Tag: Ursula le Guin

A letter to your soul

Such a letter must include the promise of hope. A promise things will get better, even as paradoxically somewhere along the line you will learn about the fact of death. Memento mori.

Remember man that thou art dust and unto dust though shalt return.

Ash Wednesday in my parish church and the priest scraping black on your forehead a reminder once a year. A dark smudge exactly where an Indian woman’s red Bindi sits. A third eye. A mark of something that singles you out as a believer.

It’s a long time since you endured the scrape of ash across your forehead, like the scrape of your father’s nicotine-stained fingers across your forehead at bedtime, the stink of his brandy breath, and the knowledge soon he will be drunk and beyond hope. 

But you keep hoping tonight he will not visit your room. Tonight, he will not peel the bed clothes from your sister’s body and crawl in beside her. Hope against hope your turn will not come too soon.

Before he died the writer and playwright Dennis Potter shared his hopes for a decent death. He was dying when he described the image of a baby crying in a room somewhere, mother nearby. 

There may be wars outside, bombs. Starvation. No matter the external dangers, the mother says to her distressed child, ‘You’ll be okay,’ and in these words, in some small tributary of feeling, creativity lies. This Potter argues is where writing comes from. 

These days when the years have left their mark on your skin and bones, you have stopped hoping for fame and recognition. You have stopped hoping to win a Booker. You know you never will. These days your hopes are simpler.

To stay as healthy as is possible in one long past their youth. Your children will be heathy, and your capacity to work, to run your fingers across the keyboard in line with the thoughts in your head. That these thoughts will have a resonance and evoke images from the past.

A small girl who bounces her ball on the concrete footpath endlessly determined to keep it bouncing as long as possible. A competition with herself to keep her ball in motion. To avoid the gutters and crooked bits of footpath, the grassy edges where her ball might go off course and make it impossible for her to hit down once more on the upwards bounce.

When Ursula Le Guin spoke of mother tongue and father tongue decades ago at her Bryn Mawr College Commencement address, she spoke to thousands of women graduating into their chosen careers, launching with hope into the whirl of work. She did not piggyback on the second wave of feminism and urge them to take up shovels, pens or swords and work like men. Instead, she talked of mother tongue and father tongue. 

Father tongue, the language of the academies, of politics. An essential language that frames all our public discourse. A language that is distancing and objective. It is a proud language, resolute, authoritative, and filled with the confidence of hope. 

Mother tongue on the other hand, is simple. It flies on the outbreath and is drawn in with the in breath. Don’t forget your coat. Are you warm enough. Now hurry or you’ll be late. It is the language of domesticity, the language to which Denis Potter refers. The language of hope and love but it is messy, filled with non sequiturs, with an emotional logic that defies calls to be objective. It too is essential. 

We have problems, Le Guin urges, when one tongue presupposes superiority over the other, typically, as happens in our twenty first century world where father tongue is esteemed, and mother tongue devalued. Both are essential to Le Guin. Both need to be integrated to form what she calls native tongue. To have a voice.

In each letter to your soul, you will need to find this voice, in every effort you make to connect to yourself and through yourself to others. You will need to find a way of laying open your soul to the sunlight and the rain. The petrichor of a cooling earth after rain.

And in your dying moments, if you like Phillip Adams hopes, are lucky enough to be awake to watch your departure, may you walk through that door of human life on earth into another existence of peace and stillness, a better life, the life of non being, that is in itself the best way a life could be before you even existed.

For what is this thing called life other than ‘one continuous try,’ as the painter Grace Cossington Smith describes? It’s the same of painting, the same of life. You put one dab of paint onto your easel then shift it with your brush. You move it around and experiment to see what you produce. And each movement renders a different image. One that pleases. Others that don’t. You keep on trying. The point of hope, the point of resilience is to go on trying, as long as you have breath in your lungs, and a mind connected to your soul with promises things will only get better. 

