Advent Women 9

The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. God is bigger, like my mother, easier to find, even in the dark. I could be anywhere, and since I can't describe myself I can't ask for help. We are alone in this quest, and Fortunata is right not to disguise it, though she may be wrong about love. I have met a great many pilgrims on their way towards God and I wonder why they have chosen to look for him rather than themselves. Perhaps I'm missing the point - perhaps whilst looking for someone else you might come across yourself unexpectedly, in a garden somewhere or on a mountain watching the rain. But they don't seem to care about who they are. Some of them have told me that the very point of searching for God is to forget about oneself, to lose oneself for ever. But it is not difficult to lose oneself, or is it the ego they're talking about, the hollow, screaming cadaver that has not spirit within it?

I think that cadaver is only the ideal self run mad, and if the other life, the secret life, could be found and brought home, then a person might live in peace and have no need for God. After all, He has no need for us, being complete.

Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

My mother has a theory that JW wrote this novel as a sort of explanation/apology for Oranges are Not the Only Fruit. JW's mother was furious at Oranges and never read another book by her. It's sad because there is a tenderness in the mother-child relationship (almost obsessively portrayed by JW) in this novel that might have undone some of the damage. This book has a special place for me because it was the starting point for my phd, as an inspirational example of literature deploying theological themes and narratives. The funny thing is that I read it to help my mother who was writing an essay (and later teaching a course) on feminist myth-revision. I'm not going to say any more about this...

Christianity is not the only thing that JW revises, there's a whole lot of myth, fairytale and literature that gets picked up and twisted to her own ends. But the theology is what intrigued me. Her (foster) mother raised her a brethren and so Christianity and the mother have fused together into a complex ambivalent relationship. She memorized a lot of Scripture in her youth, along with T. S. Eliot and plenty of other Christian writers. Weirdly the very thing she ended up rejecting (Oranges tells a pseudo-biographical story of how her sexuality led to her being rejected [notably it's this way round] by her church) is what gives it so much depth. The passage above resonates significantly with the mystical tradition and she has (sort of!) described the novel as a reading of Four Quartets (which is sort of a reading of St John of the Cross's Ascent of Mount Carmel and Dark Night of the Soul). 

I chose this passage mainly because it highlights the central feminist issue with mysticism. How can you balance mystical kenosis and the assertion of feminine identity that feminism requires? I think there are options and she hints at directions here. The garden she mentions is surely the garden at Burnt Norton where Eliot finds his still point with Emily Hale (who he almost but didn't marry). The mountain is surely Elijah's, discovered at the point of exhaustion again in the silence after an earthquake. JW herself is complicated here. On the one hand, she frequently signals that the path for the soul is independent self-discovery; but then why are all her novels about obsessive love? Anyway enough mansplaining - it's Roaring's fault who's been too busy to write this month; all these Advent women have begun answers to this question much better than I could. There are doubtless many ways to create and discover yourself, just as there are the divine; they are necessarily the same question at the end of the day, whether or not that also means finally losing yourself and God again.

Advent Women 8

"Hell is the seventh name 
Of this Love wherein I suffer.
For there is nothing Love does not engulf and damn,
And no one who falls into her
And whom she seizes comes out again…
To be wholly devoured and engulfed
In her unfathomable essence,
To founder unceasingly in heat and cold,
In the deep, insurmountable darkness of Love"

Hadewijch of Antwerp

Hadewijch is one of my favourite theologians and poets. She's like John of the Cross on acid. Full of romance, gender-bending and self-abasement; it's gripping, moving and very clever. In the same tradition of St Denys, with St Bonaventure's more human and Christological elements, but grafted into the medieval narrative of the questing knight:

"He must march far who presses on to Love – 

Through her broad width, her loftiest height, her deepest abyss.

In all storms he must explore the ways;

Then her wondrous wonder is known to him: 

        That is – to cross her desert plains,

To journey onward and not stand still;

To fly through and climb the heights,

And swim through the abyss,

There from Love to receive love whole and entire."

'She' has become a 'he', Christ has become a 'she', the mountain is partnered with her deepest abyss; there is a complementarity of images that is pretty damn sexy. Never has the journey of the soul been so exciting.

