let her go. She gives her a torch, shows her Hekate’s opening and watches her descend, carrying sheaves of wheat, three poppies and the pomegranates

whose juice is food for the dead.

Deeper and deeper she goes, moaning softly in the cold silence,

finds the place, chooses a stand for her Mother’s torch,

a nearby vase for the wheat, and a bowl for the pomegranates.

Embracing each spirit, she steps back, looks

into questioning, uneasy eyes with a steady gaze,

anoints with the red, red juice and watches the change

from grief to tranquility and the comfort of knowing

their new home, dead to the old self and now reborn.

Demeter makes her own moan. Howling and gnashing

she rages up and down the land until her mouth hurts

and her throat is sore with grief. I mean,

she thought she’d lost her forever. That can happen you know,

You can lose a child forever.

Everyone was so scared they didn’t know what to do

and kept telling her she was overreacting.

Worn out with rage, her sorrow takes hold.

She retreats to a bare hillside, gazing at nothingness

from eyes shrunken and sore with crying,

withdraws her power from crops, trees and plants. How can there be new growth in such loneliness

Everything rusts, dries up, withers. Desolate land.

No spring. No summer. (Artemis, steadfast, sits nearby.)

Persephone, wending her way through the silent chasm

caresses seeds fallen to earth, fertilized by spirits who now know

their task is to create growth underground, all unobserved.

As she completes her own task and slowly nears the surface

a ring of purple crocuses springs up around her Mother’s barren seat.

Too weak with relief to be angry,

Demeter encircles Persephone

in a cape of white crocuses, hugging her in desperate joy.

Then joins their friends in a wild dance ’round the ring.

KNOWING

The way this myth spoke to me forever disabused me of thinking of archetypes as abstract concepts. I felt their living presence in every bone, muscle and cell, a shared experience which shifted into a gut feeling that both versions of the myth were important to my story. They seemed to focus my rather blurred questions of recording and memory more sharply, directing me to ask, as I had with the clay: how does it happen that some stories are forgotten, cut off and denied or suppressed, or go underground, temporarily repressed? Whose version/desire is remembered, allowed/not cut, and welcomed below and above ground? And why? By whom? Illness had led me to art/heart work and the physical experiencing of memories. The Persephone stories guided and nourished me because they wondrously carried my intuitive understandings about these experiences, giving me a metaphoric language which was like an inner shorthand that compressed meaning enough for me to grasp it, and at the same time expanded my understanding so that I could “comprehend greater depths of meaning through cross association and clusters of related images.” (William Anderson).

            I didn’t have my own words yet, but I wondered if the language of the Demeter and Persephone myths could help me provide a theoretical framework for the reasons my grandmother and my mother and I had obeyed and/or resisted social injunctions, and had evaded/followed our inner certainties. I had seen strands of a similar pattern in my story and hers, and now I could see the similarities in our stories and the myths, and that they were also social stories about the ways in which power can be denied or suppressed.

I hadn’t yet figured out how story and myth would work to provide concrete, specific concepts, or how all of these strands were connected to memory. Even further underground were the links between metaphor, memory, myth, my artwork and the sensations and feelings I had discovered and endured in my art work. I still did not realize that I could tap into the images and language of my own experience as a guide to research questions and methodology – or even to nourish and encourage me. I had not yet found “a way through it, not yet having lived past the knot set in its frame.” (Anne Twitty). Nevertheless, in my first draft of the thesis I included my grandmother’s story, the so-called original myth of Demeter and Persephone and Spretnak’s retelling of it, and my fledgling ideas about their theoretical possibilities in an appendix.

SILENCE     

My supervisor noted in the margin of the draft that these frameworks “might work quite well,” but all of her other comments were unexpectedly negative and expressed so angrily that I was confused; this was the first indication I had that she thought I was not on the right track. “Keep on writing,” she had said, “this is exciting, work.” How then was this a wrong track? When what I had written felt so right to me … and had to her as well. Then she told me that she would be too embarrassed to let the other committee members read what she had urged me to write. I felt stunned. What was embarrassing? She had liked my narrative style (“your writing is wonderful”). What reaction did she fear from the other members? I knew that the draft needed a more conceptualized theory, and was looking forward to constructing that skeleton from the ideas I had included in the appendix, or whatever she might suggest. She had so often assured me of guidance in just this sort of situation that I was completely unprepared for the expectation that I should already have known how to do this, and had followed her instructions not to jeopardize the free flow of emerging ideas with too early conceptualization. (“for now, keep on writing, the themes will come, I will help you …”). I was befuddled, began to feel ashamed, even though I didn’t know why.

While it was certainly her job to tell me what would work and what would not, I could not in any way comprehend her about-face and, most harrowing, the unexpected and violent anger that threw me back into an old, familiar response of withdrawing under attack and distrusting my ideas and abilities. I did not, could not, stand up. I rented her room.

