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Writing With the Dark Inanna1 haunts me going to the depths and being stripped of her clothes
crossing the river and what else? leaving behind the earth moving in darkness crucifixion terror something about seven I don’t trust my memory want to go look up some facts Descent to the Goddess by Sylvia Brinton Perera (1981) Inner City Books: Toronto Canada or maybe The Inanna Poems by Karen Lawrence Longspoon Press (1980) find a book safety or maybe call Leslie because she has researched Inanna’s myth thoroughly used it in her doctoral dissertation and I don’t know Inanna speaks to me in my dreams which aren’t even in images anymore her voice listen to me you are just protecting yourself let go she says and I am fighting eyes closed fingers stuck in ears and I don’t want to go let go stand naked looking into the eyes of my sister my self *** I
begin with fear. A story. I
am at a writing retreat in the Rockies with Emily, 2 a poet whose work I have long
admired. On the first night, Emily
asks us, “What is essential writing?”
We discuss this for hours. She
ends by telling us to take away the ten pages we have submitted and to find
one phrase of essential writing. A
night long task for most of us. Our meeting
the next day is brief. She tells us
to take away the bit we have excavated from our words, to write another ten
pages from it. To come back in the
afternoon. I am already weary. It
continues in this way. I begin to
hate it. I’m lonely. There is no one to talk to. And I don’t like the food. The rooms are like hospital rooms. I phone my husband and cry. “I can’t do this,” I say. “It’s too hard.” “Come home
if you want,” he says. “Why torture
yourself?” I stay. We are
shaping pieces now. All I can feel is
the inadequacy of what I am doing.
Maybe I am just not a good writer.
I think to myself that it is good to find this out now before I waste
any more time fancying myself a poet.
I reconsider going home. But I
don’t. I keep writing. Trying to get past something. Or to something that I can’t quite
articulate. It pulls me. Compels me. Everything I write is met with polite comments from the members
of the group whom I now respect as excellent and critical readers. It is the
night before the last day. The middle
of the night, and I can’t stop writing.
I can’t believe what I am writing about. High school. My
struggles with food, with dieting.
Inner voices I haven’t heard before.
Different fonts. A play with
space. I finish a draft and walk the
halls. Tanya is up, typing and
drinking wine. She reads what I have
written and offers suggestions. I
rewrite. In the
morning, we drive to a campground to read something we have written as a
celebration and good bye. I feel
sick. I don’t know if I can read this
piece. I’m afraid of it. Can’t believe my words, how they came
out. Maybe I’ll stay silent. But I do
read it. Can feel the power of my
words. How the group is silent,
listening. At the end, no one says anything.
I feel shaky. Emily looks at
me and says, “Wow.” The piece
is later published in a literary magazine. My writing
has never been the same again. Neither
have I. *** As a little girl, I kept a notebook beside my bed so I could
write down my thoughts and ideas when I woke up in the middle of the
night. I did not even turn on the
light because I was afraid I would forget what I was thinking if I didn’t get
it down right away. Writing in the
dark, also the title of my master’s thesis, has long been a practice for
me. The story of the experience in
the Rockies, however, is more about writing to the dark, or perhaps through or with the dark. It was the
first time that I had really written with fear and avoidance instead of all around it. I could not believe the intensity of my
words. I am convinced that in some way, this
experience of writing with&through fear is connected to what I will, for
the time being, refer to as a spiritual journey. The workshop in the Rockies occurred around the middle of what
has been my two-decade exploration of meditation groups, healing circles, a
twelve step program, Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian texts, bodywork and
creative movement, art, color and energy, T’ai Chi, reiki, dreams, runes,
tarot cards, and more. What has
struck me most powerfully through these various spiritual forays is that a
common theme arises--in this wide array of contexts, people are working with
their experiences of fear and pain; they are willing to share their stories.
