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philosapphos · 6 years ago

Text

a fleeting memoir.

I don’t know how to write a great book. All I know how to do is feel.

At my university, his eyes narrow as he skims through my writing. “You should cut down on the adjectives. And be more precise.” During the semester, I learn how to write quietly, obediently holding my hands between the walls of the keyboard. The writing was programmatic: a steady string of code to create tight, virus-free argumentation. I feel like I was choking during my lectures and would run afterward toward the campus gardens, gasping for air.

It’s always raining in the classics. Whether it’s the European drizzle of existentialist contemplation and ennui, the dreary Scandinavian sleet, or just the histrionic downpour of a popular romance, something about water falling from the sky touches the soul. I moved from California to England a few years ago. Upon meeting me, everyone would always joke about the weather. Even at its most aggravating, there’s still something slightly mad and magical about getting wet from the rain: from the child’s ecstasy to splashing in puddles to the bursts of unexpected showers. Film is awash with portraits of a dark-haired woman, her face and arms lifted, her eyes closed, rain streaming down her hands and cheeks: a worship of the skies and sea, bathed in baptismal rivers, rising toward truth like an ancient Niniane.

So let’s imagine it’s raining in this story: the tale of a brunette woman in her early twenties, sliding out of her damp coat as she settles into a library desk. The world outside is darkly wet but she is wrapped around the warm glow of a favorite book, smiling softly as she turns each page.

As she moves through time, she loses herself for a bit, as young minds tend to do; drifting away into a third-person binocular gaze of her own life. One day, as though reminded of a long-lost childhood friend, she glanced into the mirror and feels a dull ache of recognition.

Through a series of unfortunate events, she had become an academic. (She smirks to herself as she writes that.) Clever enough to critique the system, with a delicate list of degrees lifting her above the rest of society. The academy was a castle (a fortress), and she strolled its hallways, draped in elegance. The world lay like a lavish fur at her feet: it wasn’t until years later that she noticed the delicate golden chains wrapped around her wrists.

People will think that this is an intellectual book because its text winks at readers with graduate degrees and aspirations of Platonic cerebrality. Unfortunately, the protagonist is an ordinary human: a body of neurochemical imbalances and menstruation and psychologically complex sexual urges. I am writing a story about a woman.

Rilke writes about solitude: about the world created within the self, the infinite loneliness and the sweet-sounding lamentations of its suffering. “There I shall live all winter and rejoice in the great quiet.” Like most people living in the recurring buzz of a city, she was lonely. She often found her peace within the walls of her apartment: a silent altar to herself, as if she were living wrapped up in the pages of her diary. She hung her friends’ art up on the walls, framed photographs of her family, and filled her bed with soft, silky fabrics. She would light incense and candles, and fill the air with soft beats of music: purifying the space, making this ground holy.

She was a graduate student, which meant everybody outside of academia thought she was brilliant and everyone inside of academia thought she was rather interesting and worthwhile. She grew up spoonfed the myth of the metals, told the tales again and again of her own precocious cleverness, of her mystical intelligence. She read far above her grade level and overextended her vocabulary. When she was young, she called herself a bookworm, and when she was older, she called herself a sapiosexual. At twelve years old, she dressed up as Athena and silently worshipped the goddess of wisdom (—she would ignore the war and weaving part).

She was also enraptured by Boudicca. She grew up on McCaughrean’s Brittania and D'Aulaires' Book Of Greek Myths. She was fascinated by the portrait of powerful women, radiant in their own strength. She loved mermaids, selkies, sirens: those dark and dangerous women of the seas. Boudicca rode in the streets of her city, naked except for her long hair, which wrapped itself around her body: history painted an eroticized form of the woman, straddling a horse, pale skin and trembling lips; tresses enticingly, teasingly feigning at modesty. Boudicca’s performance to make some statement, some protest against patriarchy or injustice, but it was clear to her, even as a girl, that this story was not a political one. The sculpture of Justice may be a blinded woman in robes, but there is nothing more appalling than a hysterical female voice screeching for equality.