"My soul melts away

In the madness of Love;

The abyss into which she hurls me

Is deeper than the sea;

For Love’s new deep abyss

Renews my wound:"

And the knight errant narrative is matched by a love story. She is the Elizabeth Wurtzel to John of the Cross' Plath. There's a terrifying chaos to the writing, but not without careful thought. The mystical journey is a kenosis, an emptying of the soul and the medieval period learns to describe this passionately. The danger is great - especially for women - and others like Marguerite Porete learned this at great cost, but this self-abandonment to God runs like a seam of coal through Christian history. And it's anything but miserable:

She always wishes to hear

And to give herself to rejoicing and sadness;

Love cannot be without either;

She is always mingling both in a wonderful way;

So strongly active is Love’s nature

That she cannot rest one instant.

The qualification of the active life of love prevents her from disappearing into self-absorbption, and with all that passion there is joy as well as sadness. Grace Jantzen drew attention to the natal aspect of the abyss in her writing, finding it to be a site of nourishment and plenitude. This is true, but to return to the quote with which I began the abyss is equally a place of self-destruction and the womb of creation possesses the vagina dentata; it is the place of making and un-making. People always go to Julian for the female metaphors of God. Hadewijch may have been from Belgium but she definitely provides a more exciting place to begin uncovering some traditional feminist theology...

Advent Women 7

‘We have no female trinity. But as long as woman lacks a divine made in her image she cannot establish her subjectivity or achieve a goal of her own… If she is to become woman, if she is to accomplish her female subjectivity, woman needs a god who is a figure for the perfection of her subjectivity’

Luce Irigaray, 'Divine Women''

A friend told me a while back (2nd hand), that Luce Irigaray was not a very nice person. I found this really disappointing. She is a great writer and, more unusually, a writer whose writing has done a lot of good. One shouldn't pay much attention to gossip, I suppose, but that sort of thing always colours how I see people. Sometimes it works the other way. Anyone who has met, say Denys Turner or Janet Soskice, would be more inclined to read their work. I imagine many have struggled through After Writing or Theology and the Drama of History purely on the basis of a well placed crush. 

What is most pleasing about Irigaray's work is the pragmatic and imaginary slant. She takes a work like Fiorenza's In Memory of Her, a feminist biblical attempt to reclaim the position of women in the gospels, to recover the equality of women in Christianity, but then asks the important question: equal to whom? In a way this cuts to the heart of the question of women bishops. Equality, after all, has two opposites: inequality and difference. Inequality is obviously a problem but the question of difference brings us into a difficult area. Difference can suggest gender essentialism, it can smuggle in inequality by the back-door, but without difference the political voice of women is lost, the distinctive ways of being are in danger of elision and the battered ark of feminism is run aground. 

Feminism's work is not done. 'Slavery is ours, not in a merely symbolic sense but absolutely. Woman is, from birth, a slave until she is able to decide for herself as a civil person. this is how it still is for us today.' That means, even if you fear that a great deal of femininity is passed as natural when it's cultural, you cannot give up women and you need to keep listening for their voice. But Irigaray takes this further in setting sexual difference as the preliminary test for opening ourselves to all forms of otherness: 'Sexual difference is perhaps the hardest way, but it is also the key, to achieving civil coexistence between other forms of difference. An apprenticeship in respect for the other at the most instinctive, emotional level, leads to peaceful coexistence with all forms of otherness.' Some might object to setting feminism as the basis for all social inclusion but it kind of makes sense.

Once you accept this insistence on difference, the next question is how do women redescribe our world. For theology the question is vital - can such a male God save women? Can He even speak to them or for them? But the point at which I think it gets really interesting is when we start clearing away our presuppositions, when we try to begin theology from a different place. This is an ethical task: 'I also ask how we can rethink our tradition, particularly the religious one, in order to be able to love each other here below, making of the other a horizontal transcendence, an absolute which cannot be gone beyond insofar as it is irreducible to oneself', but also a theological one: 'Man sets the infinite in a transcendence that is always deferred to the beyond, even if it be the beyond of the concept. Woman sets it in an expanse of jouissance here and now right away'. Like Cixous earlier who is breaking in a female voice across all different genres, appropriating and transforming, Irigaray begins to look at what a female theology might look like. Now I can see the proverbial Dean of Peterhouse wagging his finger intoning "heresy, heresy, heresy", but it needn't be. There are of course many ways in which doing theology in this way could deteriorate into some sort of New Age nonsense, or shallow political correctness, or some embarrassing wishy-washy materialism. What could be discovered, however, is a way of expanding how we think about the divine, a critique of prevailing mythologies and a new vocabulary for saying something about God, humanity and the world. This is exciting and should be what theology is all about rather than a bunch of stale old men shrouded in cigar smoke discussing Barth. It might even bring a spark of life back to the academy. After all who could disagree with Irigaray that ‘sociology quickly bores me when I’m expecting the divine’. 