HOMES

She suggested post-structural theory as a suitable framework, one that she was deeply involved in and so “felt qualified” to help me with ...

            Had she not felt qualified to supervise my earlier work? In what way? She never told me that

            …and also that I shift to a more conventional structure to organize the thesis. She told me that if I didn’t want to do this I was free to find another supervisor, glossing over how very difficult that would be, and, at the same time, assured me that I was doing important work, that she wanted to see me succeed, and saw no reason why I could not learn enough post-structural theory to do very well. I responded to that siren invitation and went along with her suggestions. The shock of her anger and unexpected reversal disconnected me from my feelings, my intuition and my ideas and I drifted, rudderless. I did not pick up on her ambivalence about my earlier ideas and way of working, or on her implicit rejection. I was still thinking in terms of either/or, success or failure and didn’t see that she was vacillating. I allowed my yearning to “weave the strands of my Grandmother’s hair into a work for her and for women like her, to hold us all …” to blind me to another similar pattern: the destructive cobra-like quality of our interactions – and my denial of them.

            So entrenched was my assumption that she was the authority I needed to succeed, that even when I was able to start asking myself questions about her stance, I did not ask her what she had meant when she wrote that my embryonic conceptual framework “might work.” Did not even ask why it was preferable to abandon the ideas she had approved, and the writing style she admired, to follow another path. Nor did I object to her changing her mind about the thesis structure, which went against both my way of thinking and her earlier opinion. As I enrolled in her course in post-structural theory I felt heavy and deadened with compliance and paid no attention to the pain and fatigue that once more threatened to overwhelm me. I ignored the suggestion, made by a colleague who had helped me edit the draft, that I might want to consider writing a story, not a thesis. I did not want to hear that. I wanted my ideas – and passion – about sensory memory and aging heard and accepted in academia, where it counted. I convinced myself that if I could make the thesis work it would carry my ideas where I wanted them to go, my desire and conviction fueled by my supervisor’s urging me to continue – and, oddly, by her anger.

            I obeyed, as I had obeyed my parents’ injunction not to be an artist, as my mother had given up her profession to marry, and again, after the war, as my Grandmother had obeyed her husband’s command to cut her feminine glory, as Persephone had naively believed Zeus’s promises and followed him . . . (Journal, 1990)

            What were the incentives behind those earlier demands that turned all of them into mesmerized followers?

UNDERGROUND

Yearning to have my thesis accepted was the incentive that drove me to focus my attention on the intellectual task at hand, ignoring the images and explanatory potential of my grandmother’s story and the myths of Demeter and Persephone. The muzzled voices of my hunches accompanied my body/soul, buried under the impact of my supervisor’s anger and adopting her theoretical preferences. I dismissed my uneasy feelings and painful body that were pointing the way to another path, did not ask why I was placatory and not outraged.

HOMES

I completed the post-structural theory course in a year of non-stop, almost frantic work and was ready to rewrite the thesis when my supervisor took a leave of absence after a serious car accident; at the same time the other two members of my committee announced their retirement and left no replacements. I was so worried about finding new members that at the Department Chair’s request, I took a summary of my work around to several professors in a search for a new committee. While complimenting me on the breadth and depth of the research, no one would take me on, saying either the work was “not in my area,” or “I’m too overloaded,” or “I don’t want the responsibility for the entire thesis and defense in case Professor X is not able to return to work.” I felt weak with abandonment. Desperation clutched at my heart. I wanted to continue! Finally, my supervisor’s assistant, an associate professor in the department, seeing that I had done everything possible to find support, agreed to read the literature review and methodology when they were finished. For three months I wrote like one possessed; she approved the chapters and sent them to my absent supervisor who wrote: “The methodology chapter alone could be a master’s thesis.”

This was a big boost! But she also wrote to me that she was “too ill to read more … you are on your own until this draft is completed.” Her admiration of the work she had seen quieted my uneasiness about not having the chapter-by-chapter supervision that was usual in doctoral work.

Again! Why? Why did you acquiesce?

She knew me. I assumed that if she thought I could do it she must have based her opinion on what she had read and so I ought to be able to.

Why should you be able to do this alone?

I didn’t ask. Maybe because I was the oldest student in the department? Had done a Masters years before, should know my way around? Besides, she was sick and very clear that she shouldn’t be bothered. Who else was there? To be there, what other choice did I have?