My search of the literature related to spirituality and, specifically, to feminist
spirituality3 reveals a similar thread (see, for example Christ,
1986; Chung, 1992; Elder, 1997; King, 1993; Tomm,1995). Noted creation spirituality theorist,
Matthew Fox, comments: There is no moving from superficiality to depth—and every spiritual path is about moving from the surface to the depths—without entering the dark. . . . Daring the dark means entering nothingness and letting it be nothingness while it works its mystery on us. Daring the dark also means allowing pain to be pain and learning from it. (1991, pp. 19-20) In my doctoral work thus far, I am exploring the ways that
(feminist) spirituality might be connected to questions left over from my
master’s study. The latter involved an investigation of the work of Cixous,
Kristeva, and Irigaray among others--a profound attempt to understand
language from feminist poststructuralist and psychoanalytic perspectives as
well as an examination of exploratory creative writing by Canadian
women. I experimented with my own
writing, personally as well as in the academic arena. Fear and pain emerged as important themes
in my poetry and cross-genre work as well in the writing I studied. Throughout the research, though I was
intellectually “taken” with the ideas I encountered, I felt a nagging sense
of something missing. I kept asking
my advisor where the spirituality was in all of this theory--and he just kept
looking at me quizzically. I was not
sure what I meant by spirituality at the time, and I was unable to
reconcile whatever notion I had of it with my understanding of feminist
poststructuralism. The project of the
latter was, for me, to become increasingly aware of the ways we are shaped
through discourses, many of which are competing and contradictory; it was to
peel back the layers of the taken-for-granted and to become more
critical. As subjects, we had to move
outside humanism. Language was
crucial. The practice of poststructuralism,
then, opened the possibility of different ways of knowing and being. My investigation of the literature about
feminist spirituality and my personal experiences in writing and
spiritually-based groups show me that these too are concerned with opening
different ways of knowing and being--often through the process of
reconceptualizing experiences of fear and pain. Descent into darkness emerges as a theme, a recurring phase in
the process. *** I descend into miktlan, the underworld. In the
“place of the dead” I wallow, sinking deeper and deeper. When I reach bottom, something forces me to push up, walk toward the mirror, confront the face in the mirror. But I dig
in my heels and resist. I don’t want to see what’s behind Coatlicue’s eyes, her hollow sockets. I
can’t confront her face to face; I must take small sips of her face through the corners of my eyes, chip away at the ice a sliver at a time. Behind the ice mask I see my own eyes. They will not look at me. Miro que estoy encabronada, miro la resistencia-- resistance to knowing, to letting go, to that deep ocean where I once dived into death. I am afraid of drowning. Resistance to sex, intimate touching, opening myself to that alien other where I am out of control not on patrol. The
outcome on the other side unknown, the reins falling and the horses plunging blindly over the crumbling path rimming the edge of the cliff, plunging to its thousand foot drop. (Anzaldúa, 1999, p. 70, my line breaks) *** Two feminist theologians that I have encountered,
Christ (1986) and Chung (1992), recognize the power of language-as-process
in awakening to the ways in which women have been positioned and also as
a way of moving with experiences of fear. Both emphasize the
importance of storytelling in community--the interwoven movements of naming
experience, of listening, of being listened to--and how such an interweaving
effects transformation. Both speak of
‘moments’ in women’s spiritual journeys, moments which can be discerned as
integral to the rhythm of women’s emergence into their own powers, moments
which can occur through the process of naming experience through story. Both
reiterate the point made by Irigaray (1996) and Ruether (1983) that women’s
spiritual quests are rooted in the body as material being (Christ, 1986, p. 21; Chung, 1992, pp.