I don’t remember when I first discovered feminism: I only remember hating women as a child. I found a notebook once, filled with a child’s scrawl, where I exclaimed that I was so glad to be clever—not silly and pretty like most girls. As I grew into adolescence, I occasionally cast longing glances at the other girls: with their golden curls and million-dollar smiles, exquisite little dolls of coiffed femininity and rich daddies. I went to a whiskey bar recently that embodied a kind of polished masculinity: mustached waiters in tweed vests over cuffed white shirts and sculpted forearms, busts of hunted deer and other achievements of man, wooden bookshelves filled with elegantly muted book collections. It was another kind of holy place: where one kneels before the marble mantelpiece in obeisance to the power-hungry colonizer.

My sexuality began to emerge in the office of a professor: his mahogany desk looming around me, legs spread nonchalantly in an easy authority. My heartbeat quickened, knees crossed primly in a skirt, as I blushed and asked questions about the course. Lower your voyeuristic eyes: these encounters never went beyond a comment or an accidental touch. My years as an undergraduate were spent daydreaming over my notes, talking about the world over coffee, and thinking about sex in the library. I liked that momentary hesitation of surprise as I casually mentioned something sexual from my studies: a metaphysical puzzle about pornography, the liberatory rise of polyamory to dethrone an antiquity of monogamy, the darkly wrung layers of power within sadomasochism. Perhaps it was there that I found feminism: from a language of embodying oppression flowered forth the idea that surrender could be empowering. The thought was a pearly light: the gift of femininity, of submission and release—and the deep, silent power within.

I found my sexual power like the rest of my generation: by exerting a measure of control over the other. It was a prize to hold enticingly before them; deliciously unattainable. To have something that someone else wants: that is the only measure of worth in a capitalist landscape. The mouth of the cave was enticing: that insidious allure of Pandora’s box. Suddenly, it was no longer enough to be intelligent: one must be desirable as well. Like a trophy held above the heads of others: they needed to see the prize and want it for it to be special. She saw herself as a tightrope dancer: balancing the power of the mind with the desires of the flesh. It was an elaborate performance, a practiced soliloquy for a darkened theatre: one hopes dearly for an audience.

I spent a year as a professor. I recall a single frozen scene: it is raining outside of the coffee shop and I am listening to achingly melancholy French music (Les mémoires blessées, Crier tout bas). I prepared my mind and body for each lecture as though I were entering a gladiatorial ring: I neatly typed and stapled my handouts, and slid into a modest knee-length dress that subtly held close to my waist and dipped along my collarbones. My clothes felt like a costume for a 1960s-style secretary or stewardess: cleanly washed with a mildly sweet perfume, hair twisted into a tidy chignon, legs folded at a desk with my books stacked in alphabetical order. I answered emails in a timely manner, graded with a kind but firm hand, and smiled with the vacantly polite gaze of customer service. I checked my evaluations diligently and tried to be likable and friendly, welcoming my students into the warm hearth of philosophy and letting them wander through my home. They would step in for a moment, tracing their fingers along the spines of the books, glancing over at me as if I were an aspect of the furniture as much as the shelves. I felt like a salesman, smiling indulgently and explaining to the unimpressed consumer why they should consider getting into academia. I model prettily, showing them the life that they could have: the picture of success in this tier of society. I still see other professors twisting into this routine: the assumed air of authority, the dignified crown of the philosopher-king. Like prophets of an ancient religion, they share their advice with all and teach the one true path toward enlightenment: the rigor and the rituals of knowledge. Like any good advertisement, they draw others in with a manufactured sense of humanity: the self-deprecating humor, the melodramatic tearing of cloth and hair at self-imposed deadlines, the pale, bony thinness of perfectionism, wasting away before an audience of other performers.