I felt as Robert had, adrift in the academic world without what “I needed and never thought to ask.” No one, especially me, realized how naive I was in this world. Finished with course work, without a committee, and now a year behind my classmates, I was cut off from my peers and professors in the academic community and had no one with whom to discuss my work or reality check the situation I was in. I saw no other alternative than to get on with writing in the hope that I would rejoin the academic community with an acceptable draft. I kept at it for a year and a half, trying to weave stories and theory together in what became a more and more abstract and disembodied language. I was mired in a search for the right stance and the right words, trying to muster my reasoning in the “usual rational, logical way,” as Robert would say. But this went contrary to the way I think, which Lowinsky calls looping, the practice of an “associative process by which we pass through our own experience to understand that of another,” a way of thinking and speaking that recapitulates the experience of life, including interactions with others, and our involvements in and responses to their experiences, thus making loops through time. For me this way of thinking is logical and rational, and so trying to write in a more linear, sequential way muddled my thinking. The life-blood oozed out of the rents in the stories until I was sickened. I couldn’t find a way to tell these stories and also fit them into the categories the supervisor had recommended, because the stories had to be wrenched apart so that bits and pieces could be assigned to themes. My despair grew. I wanted to write each of the stories told me by the people I had interviewed on the island and during the memory workshops: In my journal I wrote: “There is so much here. Attached to the conceptual themes that organize the material are a cacophony of voices, all interesting, all having a right to be heard; the different ways of describing and explaining are like strands streaming, entangling, enticing, like the ragged, dangling tails of a kite, colourfully descriptive, but how functional are they?”

I completed a draft in the spring of 1994 and mailed it to my supervisor with mixed feelings of relief, anticipation and dread. I needed her guidance, and yet was uncertain of what that would be. Would she help me with the structural and conceptual difficulties I was having?

Had I the right to ask?

Why not? You were a student for goodness sake.

In November, after a long and worrisome summer and fall of waiting, she wrote to set up a time for a meeting. She handed me the draft and asked me to read her comments at the end of it before we talked. This time the anger in her feedback was so contemptuous, virulent and again completely unexpected (“The methodology chapters alone could be a master’s thesis,”) that in spite of my earlier seeds of doubt, I was struck dumb, unable to respond at all. She wrote that she had “spent a great deal of time reading the thesis.” Wasn’t that what supervisors did?“Your ideas are lost in description and images, in spiral movement (!), the research more thematic than conceptual … by now you should be able to conceptualize clearly … should know how to do this … must reorganize and rewrite almost all.”

       But I had asked her advice about how to move these images and themes into the broader conceptual framework of post-structural theory. She had admired the spiraling movement in my writing style, said it was a perfect fit for the subject of memory. Why was she objecting to it now? In her office, I stared at her comments as she answered phone calls. Other students wandered through the door she had left open to signify her availability. She answered their questions. I felt invisible. Finally, still speechless, I left, murmuring that I would get back to her. It was only as I drove home that fear thawed to affront (not quite anger yet) and I was able to think, “But this was not a second draft in the same vein as the first. I was asked to do a first draft of a complete about-face, to fit my material into a theoretical framework and organizational structure that was virgin territory for me. How could I possibly produce a completed product?”

By now why aren’t you getting it?

Because I had not understood that by a draft she meant an almost finished product, not a first attempt. I had been educated in the liberal arts where draft meant “a preliminary form subject to revision etc.” (Oxford Dictionary). I had assumed we inhabited the same world, spoke the same language. I was wrong. I did not know her vocabulary.

I was sunk in misery. To follow this latest shift in academic requirements I had abandoned everything I had worked so hard to understand about the embodiment of sensory memory: my grandmother’s story and the myths of Demeter and Persephone, as explanatory framework and overarching metaphor; the artistic and writing worlds I had so recently realized could be mine; a way of writing that fit my way of thinking. My supervisor wrote that the categories she had suggested as a way to achieve a more neutral position “in order to avoid setting up a dichotomy of young/old, masculine/feminine ... did not seem to work very well … your people are lost.” I didn’t fault her for the categories not working, but by now I realized that the ones she had suggested, and I had agreed to use, were a violation of the interviews because they had not been conducted with these categories in mind. Of course this version and the interviews did not fit comfortably together, they came from different contexts! I had been trying to write from a perspective that had not grown out of my previous work. No wonder my people were lost!

As lost as I was, wandering in an underworld of inconsistency, vacillation and uncertainty

But surely the place for this criticism was the methodology chapters, that “alone could be a master’s thesis,” before I proceeded with the analysis. I already knew the “stories had lost their personality,” they – and I – were fragmented to suit a different way of thinking, disconnected from their beginnings in sensations and feelings. Now, I felt we were all depersonalized, all lost. For a year and half I had felt increasingly sick, trying to adapt to and work in a world that I was beginning to realize was foreign to me. Now, with this devastating feedback, I was intellectually and emotionally severed from my academic purpose. I felt cut off from myself and from the people I had interviewed. It seemed that no stories of disenfranchisement would be told, that no one would ever really hear them, or know them. 

“How can anything good come from this?” I asked Margaret.

She assured me it would.