A would-be feminist rant

Women over
populate my life.  Four daughters,
three sisters, and a professional life both in the world of psychology and of
writing that these days is dominated by the presence of women.  It is the same wherever I go.  
The Melbourne Writers’ Festival.  Check out the audience: all those
heads, the dyed or otherwise greying hair of women, mostly older women, though
there are some young ones in between. 
Maybe a quarter of them at most are men.  I do not know the statistics.  The ratio is much the same in psychotherapy circles, one man
to every four women. 
I prefer a more balanced mix of gender, including the in between,
the hybrids, the transgendered.  I
tell myself I would prefer there were more men present, at the same time I am sensitive
to the degree to which men tend to dominate conversations.  
Research suggests that from the
beginning in early childhood at kindergarten and primary school, teachers spend
more time addressing the boys. I risk a generalisation here but it seems to me from earliest days
girls learn to communicate with words, whereas boys are more inclined towards
action, including action words.
In September this year, the feminist activist, comedian and all
round ‘nuisance’ woman, Catherine Deveny was on the panel of Q and A with the likes of Peter Jensen, the Anglican archbishop of Sydney.  Catherine Deveny gets bad press as a
loud mouth.  She invites it to some
extent because of some of the things she says, like her comment about Bindi Erwin and the hope that she ‘get laid’.  
A non-academic Germaine Greer of sorts, Deveny by and large is on the
side of the underdog, on the side of women, but she too enjoys her friendships
with men and what seems like a loving partnership with a man with whom she
cares for two sons, though to her great pride the couple remain unmarried.  I befriended Deveny on Face Book
because I enjoy her style; though I watch other peoples’ faces crumple at the
mention of her name.
I mention Deveny here because of the battle over the number of words
ascribed to her during this session of Q and A.  Several twitterers and bloggers considered her to have
dominated the show.  She cut across
the other panelists, people complained, when in fact she did no such
thing. 
Chrys Stevenson analysed the data and found that as is typically the
case the men used more words, and cut across people more often, while the two
women on the panel spoke less.  Not
to get into a battle between the sexes, I think about these issues here in my rambling
disjointed and broken way of thinking – I am a woman after all – my father’s
daughter, my husband’s wife.  I
recognize the imbalance of power in my world where women are mainstream but men
get the cream.  The cream of jobs,
the cream of books reviewed, the cream of recognition.
Despite the prevalence of patriotism everywhere, including
and for me especially during my childhood, somehow the men often seem to wind
up worse off than the women who are downtrodden, though not in extreme
cases.  Witness the plight of
certain Muslim women, Indian women, women in deeply patriarchal societies where
to speak out as a woman is to risk getting your head cut off, and not just
metaphorically. 
When I first started to write again, many years ago after a destabilising
event that left me demoralized, I could only seek solace in words on the
page.  I realised then the degree
to which writing has come to be dominated by what Ursula Le Guin has called
‘father tongue.’  Father tongue,
the language of the academy, the so-called objective language that seeks
distance; that resents uncertainty and demands closure.  This as distinct from mother tongue,
the language of mothers and babies, mothers and children, the language that Le
Guin argues is closest to poetry. 
It flies on the wind.  It is
repetitive and simple.  It thrives
on doubt. 
Both languages are essential Le Guin argues but there is a danger
when one presupposes superiority over the other, as evidenced in the hostile
response to Deveny’s non-rational comments juxtaposed to the less virulent
responses to the so-called objective and reasoned thoughts of her fellow mostly
male panelists.  We need both
mother tongue and father tongue to develop what Le Guin describes as native tongue
but this is not easy in a world dominated by the patriarchal.
My sensitivity to such things derives from my life in a family top
heavy with men and this time not only in notion, but also in fact.  There were eleven of us in my family,
six males, five females.  My father
at the head.  He ran the show.  He earned the money.  My mother obeyed.  
At least overtly she obeyed.  If ever she defied him it was a hidden
defiance, one she undertook in stealth. 
That was until she caught my father at my sister’s bedside and the look
on his face told her he had over stepped the mark.  My sister was sitting in bed, the blankets pulled up to her
chin, like a little bird, my mother said, while my father leered. 