38-39). Both speak of the need to
acknowledge pain and to question conventional values and social beliefs. For both, profound feelings of shame and
inadequacy must be endured in the midst of deep reflection on one’s culture
and its unjust and unethical treatment of marginalized groups. Storytelling in community, whether in oral
or written form, is seen as central to the process of naming past and
emerging experiences as well as articulating visions of hope. For Chung, storytelling in oral form is the
foundation for a new Asian women’s theology of liberation; writing as a means
to communicate experience is only beginning to emerge through education and
through connection with the West (1992, pp. 102-103). Asian women’s approach to theology . . . starts with women’s storytelling. Women from various backgrounds gather together and listen to one another’s stories of victimization and liberation. Educated middle-class women theologians are committed to inviting or visiting poor farmers, slum-dwellers, dowry victims, and prostitutes and listening to their life stories. Storytelling has been women’s way of inheriting truth in many Asian countries because the written, literary world has belonged to privileged males. Until the turn of the century many Asian families did not teach girls how to read or write. (p. 104) Christ is interested in two aspects of language: as
a symbol system in need of examination and also as a process of naming
experience through writing in community. Her work highlights the struggle to
find ways of expressing women’s spiritual experiences in a language not their
own. In Diving Deep and Surfacing:
Women Writers on Spiritual Quest
(1986), she goes to women of letters to find support, writers such
as Kate Chopin, Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, Adrienne Rich and Ntozake
Shange. Christ notes that traditional
language must be used in non-traditional ways; she uses terms such as nothingness,
awakening, and insight
from mystical discourses to help in her discussions--but finds that
these words do not yet accurately portray the experiences described by women
writers and lived by their characters (1986, p. xii). Christ finds the search for ways of
expressing women’s spiritual growth in a language of their own a serious
project, and one that also pertains to women writing in the academy about
such experiences. She refers to a deformation where traditional language is used in
unusual contexts to help open meaning (p. xiii). Christ’s work with women in community includes as a
central aspect the process of writing in response to shared readings (1986,
pp. ix-xxxii). This process of
writing--personal reflections on readings and the integration of personal
experiences and insights--is a means of journeying spiritually and
moving into power, effecting transformation. The experience of writing in class in
the presence of others seems to evoke deeper reflection and sharing than
either writing at home and sharing in class or simply sharing in class. It is easier for those of us who are
insecure about our writing to write in the presence of other women who are
also writing. The limited time for
our writing seems to encourage us to dive immediately into our depths. (1986, p. xvi) *** Inanna descends leaves word with Ninshubur her servant, to send help after three days farther and farther down meeting gate after gate seven times she disrobes more until she reaches bottom naked face to face with Ereshkigal dark queen of the underworld death transformation rage greed fear destruction suffering loss she naked suffering too unleashes fury sentences Inanna to death hangs her corpse on a peg flesh rots turns green surrounded by friends in the labyrinth of dreams I am aware that I must do something (I can't remember what) no one is surprised Deborah takes me to the bathroom makes me look in the mirror face burned beyond recognition skin stretched nose smeared into lips flesh covering parts of eyes I am terrified but can't stop looking at my self in the mirror why didn't you tell me I ask it happens to all of us she replies I splash with cool clear water and surface, sobbing from someplace deep within tears dissolve the glue that holds me together *** As I learn more about (feminist) spirituality, I have
to reconsider the work of Irigaray and Cixous, two of the philosophers I
explored in my master's study and whom I had considered separate from any
association with spirituality.
Neither neglects this important discussion. Both speak of death and transformation. Both seem to connect spirituality with the
important work of coming to know and be differently in the world. And, neither separates this work from
examination of and experimentation with language. Irigaray (1993, 1994a/b, 1996) speaks
about how women in the West have been excluded from the symbolic in at least
two significant arenas--that of identification with the divine and that of
representation in language. Women’s
increased awareness of their exclusion and their struggles to find different
ways of being in the world often involve dark and painful moments. She insists that female subjectivity has
been shaped through a patriarchal language and a social order that permits
only one relationship with the divine. Her project is to work toward
recognition of two instead of one, the acknowledgement of sexual
difference as a metaphorical basis for ethical relations, the acceptance of
difference, of otherness. She
revisions thought and being on the basis of sexual difference, moves beyond
dualistic thinking, and also through and beyond an essential feminine.4 She is not replying to the question “Who art thou?” from within, in the context of the discourse of man, of humanity. She replies elsewhere. With or on the basis of another language, another world, a different relation to being. Often situated on the side of the abyss, perhaps, that other slope of the transcendence of the God? Where being in the feminine is to become, to grow unchecked. Without ecstasy or standing outside the self, if she is faithful to herself. (Irigaray, 1993, p. 139) Irigaray relates immanence, a respect for the spirit, the divine
in all things, to a respect for life, its transformative potential. Death is, at least partly, a spiritual
death that originates in the belief in a universal one--the denial of
woman; death must be reconstituted within her own horizons, not his (1996,
pp. 23-26). A relationship with death
on her own terms is linked to a need for her own connection to the divine
(1994b, pp. 158-159, also 1996). For Irigaray, woman’s connection to the
universal, the possibility of her being able to open to spiritual energy is contingent on her ability to be
separate from man. Within her own
bodied subjectivity, and while developing a language of her own, she can work
toward redefining the space between them. Cixous (1993) says that the writers she loves best
are those who have the courage to go to the depths in their writing. She
quotes from Kafka in saying that “a
book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us” and extols the work of those who write in such a way (pp. 17,
63). She too reconceptualizes death
in her work, describes it as the first in three schools of writing, and
espouses the belief that death is a passageway to openness, abundance,
transformation, a space between.5 To begin (writing, living) we must have
death. I like the dead, they are the doorkeepers who while closing one side
“give” way to the other. We must have
death, but young, ferocious, fresh death, the death of the day, today’s
death. The one that comes right up to
us so suddenly we don’t have time to avoid it, I mean feeling its breath
touching us. Ha! . . . It’s true that neither death nor the doorkeepers are enough to open the door. We must also have the courage, the desire, to approach, to go the door. (Cixous, 1993, p. 7) Death, the dead as doorkeepers, closing one side and
opening another . . . For Cixous, going to the depths, having the courage to do
so, looking deep inside the self in a truthful way is linked with seeing the
god inside. "What we hope for .