OPENINGS

And it did. The shock of illness had led me to art work, shown me the power of images to reveal embodied memories and forgotten parts of myself and bring them into relationship. Now, the shock of rejection was shattering, but it also splintered my blind drive to succeed in academia. Like a searchlight illuminating the exact spot in the midst of darkness it jolted me awake, loosening the bonds of paralysis. Now, like one of Persephone’s lost souls, I could hear my own lost, neglected voice crying in the midst of all the others – really hear myself, on my own, without having someone else tell me what I should be listening to or saying. I began to quiver with rage; as June had done as she painted, as Rachel had when she “woke up to the father’s abuse,” as I had done after recognizing my cobra landlady in myself, and as I did now when, like Demeter, I suddenly saw the abuse of power in the world of my aspirations. I understood the cycle. Unconsciously I had kept the emotions engendered by oppression well in check. But they were there all along and fueled my desire to be an advocate for those whose voices had been similarly stifled. Then came my yearning to be accepted in the academic community, convinced that it was the right place to lend legitimacy to my ideas. My supervisor’s intellectual and emotional ambivalence (possibly based in the same desires and fears I was wrestling with) set up shifting criteria and triggered my increasing anxiety about not being accepted. A constant, continuous process of disempowerment was set in motion as I kept on trying to find out what would be acceptable in a world whose expectations kept changing, seemingly without warning. What I had thought would be a home that would nurture my goals became the place that also played a part in the oppression I wanted to uncover.

What kept me trapped in this cycle was my conviction that academia was the only, or best, place to nurture the expression of ideas. Since my supervisor’s ideas were accepted there and mine were as yet untried, it seemed better to follow hers than mine. I assumed it was my inexperience that made it hard for me to understand the changes in her thinking, and that it was up to me to keep on trying, to learn enough so I could make it work. By not critically examining her part in our interaction I cooperated in perpetuating a self/other cycle of layers of denial and unfulfilled desire. Which seemed inescapable at the time.

At last you begin to feel outraged!

Yes!

On another wave of anger that I felt in my muscles and bones I knew how much this was like my grandfather demanding that my grandmother cut off her hair! That one cry was her protest about having to obey, having to fit into the rigid rules about seemly behaviour for women. So wrenchingly remembered by a daughter that her heart-hurting cry was passed on until it was recognized as a voice calling from the silent community of women remembering oppression. My emotions cracked open the door I had kept so firmly closed and I remembered all of the demeaning, exploitive and abusive moments of the past few years, so like what my grandmother experienced. And like older people now experience in disempowering themselves by having to acquiesce in the idea that they (and their memories) are failing and faulty so that they won’t be out of place, will be acceptable, connected. And will survive. And then live their protest in their excellent memory practices. They and my grandmother had shown me how hard it is to live in that twilight zone where you say you believe one thing so you can be part of a community, while quietly living your own truth in order to maintain your sanity.

Sometimes it must be impossible. Do you think some of their forgetting is a an unconscious forgetting? Maybe even angry and deliberate at times? There is a lot I would like to forget.

But not be forgotten, as they are.

No.

Remember Greco-Roman Persephone/Demeter: images and representations of seduction by promise, following, obeying (enforced community), resignation and paralysis below, no growth destruction above, protesting, bargaining, returning conditional on the whim of Zeus.

All returning is conditional: the issue is what those conditions are and who constructs them. Memory processes like repression and denial of the physical and emotional as basis and beginning, suppression of certain ideas of value in particular personal and social conditions, have maintained the social conventions of a body-mind split down through the centuries since Plato and maybe before, as parts of self and entire social worlds forget one other in disconnected states – as I had seen in my art work

            This cycle of attempting to find someone or some place for one’s ideas, passions, even for the new self learned whilst journeying, and the experience of rejection, was not unique to me. It is a systemic part of any society: anger, fear, desire fuel a venture; one finds a community to satisfy needs or validate yearnings, then becomes entangled in discovering the rules, trying to break through glass ceilings; eventually, there is resignation to the situation or departure from that community in a search for another. Anxiety, fear of isolation, striving, always striving to find a place. Knowing that there must be someone to come home to.

            Remembering Spretnaks’s re-visioned, transgressing myth held me up while I was trying to find my home-place. The myth tells of hearing one’s own voice over the seductive insistence of easy conforming; answering that call, rather than bowing to noisy demands of all the others; serving and nurturing growth within and below, waiting quietly (and yes, uneasily, in loneliness) above; returning when the job is done; finding a community to welcome you as you now are; being able to embrace the inevitability of recurring departures and returnings when you know there is someone to come home to. My grandmother, after fulfilling self and socially imposed conditions she could not avoid accepting, did answer her own call, did find another place to come home to.

Wherever and whatever the journey, desire, physical and spiritual pain and joy are embodied in one’s physical and emotional being, always remembered, (somehow, someway, in sickness and in health) in each and every day’s life, alerting the mind to deep disturbances. What sustained me throughout all these years of sadness, anxiety , fear, disappointment and confusion was an unrelenting underground imperative, a ruthless determination that would not let go, that shouted,

I will be heard ... her cry … all the crying ... must be heard.