Advent Women 3

Men have committed the greatest crime against women. Insidiously, violently, they have led them to hate women, to be their own enemies, to mobilize their immense strength against themselves, to be the executants of their virile needs. They have made for women an antinarcissism! A narcissism which loves itself only to be loved for what women haven't got! They have constructed the infamous logic of antilove. We the precocious, we the repressed of culture, our lovely mouths gagged with pollen, our wind knocked out of us, we the labyrinths, the ladders, the trampled spaces, the bevies - we are black and we are beau-tiful. We're stormy, and that which is ours breaks loose from us without our fearing any debilitation. Our glances, our smiles, are spent; laughs exude from all our mouths; our blood flows and we extend ourselves without ever reaching an end; we never hold back our thoughts, our signs, our writing; and we're not afraid of lacking.

Helene Cixous 'Laugh of the Medusa'

I should have begun with this essay as it contains some of the most impressive writing I have ever read. It's also related to one of the most awkward moments I've ever had. I was in another English MA seminar; I can't remember the subject. Anyway, for some reason I brought up style and started talking about this essay because one of the beautiful things about it is that she is trying to write differently. Her point is that writing is male, and women need to find a way of writing female texts. So even the female writers of the past have written as men: 'the woman who writes cuts herself out a paper penis', or haven't written publicly; the woman writes in 'white ink'. Cixous is trying out writing as a woman though, writing bodily (hence white ink/breast milk) and rewriting myth, psychology, philosophy, politics and theology as a woman: 'in the beginning are our differences'. She even manages to pre-empt mobile phones: 'we're going to show them our sexts!'. And part of this is reflected in her style which is highly rhetorical and runs in waves over the reader, the entire essay is a long drawn out, pulsing orgasm, reflecting playfully a metaphor between women's writing and women masturbating. Anyway halfway through my explanation I realised that I was about to talk to a class full of people about women masturbating. Awkward. Well I pressed on and regardless of my dislike of the word itself (sounds too much like masticating, which makes me think of cows) I made my point. This wasn't the embarrassing bit though. At the time I had developed a new side to my relationship with my mother by discussing these classes each week (she has a phd in English - helpful common ground). And in the evening I'd call her to discuss the seminar. well somehow I didn't see it coming and once again started making my point, realising with horror the approaching wreck where I was taking the conversation. So yes I am one of the few boys who has managed to discuss women masturbating with my mother. Awkward.

Anyway, all that is pretty irrelevant (although in a pleasing meta- way it's nice to have managed to have a third chance to relive this experience), because until you have read this essay, you do not know what beautiful, powerful writing is. This essay made me jealous of women. Think Martin Luther King's speech, but wait! 'The new history is coming; it's not a dream, though it does extend beyond men's imagination, and for good reason. It's going to deprive them of their conceptual orthopedics, beginning with the destruction of their enticement machine.' Think the Communist Manifesto, but 'A feminine text cannot fail to be more than subversive. It is vol-canic; as it is written it brings about an upheaval of the old property crust, carrier of masculine investments; there's no other way. There's no room for her if she's not a he. If she's a her-she, it's in order to smash everything, to shatter the framework of institutions, to blow up the law, to break up the "truth" with laughter.' This is the laugh of the medusa reclaimed: 'You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing.' Think of the sexual revolution but taken further: 'We will rethink womankind beginning with every form and every period of her body. The Americans remind us, "We are all Lesbians"; that is, don't denigrate woman, don't make of her what men have made of you.'

This essay should have changed the world. It should have been played on every radio station, when it was written in the summer of 1976. It should not be possible to be sexist in the way that society and the church remain sexist - as if one were to say that no black man can be a bishop. The writing here is not on the wall, it is on the body; and that body is the female body of Christ. What I would like to see is a legion of women in synod on the terrace laughing; laughing so hard that all the women-haters, men and women, could no longer speak. Laughing to destroy all this anti-love with an orgasm that will send waves of jouissance throughout this flacid, impotent structure.