‘Get out of here,’ my mother said to my father.  ‘If I ever see you with her again I’ll
kill you.’  
Later she thought my
father’s visits to my sister had stopped, but my mother could not bear to see,
and my sister protected her by keeping my father’s further visits a
secret.
I do not want to suggest that men are the bad guys here and women
are the victims.  We are all in
this together.  The other night at
dinner after a day long writing workshop, four women and one man, we talked of
travels overseas, and one woman, the youngest among us, talked of how she had
been groped six times in India in less that six days until she finally saw
red.  She ran after the man who had
grabbed her breast, and yelled at him that he should not behave so while
squeezing a bottle of water over his head.  She yelled at him all the way down the street and
imagined-hoped, she said, that she had managed to shame him in front of friends
and family.  
‘It happens all the time,’ she said. 
Not to me, I thought. 
But then again I have not travelled through India, or Rome, or the
Middle East where others have told me such extreme exploitation of women takes
place.  And I am over fifty, the
age they say when women disappear from view as sexual objects.
Alas, these unwarranted gropings do not just happen overseas.  I went to the most recent Reclaim the Night march in Sydney Road in Brunswick in October this year.  The march followed closely on the death
of Jill Meagher.  This much
publicized event took Melbourne by storm. 
Jill Meagher was young, beautiful and talented.  She worked in the media.  She had a profile in her ordinary
day-to-day life that drew people’s attention to her, but now she is dead and
her alleged killer is in prison awaiting trial.
There was a storm of protest when Jill Meagher disappeared, mostly
fueled by comments on social media and people’s rage which apparently made it
easier for police to track down the alleged killer.  When I heard they had found him, not only did I feel relief,
the man was off the streets at last, my daughters might be safe, especially the
one who lives in Brunswick close by to where Jill Meagher was raped and murdered,
I also felt sorry for the children of this man, boys or girls, what does it
matter?  
How is it to live your life in the knowledge that your father is a
sexual predator and a murderer?  I
know something of what life is like with a father who sexually abuses his
oldest daughter and moves in the direction of his younger daughters.  And it sucks.  It sucks because it makes you twitchy in relation to all
things sexual.  And it makes you
wary of relations with men.  Not
that I haven’t had my share of them. 
And I have been married for 35 years to a man who even as a successful
lawyer and a man of many talents still struggles to find an identity in a
world, his world dominated by women, his mother, his sisters, his wife and four
daughters. 
He calls it girlie talk when we prattle away in whatever is of
interest to us at the time, the price of the new Funkey shoes, the intricate
details of my daughter’s recent birth of her son, the latest gossip about the
girls at my youngest daughter’s school. 
I am used to my husband’s disdain and often times will try to redirect
the conversation to something that might feel more inclusive of him, but my
daughters are less so inclined. 
It is not simply the gender divide.  The generation gap applies too.  My husband who had his formative years during the hippie
loving seventies now and then comes out with schoolboy humour, lightweight
sexual innuendo to my ears but to my daughters, his jokes are appalling.  He once argued with one daughter and in
the heat of the moment referred to her as a tart.  She objected to the word.  She still does. 
She considers it an affront to have a father who calls her a tart.  He used the term not to describe her
appearance but more because he was angry about her behavior, too long on the
telephone or some such thing. 
I argued with my daughter over her sensitivity to the word.  ‘Bitch would have been better,’ she
said to us, ‘but not tart.  Tarts
are prostitutes.’  My husband
learns to hold his tongue. 
Language changes and with it words take on new meanings.  The politically correct extracts its
toll and plays its part in the power imbalance between men and women. 
When I was young I thought my father ruled the house, but there came
a time when my parents were around the age I am now, not long before my father
died, when the tables turned.  My
mother took up voluntary work with the church visiting impoverished families in
the high-rise estates in Fitzroy.  My father by now had retired.  He did not like her going out while he
was stuck at home alone.  He did
not want her to learn to drive for fear she would never stay home.  Instead he drove her in and out of the
city from Cheltenham every day in order that she should be near.
The tables turned and my father, once the strong one became the helpless
dependent one right up until his death. 
And my mother grew stronger once he was gone.