For too long I had been trying to answer the voices that cried out, “How could my supervisor do this? How could they – my grandfather, my social milieu, academia – do this?” Strong emotions, waves of remembering, a flood of new understandings allowed me to move from the personal to the social. Now I saw that the link I’d been wondering about and looking for among each of the stories I wanted to tell – about my grandmother, mother, the elders, mine, and about sensory memory – and the two versions of the myth of Demeter and Persephone – is power, the use, abuse and/or denial of power.

Power, the use, abuse and/or denial of power.

Now I had an overarching theme that would allow me to step back from my involvement in my own story, observe and come to understand how the stories are connected, see how they could “live comfortably together!” I could look into and write about the particular conditions of setting out, journeying and coming home for older people who transgress what is expected of them in their community, particularly around issues of memory – I could write about the consequences and costs in the remembering and forgetting of body and mind: Leo’s poverty, which drove his passion for book-learning and obscured the artist in him until his body’s pain uncovered it. How Ruth realized the limitations of art school rules that shaped what and how she could see and what she would remember, until she broke away and reconnected to the freedoms of her early years. I learned so much more about sensory memory listening to Mort telling me about how he remembered the music he could no longer hear. Mae taught me that anger lives in the body and is never forgotten even “though you may find a different perspective.” Charles and Rachel showed me how that happens – he can never, ever, forget his Mother’s voice because he hears it living inside him; her remembering arms still ache after 30 years. Robert learned how to read by touching the letters until he could remember their shape. Dave’s missing piece showed me the body/mind split lived in everyday life, as does my own story of sensory remembering through artwork and myth. Emma gives me hope, her music is a form of love through which she remembers.

Not only did I now have an explanatory theme and a framework that incorporated people’s cyclic living, I also had a new way of looking at the layers and spirals in people’s biographies and a new descriptive vocabulary. Art work had done more than show me the forgotten parts of myself, how they related to each other, and eventually how these aspects were practiced in my daily life. I had learned about repressed sensory memory in my body/mind by following a new methodology: drawing, painting and clay work was an evolving process of learning how to pay attention, attending to the relationships among what I was noticing, and then attentiveness to the what, where, how and when of these relationships in my every day life. I had developed some experience in holding the tension between waiting and the urgency to express as I learned and practiced this different language. I could now use its vocabulary to analyse the interviews and ask: What do the older people I talked to pay attention to - and what not? How do they attend to what is important to them - and dismiss what is thought to be unimportant? Who decides what is or is not important? How are these values and preferred behaviours actually practiced in daily life?

Rachel’s story showed me themes and processes, where they originate, how entrenched they are and how hard to understand. Her family was poor, sometimes hungry; work never ended. But what she remembers most is fear of her father’s harshness, criticism and demands for perfection, and the requirement of serving his needs. “I am a perfectionist to this day,” she told me. When she went to school she had “no self-confidence … was terrified in debates and discussions … there was no room for the person, you had to be exact to their rules.” She already knew about obeying rules and taught herself how to get along in school: “I listened to the teacher, paid close attention to the lesson, always concentrating on what they wanted.” (Attending, a constant, continuous process of heedfulness – in this instance, to the other)

She did everything right and was good enough for university, but there was no money for a daughter’s education. The boys would have professions; she could marry and become a homemaker like her mother, “chained to the house and a lot of kids,” or get a low wage job and leave home. Like my aunts had done, she decided that: “I didn’t want a life like my mother’s, dependent on someone else for my existence.” Her first job was in a factory sewing clothes. She was good at it: “I had some skills I learned from my mother.” She stood up to the foreman, demanded a promotion: “I got it, but it wasn’t much different from home and my father, I knew I really had to leave.” She went to New York and became a “senior saleswoman.” She stood up for herself. She learned the ropes in her new job, was successful and independent: “I don’t owe anyone anything, but to my dying day my arms will remember my dress shop days … being nice to disgusting, superior people, and ending up not liking people.” In muscles, bones and cells her body has recorded her life.

Leaving home meant that she didn’t fit in with Jewish community values of marriage and children as woman’s true calling. She didn’t miss being “a slave to the house,” but she missed having children and the closeness of family. She cared for her nieces and nephews in whatever ways she could, looking after them when they were small so their parents could have a break, inviting them to New York when they were older, “so that we would always have a good relationship ... and we do, they gave me seven Hi on my 70th birthday.” She went home for all the holidays and took a year off to care for her dying mother. “It was expected, I was the unmarried daughter. I sacrificed a year’s seniority to do it.” Rachel was well aware that “only family look after you when you are old and sick. I retired early so I would be sure of that. There has to be someone to come home to. But they will never know what I miss.” Cut off from the friends and interests of her life in New York she was persuaded to go to a senior’s drop-in centre, where I met her. “I didn’t want to, didn’t want to be associated with a lot of sick people, but now I’m happy I did. After a while I saw that here, there’s a place for everybody.”