Advent Women 1

Well there you are. It’s not that these things happen or even that one survives them, but what makes life strange is that they are forgotten. Even the one moment that you thought was your eternity fades out and is forgotten and dies. This is what makes life so droll – the way you forget, and every day is a new day, and there’s hope for everybody, hooray…

Now our luck has changed and the lights are red. 

(Jean Rhys, Good Morning Midnight)

Whenever I hear Jean Rhys's name I smile. I was at an MA seminar in the School of English at Exeter University and an American girl was giving a seminar presentation on the above novel. The only problem was that she had, at some point, assumed that Jean Rhys was in fact a French man (repeat the name in Joey Barton comedy French accent...). By the end of the twenty minute presentation the room temperature had gone through various levels of surprise, confusion, embarrassment, humour till finally settling upon excruciation. As her words trailed into silence everyone stared at the desk in front of them wondering how, HOW could anyone not check the gender of the writer they were presenting on in a postgrad seminar (especially when this novel is a first-person woman's narration). The lecturer, all wry grin and charm, deflected the situation with a rhetorical interrogation of the significance of the author. I don't know whether the girl ever recovered her own dignity, but in a way it was a telling indictment that she assumed male gender, especially in this case. 

Well, there are enough reasons in stand on your chair a la Caitlin Moran and declare yourself a feminist. I myself have been wrapped in black these past weeks mourning the sad cases of so many young men (and women though I do not personally know these) who are so young and yet on the wrong side of history. They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. They are already middle aged and already condemned in their own smallmindedness. Anyway and I must publish this as I only have two minutes before midnight, but we have decided to celebrate great female writers and thinkers this month and so we have a treat of an Advent 24 days of the very best wisdom of women...

Oh and let's hope our luck changes again and the lights go green.

What's that coming over the hill?

(Trigger warning)

When I first saw the (leaked, probably unfinished) video for Kanye West’s ‘Monster’, I felt a bit sick. Then I thought, Kanye is an asshole. Everyone knows he’s an asshole. And the concept for the video is not that original. Basically, monsters have jumped the shark.

How to have a crap time camping

Why doesn’t Bella Swan just get a hobby? Like knitting. Or kayaking. Or stabbing herself in the face with a chopstick. I think I would rather have spent last night watching K-Stew take two hours to choose between two M&S ready meals than the drippy and curiously asexual vampire and wolf.

“I LOVE duck with noodles and hoi sin sauce. I want to eat it for the rest of my life.”
“But chicken and mushroom fried rice is so delicious.”
“No. I will have the duck. Even if it means I become a serial killer.”
“But the chicken! It’s so tempting. Maybe I can have a bite of it and still eat the duck.”
“Gosh I LOVE the duck so much. And it knows I want the chicken, and yet it still wants me to eat it. That makes me feel special.”
“Yummy chicken... It’s calling to me, saying, ‘Eat me too! I don’t care if you’re eating duck most of the time.’ But it’s wrong to have two dinners. Perhaps I’ll take them both camping and that will help me decide.”
“But I LOVE THE DUCK. Even though it’s cold. Maybe I should put it in the microwave.”
(And so on, for 300 hours, ad nauseam)

"It's time for a women's reformation"

In the wake of Hans Kung's open letter to the Catholic bishops, and before commenting more fully on the Catholic situation, I'd like to point you in the direction of Tina Beattie's marvellous call to arms over at her Marginal Musings blog. She rather unfortunately begins by saying

On reading this, I realize it's an extravagant polemical gush, but I decided to publish it anyway

which caveat, though I hate to be so essentialist, a man would never have given.

Given she's seen as pretty strident anyway, she should just own it and say what she really thinks (if you haven't read her intro to New Catholic Feminism, a fantasy of mourners getting up to all sorts of sexy high jinks in Rome at JPII's funeral, you should - most grabbing introduction to an academic book I've ever read). And note the references to Philip Blond and John Milbank... Feistyness is good, Tina! The conversation needs to be pushed on...

"Bless God and bless the gays!"

Plenty has been written this week about Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’, a ‘homoerotic rampage of capitalistic ultra-violence’ . From the Tarantino, Meyer and Thelma and Louise references, to the ‘Baby One More Time’-esque dance routine, to Gaga’s crotch, the video – on its way to being the most watched video ever, beyond even MJ’s ‘Thriller’ - has been analysed to death (smelling suspiciously of rat poison).