In academia, we hide our faces under a paper-mache mask of stiffly inked degree papers and watery excuses of endless busyness. A Kafkaesque artist of twisted, exhibitionistic self-torment, a Pharisee loudly lamenting a self-inflicted agony: the scholar fights to surpass another in self-flagellation, a mortification of the unbearably corporal flesh. “Only pain is intellectual.” We tout depression as an honorable badge of intellectual superiority—the masses are dead-eyed and drunk on a cocktail of prescription drugs and pre-packaged ideology. But those gifted, cerebral children can see through the painted backdrop and television lights: they witness reality as it is.

At its best, intellectualism is unhappy—at its worst, it is cruel. The 17th-century dramatist Jean Francine wrote that life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel. Some scholars do care, and care deeply: for them, a pedagogical journey is like excavating a lost city, brushing dirt away from crumbling walls, filled with warnings written in an ancient, dying tongue. Unearthing the skeletons of a forgotten history, a memory that humanity longs to forget.

“It would be much better if, on the earth as little as on the moon, the sun were able to call forth the phenomena of life; and if, here as there, the surface were still in a crystalline state... In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence means.” (A. Schopenhauer, Lehre vom Leiden der Welt)

With the inevitable tumble into nihilism and absurdity, the rarity of the compassionate philosopher sinks deeply into the quicksands of despair. But what of the hermit, the ascetic, who casts aside the ropes of human connection? From the side of the hilltop, he looks down upon the ravaged city and laughs; like a dying man in a desert, watching his horse die before the mirage of a lush oasis. Perhaps I felt this way when I was younger: laughing at my freedom before the pilloried women, imprisoned in the bodysuits of gender. Perhaps I saw myself as androgynous: a sexless fae child with inexplicable knowledge of wordly things and a playful schadenfreude.

As a child, I saw the pillars of women and their wisdom as arching tombstones in the chilling mist of my future, the inevitable decline into the pains of labor, that aching creation of an object to be snatched away from my grasp: the anonymity of motherhood. I longed to be a maker of worlds: to hold my hands in the raging welding fire and twist metal into mechanism. When asked why I chose to study philosophy over literature and history, I tell people that I never wanted to be relegated to Whitehead’s ‘series of footnotes’ on a great thinker. The idea of dedicating my life, fawning at the frozen feet of bygone wisdom, entangling myself in the discourse of another and attempting to organize their thoughts, struck me as debasing.

I imagine these scholars as custodians, moving slowly along the great halls of the history of the mind: dusting off the tired exhibits, examining a relic of ancient wisdom, and guiding others to a particularly showy gallery of pop intellectualism. I longed to be one of the innovative elite: developing my own ideas and launching them out into the world like sleek silver rockets.

Still, unbidden thoughts lift to a rising echo, like bloated corpses floating to the surface of a lake:

i. This too shall pass.

ii. The truth will always emerge.

iii. Failure in life is inevitable.

Why have we created lives that lack a solidity of meaning? The Aristotelian virtue of striving has been perverted into a constant desire for something out of reach. We exist in the hellish stance of Tantalus: the king of Sipylus who consumed his young in an unquenching burn for power. He was condemned to the agony of desire: emaciated, shaking fingers brushing against the soft, bruised flesh of a fruit he would never taste. I never understood why the Garden of Eden was a utopian paradise—Eve and Pandora have been damned by the priests of time for embodying that trait that is valorized in men: curiosity. The great men—the scientists, the philosophers, and the poets—have loudly proclaimed the glory of the inquisitive gaze, of those first pioneers who pressed into the darkness of the great unknown. Yet it is a sin for woman: feminine curiosity is prying, gossiping, the idle chatter of busybodies. The curious woman is one who should have known better, who ought to have kept her mouth shut: her questions are barren and vain. The moral of these ancient stories is simple: obey the commands of men and remain shrouded in ignorance. When offered knowledge or understanding, the good woman will look away and choose the path of purity. (“The innocent eye is blind, as the virgin mind is empty.”)

I recently bought my mother a print transcribed with the cheerfully defiant line, “Well-behaved women rarely make history.” The sentiment is true, in the bland, platitudinal way of many inspirational quotes, but what is the fate of the women that do make history? Too often, their mangled corpses are left hanging on the city walls: a grim reminder to all of the merciless suppression of insurgent forces.