Standards shift and are different or ambivalent for different individuals, societies and times, but the importance of being connected to others overrides differences. Experience brings changes, so do our circumstances, and the aging process brings change as well, but to be mentally and physically healthy we still must belong somewhere, as our own experience and recent scientific studies have shown (Eisenberger). Like Rachel, my grandmother made sure she raised children for whom family was central, so that when she made the break from her old life she could be sure that there would be someone to come home to.

Attending to how we are not/getting what we want is the hardest of all. We are trained to pay attention to ideas, not feelings and sensations. But ideas do not construct our daily living, they organize what the heart desires, and, as Atwood pointed out, what we want does not change. If heart and body are seen as nuisances, and daily life as trivial where and how can we ground and legitimate our dreams? That is why we need the myths and stories. They provide us with ways of stepping back so that we can see how we feel and what we are doing, or not, to achieve our heart’s desire.

            I remember Bethea, my mother’s oldest friend, telling me how she and my mother denied their “good minds because such independence would make your husband angry. The first decision I ever made was to leave my husband, because he was so mean. All I’d done till then was go to school and get married. That wasn’t a decision. Girls got married.” Now she’s in an “old people’s home – that’s what they are you know. They just want to give you a pill and forget about you and you’re supposed to forget yourself too. But how do you forget your pain?” She is house member for the patients’ advocates group and “has been known to bug them,” and to disagree with the Women’s Auxiliary, “who come in, all condescending, thinking they know best for you. They think you don’t remember. But they’re not old. Mostly, you know you have an opinion, but you keep it to yourself or you’re a troublemaker and won’t have anyone to talk to. Then you can’t talk about what you think and things can fade.”

I had the bare bones ideas – the conceptual framework - to support the ample flesh of all the experiences I had observed and recorded. I was also exhausted from years of work and uncertainty, and emotionally and spiritually tattered from never knowing where I stood in the world I had always thought of as a home for me. But I was so close! The lure (from Hades) was to proceed with the thesis, to pursue the academic goal. When my supervisor told me that she would read “a final well-conceptualized outline,” and then decide whether she would continue, I listened to that tenuous promise, paid no attention to my bone-deep fatigue, ignored my feelings of betrayal and injustice and the deep uneasiness that weighted my chest, so that I could “get on with it.” One more try and all would be clear. And the stories would be heard. I went home to write an outline that I knew would get it right.

STANDING UP

I had a conceptual theme I could write about, as well as draw or paint or sculpt. I was so excited that I didn’t pause to ask myself – and there was no one else to discuss it with – whether this writing would be any more acceptable than my past efforts. As it turned out, none of it mattered anyway, because my body was no longer going to let me get away with ignoring her, and was sending much stronger messages, was telling me that I was still caught in the same abusive cycle that I had discovered was the process and means of disempowerment in my grandmother’s life and for the older people I had interviewed. By December of ’94 chronic back pain became acute. I didn’t rest, I took Tylenol. A urinary tract infection set in. I still didn’t listen. I took antibiotics instead, and then had such a severe reaction to the drugs I took “to keep me going” that I was unable to eat for six weeks and lost forty pounds. Hans Selye, the founder of stress research, developed the concept of adaptation energy. “It is as though we had hidden reserves of adaptability, or adaptation energy, throughout the body.… Only when all of our adaptability is used up will irreversible, general exhaustion follow.” Aging is the normal process through which the reserves of adaptation energy become depleted. But physiologically, stress ages us as well – as language recognizes when people speak of “having aged overnight.” As I felt I had.

 … AND MY BODY COULDN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE

Felled, I sank out of sight,

frozen solid in shock.

All

Winter

I was so very still.

And silent.

What kept me alive? Music,

filling bone hollows. The sun

pouring light, honey-warm

on dry skin.

Rusty sitting, feet up, doing needlepoint,

her presence letting me sleep.

Mary in the next room

“every third weekend”

cooking tiny meals

which I could rarely eat.

Friends come and go

with advice and worried looks,

offering food.

Children, caring their utmost,

peer anxiously

young again and bewildered

at the uneasy intimacy

of a parent’s pain.

I did not defend against the pain,

nor welcome it.

There was no I ….

A previous serious illness had led me to artwork, to the images that gave me new eyes, and a new perspective on my research. Once again my body pulled the rug out from under me, wrenched me out of the cycle, and presented me with a life-threatening, life-giving choice. I was living a part of the family story that had so haunted me, a part that my mother had never talked about, the cost of staying in an abusive relationship. Not talked about because the appeal of my young husband’s keen mind, and the security his family could offer me, drew her attention away from what lay beneath? Never questioned what kept my grandmother bound, or what had loosened the bonds? … never questioned her own acquiescence? Where was her cry?

Not talked about but lived. Dead of heart failure at 67.