. . is the strength both to deal and to receive the axe’s blow, to look
straight at the face of God, which is none other than my own face, but
seen naked, the face of my soul" (1993, p. 63). *** when I started writing . . . it was like stepping off the edge of
the world into the void I didn’t know who I was I didn’t know where all these
voices were coming from. . . I didn’t know why I had such a desperate need to
break the centuries-old public silence of the women in the Mennonite
community where I grew up . . . I just knew that if I didn’t do it I would
surely die. . . . the pain of undoing a dozen generations of repression and
silence . . . the utter pain of risking my cultural and personal identity was
so deep and intense . . . I simply fell apart. . . . I found a wise woman, a
spiritual healer . . . I didn’t know there was such a thing as healing before
that real healing where you release the body/mind’s incredible capacity to
regenerate itself through therapeutic touch and meditation and talking and
writing. . . .(Brandt, 1996, pp. 156-157, my line breaks and omissions) *** I want to
read and outside the lines already constructed. Pre-formed.
Limiting. Boundaried. I want to be freer, let go, be less afraid
of the blank page than I have been conditioned to be. I want to find ways to let the body speak,
to disrupt, to let prayer and dreams and spiritual guidance come
through. Process of
writing as process of being-becoming.
Something more startling, more radical, more poetic. Disrupting the body of the text to allow
the surfacing, the investigation of other ways of being. The syntax of "ordinary"
discourse as a limiting factor in the same way that being an abused child or
an adult child of an alcoholic is limiting.
How do we break free of our language, our discourse? Ereshkigal
I wish I
had a picture of you
dark queen of the
nether space under world
sister I have felt in
blackness fury anger hatred
have recognized you
want to keep your picture
where I can see
it hold you in reverence
up here above
but you are not
to be seen only felt
in the gut in the shivers
of the scalp are you
the blackness around her around Inanna? Breaking free,
letting go of the discourses I have learned as a Western
woman/academic/writer has been much more difficult than I ever believed. A strong part of me desires change,
transformation while another part resists such a death--such an emergence
into ways of knowing and being in the world that are other than the way(s) I
have found to be successful--new ways of knowing and being which are still
unclear to me, still very much in the dark. . . . Inanna
speaks to me in my dreams which aren’t even in images anymore her voice,
listen to me. . . Writing with the dark at the retreat in
the Rockies was the first crack in my resistance, my fear of the death of
habitual and unexamined ways of knowing and being in the world: writing with
the sickness and death of my father cracked things open even further. . . . You are just protecting yourself let go she says. . . . Still, often as I sit down to write, I am
reminded that this learning is not linear. . . .
And I am fighting eyes closed fingers stuck in ears and I don’t want to go
let go stand naked looking into the eyes of my sister my self. . . reaching into the bag I draw a rune rough between my fingers blank it says leap* into the void empty handed (trembling at the edge passport driver’s license falling through fingers) *
between resist and let go hold and
surrender before and beyond staying
home changing home Notes 1.
Inanna was a much
revered deity in ancient Sumer--the Queen of Heaven and Earth. She represents femaleness in its many
aspects; texts about her from this early civilization reveal various
different phases of her life cycle.
Crucial to Inanna's story is her descent to the underworld where she
is put to death by Ereshkigal, Dark Queen of the Great Below. Inanna later returns to Heaven and Earth
as a transformed and empowered entity.
(see Perera,1981; Wolkstein & Kramer, 1983). 2.
Pseudonyms are used
in this section. 3.