Curious women are not considered clever: they are considered dangerous. Eve damned humanity to physical pain and scarcity; Pandora released a whirlwind of sickness and death; even Joan of Arc was burned with so many others at the stake. The women who refused to be ‘well-behaved’ are condemned to inhabit our nightmares as graffitied caricatures of the Furies: shrieking women wreaking havoc and suffering across the orderly landscape of civilization.

Again and again, we watch these women bowing their heads to accept their punishment: Boudicca, Artemisia, and Cleopatra each died by their own hand. Western history relishes the tragic figure of Lucretia: a woman who was raped before committing suicide to preserve the honor of her father. Marble sculpture immortalizes the brutal rapes of Prosperina, of Europa, and the Sabine women. Even the Old Testament tells the story of a Levite throwing his concubine to a mob maddened with bloodlust in an effort to protect himself. She is brutally raped and murdered and, like Lucretia, she is marked as culpable for her rape: the Levite later dismembers her corpse by slicing her body into twelve pieces.

If only I had known before that the trinkets of intelligence and sexuality are finery on men, yet mark women out as scapegoats. A woman told me yesterday of a line that resonated deeply with her: “Give no-one cause to fear you.” To me, it sounded like a warning. Intelligent women are intimidating—I am told this time and time again. Men are afraid of women who out-earn them, both in pay and degrees. They are terrified of being laughed at by women—and this fear quickly boils into a destructive rage. The woman who smiles at the wrong time is beaten, raped, and murdered; the confident, curious woman is seen to invite her own destruction.

Academia is like wandering into a gilded museum and gagging upon the stark realization that the naked bodies of your mother and sister are hanging from the walls. Silently slipping into the room, you can feel the hands of men reaching for you next.

The kindest death that I face is to be ignored and silenced. My words have already been torn away from me or kicked into the shadows, and I have already been punished for my ideas. Men only respect other men. The esteemed title of ‘philosopher’ is unattainable unless I contort myself into masculinity. Either I must destroy the woman or they will do so.

Catherine Malabou writes on the contradiction of a ‘woman philosopher’: “Philosophy is woman’s tomb. It grants her no place, no space whatsoever, and gives her nothing to conquer... The possibility of philosophy is thus largely premised on the impossibility of woman.”

Female philosophers are exiled to the land of poetry, where their writing is derided further. I like to say that my favorite philosophers are Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath: a comment that raises the eyebrows of male academics. These writers are mostly known for their highly publicized breakdowns and suicides: while madness is romanticized in male artists, it is scorned in women.

The two cruellest labels against women are hysteria and gossip. The powerful wisdom of the emotions, the deep interpersonal insight of psychology have become degraded feminine ways of thinking. The kingdom of the heart, the knowledge of the self and of others, is ravaged by the pillaging armies of the mind. The ideal individual becomes a solitary agent, swathed in a protective layer of rights: he relies on nobody and protects only himself. A father is permitted to walk away at any time, while a mother never gives enough for her children. The nuanced intricacy of the web of care and dependency is wiped away in the blank face of laws and duties: men see themselves as tabula rasa, pretending to be immune to the deep memory of the womb from which they emerged. Plato wrote that the traumatic event of being born caused men to lose touch of their innate knowledge, while Socrates called himself a ‘midwife’—both espousing an ideology that men must be pulled away from the treacherous touch of woman in order to flourish into excellence. It is a mantra repeated again and again within the Western tradition: the mother is the passive soil of the earth, little more than a breathing incubator, while the father actively sows his seed and causes new life to spring forth.

The medieval philosopher Boethius is known for proposing a theory of time, stretched out across eternity, where God stands as Being in a place apart from spatiotemporality, gazing down upon existence. He writes often of a single woman: Lady Philosophy. Even within the Romantic languages, where declension casts a shadow of gender across the syntax, the word ‘philosophy’ is feminine. So too can we return to Iustitia, the female figure of justice. In the masculine world of law and philosophy, why are the disciplines imagined as encapsulated by the female body? And why is this female body possessed only by the men who study her?