THOUGHTS

W.G. Sebald’s work on guilt and memory struck a deep chord for me. He notes that the people who actually lived through the Allied fire bombings of Dresden and Cologne were so numbed with shock and horror that they didn’t remember much, and that the precondition of later rebuilding their cities was repression of the emotions and memories connected with destruction: “There was a tacit agreement that the true state of material and moral ruin in which the country found itself was not to be described. The darkest aspects of destruction remained under a kind of taboo like a shameful family secret, a secret that perhaps could not even be privately acknowledged.” Even writers and historians remained largely silent. “Such silence was a spiritual catastrophe since it meant a narrowing of awareness by those whose part it is to see and remember” (Philip Marchand).

            While not anywhere near the same magnitude as the destruction of cities and lives in wartime, there is a resemblance of pattern in silencing the stories, and even the memories, of family secrets in people’s ordinary daily life which produces a similarly impoverished awareness and spiritual barrenness in them. What happened after my grandmother’s single cry was what Sebald calls “the art of forgetting.” This is an “art” that is also physically devastating. My grandmother and mother died early, of heart disease. I was wrestling with incapacitating illness. Must I fight until my dying day?

            Like my grandmother, I too left an abusive husband, but did not find a nurturing home as she had done. I understood that she had left an intolerable situation but was not told her story until I was an adult. Her despair – and her courage – and how she had actually managed to cope with a life that made her cry out – was never acknowledged or talked about. Only long after she was dead, when I was waking up to the horrors of my own situation, did I come to realize the depth and extent of misery which must have driven a woman of her generation and religious beliefs to leave her husband. Her faith never wavered, although it must have expanded to include her own worthiness. But the consequences of her life story were unknown to me when I was growing up and could not provide me with the overt clues which might have alerted me, warned me that I was going from one abusive situation to another. I made the same mistake and failed to recognize it. Impaled on silence.

KNOWING

The silenced voices of the people I interviewed haunted and chivied me as did my grandmother’s cry in the midst of her life of deadly quiet: her voice and my mother’s insisting on their right – and mine – to academic education as the first step on the road to liberation and legitimacy. They had found a temporary refuge from the systemic abuse of their domestic world, but they had not expected to be heard! Their refuge provided a chance to escape, and to enjoy a taste of a more stimulating world than home and children would later provide. Challenging the values of the social order was minor and personal. They had played by the rules. For a long time I didn’t know I wasn’t doing that. Stimulated by the course work, and by those faculty members whose methods and perspectives seemed similar to my own teaching and therapy practices, and who had encouraged me in my work, I thought I had approval to push the limits, as they did. Then, when I was told that work which they had liked was not acceptable, and this pattern was repeated, I became so confused and disoriented that my own judgment was buried under doubt. As Yann Martel says: “To choose doubt … is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”

 THOUGHTS

From the vantage point I have now I understand that my supervisor’s anger, which had flooded over me leaving me barely able to gasp for air, was so extreme that it had to be a projection of her rage and helplessness about her own situation. She dumped it all on me and I reacted accordingly. It was impossible for me to deal with because it had nothing to do with me. But she was trying to make it mine and I had to get away. That open door of her office signaled that she was taking no chances of a confrontation. But what if she had been open with me about the ambivalence of academia towards her research, and her position? Or how her illness was making an untenured position even shakier? I will never know the answers to those questions. But I can see now that she, like the other women faculty, especially the feminists, was marginalized in the department and had little real power “to bargain with.” Nor could she “disappear in the old self and re imagine herself into someone else,” follow her own voice, and still be a part of academia. I sense that my story and my struggle may have been very close to her own, so that she alternately related to it and then denied, was enthusiastic, then rejecting, thus creating shifting criteria and confusion about what she required in my work – unknowingly perpetuating the very system she so ably critiqued in her research.

And of course that was the problem. The academy of the late ’80s and early ’90s was just beginning to be a place where attention could be drawn, carefully, circumspectly, to bodies, to women’s abuse, to the ways in which knives are wielded in secret, behind closed doors. But it was not the place for crying and speaking of the tears for that cutting and waste. It was also the wrong place to use metaphor and story as explanatory frameworks because I could not explain those frameworks in words – and words are the required coinage in academia. If I had been able to step back, as I had learned to do in my art work, I would have seen that the judgement “You are doing exciting work, keep on writing … mold as you would mold clay,” - then followed by: “I would be ashamed to show this to the committee,” made no sense. But I was so convinced that the academy was the only place where I could develop my abilities and find an audience that would allow me (and my grandmother, and the elders I had come to know so well) to be heard, and so obsessed with getting it right for this milieu, that I did not create the necessary, objective distance. And so, my body and intuition were silenced.

As I had worked to bring everything together the norms I was striving to meet seemed to shimmer and shift, like a mirage, but I tried to change my way of thinking and writing as a way to fit, and could not make that work. I had not yet done my own shifting from trying to fit a Procrustean bed, to resolving to tell the stories my way, whether they fit or not. I needed to sort out those two voices and change the place and method. I needed to figure out how to say no to the voice insisting that violating myself was the necessary price of being heard, without thinking that to eschew her would bury the consistent and compelling determination to be heard. I had identified the uses and abuse of power as my major theme and realized that the process of my artwork gave me a methodology that fitted my way of thinking, but my body was telling me I was making a mistake to try and fit my perspective and methodology into the same old place. I needed a new home.