Though I am uneasy
with dualism as I explore knowing and being differently in the world, for
now, I frame the term spirituality as King (1993) and Tomm (1995)
have—as a process, movement between inside and
outside, from inner to outer work and from outer to inner work, an energy,
an integral, holistic and
dynamic force that shows reverence
for life . . . from a wide range of experiences (King, 1993 pp. 5-6) and awareness of immanent, creative
powers that serve to integrate the life system (Tomm, 1995, p. 2-3). 4.
There is no doubt that
Irigaray bases her work on the importance of sexual difference and that she
uses the physical body as a metaphor for her discussion (see Weedon,
1987). She has been critiqued at
length because of her “essentialism.”
Tina Chanter (1995) notes that charges of biological essentialism are
especially serious in feminist theory because such reductionism leads to
preservation of the status quo whereas social change is the most important
aspect of feminism as a project.
Chanter argues, however, that while Irigaray does base her discussion
in sexual difference, she attempts to go beyond this and to rethink the
(historical/philosophical) structures on which such debates center (pp.
6-7). Irigaray sees sexual difference
as the basis on which to accept differences of all sorts, the limit to “a
narcissistic and imperialistic inflation of sameness” (Irigaray, 1994a, p. 79). 5. In earlier writing, Cixous counters notions of
death as closure--originating she says from the classic psychoanalytic
(masculine) conceptions of desire--with a feminine desire, which she rethinks
in terms of life, a dispersed openness that does not yearn to return to
itself (1986, p. 87)--one that is
motivated by love, generosity and excess.
She refers to the female body and a feminine libido . Libido is “something which can be defined
from the body, as the movement of a pulsion toward an object”; she emphasizes
a “decipherable libidinal femininity”
(Cixous & Conley, 1984, pp. 51-52). Cixous uses the term “economy” to discuss a relation of
spending and return, a feminine libidinal economy that invests itself freely
and bountifully while a masculine libidinal economy invests itself with an
eye on the return to itself (Cixous,
1986, pp. 86-87: Cixous & Conley, 1984, p. 52). References Anzaldúa, G. (1999). Borderlands/la frontera: The new mestiza (second edition).
San Francisco: Aunt Lute
Books. Brandt, D. (1996). Dancing
naked: Narrative strategies for
writing across centuries. Stratford,
ON: Mercury Press. Chanter, T. (1995). Ethics of
eros: Irigaray’s rewriting of the
philosophers. New York: Routledge. Christ, C. (1986). Diving deep
and surfacing: Women writers on
spiritual quest (second
edition). Boston: Beacon Press. Chung H. K. (1992). Struggle to be the sun again: Introducing Asian women’s theology.
Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books. Cixous, H. (1981). The laugh of
the medusa. In E. Marks and I. de
Courtivron (Eds.), New French feminisms (pp. 245-264). New York:
Schocken Books. Cixous, H. (1986). Sorties. In H. Cixous & C. Clement, The
Newly Born Woman (pp.
63-132). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Cixous, H. (1993). Three steps
on the ladder of writing. New
York: Columbia University Press. Cixous, H.,
& Conley, V. (1984). voice i . . . . Boundary 2, 12,
51-67. Elder, J., & O’Connell, C. (Eds.). (1997). Voices and echoes: Canadian women’s spirituality. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Fox, M. (1991). Creation
spirituality: Liberating gifts for
the peoples of the Earth. San
Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. Irigaray, L. (1993). Love of the
other. In An ethics of sexual
difference (pp. 133-150). Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Irigaray, L. (1994a) Equal to
whom? In N. Schor and E. Weed (Eds.),
The essential difference (pp.
63-81). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Irigaray, I. (1994b). Sexual
difference. In M. Whitford (Ed.), The
Irigaray reader (pp. 165-177).
Cambridge, Massachusetts:
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you: Sketch for felicity within
history. New York: Routledge. King, U. (1993). Women and
spirituality: Voices of protest and
promise (second edition). Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Lawrence,
K. (1980). The Inanna poems.
Edmonton: Longspoon Press. Perera, S. B. (1981). Descent to
the goddess: A way of initiation for
women. Toronto: Inner City Books. Ruether, R. R. (1983).
Sexism and god-talk: Toward
a feminist theology. Boston: Beacon Press. Tomm, W. (1995). Bodied
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practice and postructuralist theory.
New York Basil Blackwell. Wolkstein, D., & Kramer, S. (1983). Inanna, queen of heaven and earth: Her stories and hymns from Sumer. San Francisco:
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