The male gaze is not merely a visual technique of producing images of women that cater to an audience of heterosexual men. In feminist theory, the ‘male gaze’ is often imagined to be a lavascious position: the businessman watching the stripper sliding around the pole, the voyeuristic neighbor peeking through a young girl’s window as she dresses, the horny teenager scrolling through a disjointed compliation of fragmented genitalia and artificial moaning.

But the ‘male gaze’ is the dominating gaze: there is power in the ways that we see. It is written as far back as the Genesis Rabbah: in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. To see is to rule over all, and the cruelest power is forcing another’s eyes open to gaze upon the unspeakable. MacKinnon writes that women live in sexual objectification the way fish live in water: not only does it surround us constantly, but it constitutes the only environment we have ever known. We see ourselves and other women through the blurred filter of this hierarchy—gender is not a dichotomy of body parts but rather a manufactured reality: nothing remains untouched by it. When men see philosophy and law as woman, they see themselves as her conqueror: explorers stepping foot on yielding, fertile ground, eager to ravage her body in imposing their structures of violence and cruelty. Within the institution of sovereign state, her life is nasty, brutish, and short.

Do you remember the woman from the beginning of this story? Night has fallen and the library has grown cold around her. The austere portraits of men clad in greatness loom over her, reminding her that she will never join their ranks. The female body of classical art is nude, her limbs arranged invitingly. She smiles softly and asks no questions: she allows the viewer to take what he likes from her with a self-effacing brush of coy reserve. The woman has spent many hours studying the art of the Greco-Roman world, and she has never recognized herself in any of the half-lidded eyes of these soft, eroticized women.

She once stood at a museum in front of a sculpture of Venus. The marble woman was crouching to the ground, as if kneeling before her viewer. Her arm curls across her upper body, obscuring the breast from direct view—her thighs are pressed together, and her hair falls in elegant waves across her face. Art historians have called her posture ‘playfully erotic’: a titillating peek-a-boo of sexuality behind a veil of feigned modesty.

She imagined the marble woman standing up: pushing back her shoulders and jutting her chin upwards. She imagined looking at the marble woman directly in the eye. The sculpture is naked, but she is unashamed of her nakedness: like the endless depictions of the Athenian youth, her body is seen as a perfection of nature—strong and elegant architecture to house a dignified mind.

This standing sculpture does not resemble the warrior women of the Amazon: fierce mythical women who sliced off their breasts in order to kill more effectively, rejecting their femininity to transform into virago. Our culture fantasizes about the Amazonian woman as female Ares: Diana, ferocious princess of the Amazons, is often depicted in armor and headgear. Even Athena is rarely depicted without her helmet and spear.

But standing before us is not a warrior: she is simply a woman, and her body is simply a body. We can trace the muscles along her thighs, the soft rise and fall of her belly, the bones along her neck and shoulders. Her expression is unreadable: she gazes back to meet your eye, watching your movements. Standing before her, you seem to forget which one of you is the art and which is the audience. Perhaps you hold your breath, wondering if she will reach out to touch you.

But the woman simply turns and walks away from you. Her marble feet make no sound as they climb down the pedestal and across the hallway. She was not created for you to look at her: she was created to exist, to experience the world through herself.

One day, I find myself resting in a secret garden: there are stone walls surrounding me and in this hidden place, I have discovered the meaning of life. A grey cat is sleeping next to me and blue butterflies swim through the air, but there is no-one else here. I breathe deeply and on the exhale, my knowledge of time disappears: I float within the essence of reality and it is beautiful in its vast eternity. Like gazing upon the sea or the sky, I look at the world that I have created. With a smile that nobody will see, I press my lips against the small cat beside me and stand to leave. I retrace my steps by memory: across the hot desert sands and snowy mountaintops and finally to a familiar dirt path. I walk until I arrive at my childhood home. Tears spill over as I hold my mother, my sister: even my dog is there, her tail wagging in recognition. In Ithaca, I have found everything I was searching for. The rest of the marble melts away, and my story is just beginning.

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