In my illness I seemed to exist in a state of altered consciousness.

One could scarcely call it living.

Really! Why not?

… not caring for anyone else, or even yourself, in the usual way.

Someone, I don’t remember who, thought I might die, and my doctor appeared in a rare house call. Electrolytes were measured, blood pressure assessed, iron reserves noted. Nothing unusual. One day I found myself in hospital with my daughter, facing an internist recommending a psychiatric evaluation. “You are anorexic,” he said. “Thin, yes,” I replied, “but not anorexia nervosa. I like my body.”

I did?!

This news flash filtered down. I hadn’t thought about whether I would die. I wasn’t thinking at all, about anything. I was weak, but I had no stomach cramps or headaches unless I forced myself to eat, or to try to eliminate. I was quite content to lie on the sofa in the sun, sipping water, listening to music and floating with the occasional images that appeared, but mostly just – being. I felt as if I could do this for a long, long time. For as long as it took

to step back

to see the craziness

to face the killer

to find a place that welcomes the voice

that wants to be heard

THOUGHTS

Once again I am struck by the power of archetype to hold the strength of my struggle and the depths of its meaning until they became intelligible to my more superficial mind. Looking back I see that I was living both versions of the myth of Demeter and Persephone, as well as my grandmother’s story. As Persephone, I was attracted to academia because I had always believed that I could fulfill my goals there, and was “raped away” in the sense that I did not look closely at what those promises really entailed, did not see that they might be inimical to my desires. My body was a lost, forgotten soul, unacknowledged and crying for help, way down there in the unconscious, uninitiated, body/mind. My sick body judged me. It is her pain that summons me. As I become aware of what is happening I am like an angry Demeter driven to overcome all obstacles, rejecting all other outcomes, until I can no longer override my inner judgment and must let go of the imperative to be heard, which goes underground, resurfacing many years later in a new way.

            When that driven part of me is willing to let go of her worried, rigid control and step back, other parts can be heard and Persephone can make her own choice whether or not to make the inner journey to care for her neglected body and soul. As Demeter, I had continued to rage at the forced absence of body/soul-mate. Then I/she shift and reluctantly agree, through physical and spiritual necessity, to the temporary cessation of all conscious growth, not in anger, but in weary, waiting, healing acceptance, knowing that there are times when growth must happen underground. All creativity awaits the nourishment of acknowledgment and the connecting of spirit and body through image into consciousness.     

The underlying rape was the seduction of the system, the violence against any transgressor, and the ambivalence it created in my mentors, thus isolating, exploiting and violating all of us. Born of this system, I never questioned the isolation, unconsciously allowed the violation, and came back for more. In a trance of unworthiness, I always felt that I was the one at fault, not good enough. Even as I was becoming conscious of what I was doing, lured by promises explicit and implicit, and my own fantasy, I believed/felt that if I played by the rules, temporarily put aside my different way of thinking and writing, and was logical and clear enough, I could insert a contrary opinion that would be accepted. I closed the door against the incessant inner objections, repeatedly agreeing to ignore, chop off my ideas, feelings and spirit, believing once more that if no one in the academy listened there would never be anyone, anywhere, who would hear. And then my body protected me by her own heart-hurting cry so intense that I had to stop driving over her, take myself away from the entire interaction so that I could pay attention. “Here,” Charles had insisted. I must be here. “An exercise in faithfulness,” Charlotte had promised

And I am struck by the power of the body’s memories and memory processes. I had written that: “The stories (of family, myth, elders) do not live comfortably together,” that is, were not yet consciously connected. Yet I knew they lived together in memory, although not comfortably. As Sebald wrote about the repression of memories and emotions connected to the destruction of cities in the war, the stories I was living and working with spoke of ways in which people forget important experience, deny or don’t recognize - repress - their own power in consciousness but live their unrecognized experience in their daily lives. They do remember, but they act out societal norms, even though it goes against their own reality and values. Like my grandmother, they cut off their hair on demand, crying out. Somewhere. As my elderly interviewees did in their belief that all aspects of memory “decay with age,” while their daily practices belied those beliefs. As I did in school, marriage, profession and academia – striving to accomplish goals in contexts that denied my worth and abilities to do so, and devalued my desires. Like the Greek Persephone, we all wander away from our centre and inner convictions, allowing ourselves to be seduced, and are then raped, rather than listen to and follow our own truths. We become caught in the cycle of the uses and abuses of power, a theme common to all of our experiences. We forget ourselves.

Would I always forget my sensing, feeling selves? Always need to go back and get them? I didn’t know the answer to that question either.

I am almost getting used to not knowing answers.

But I did understand that I would always know I must look for them when they go missing.