"'Feminine' Gnosis: Gnosis and Modern Feminist Thought"

Karen-Claire Voss

An invited lecture presented to the Amsterdam Summer University Course on "Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern Times."  Amsterdam, The Netherlands.  August 15-19, 1994

Introduction

In an article entitled "Is There a 'Feminine' Gnosis: Re­flections on Feminism and Esotericism," I set forth a spiritual feminism that was identifiable because of the presence of a five-fold awareness:  that reality is inherently processual and dynamic; i.e., fluid; 2) that reality is multi-dimensional, multivalent, and meaning-full [now I would add that it is also multi-leveled]; 3) that reality is subtle; therefore, for example, it is not comprised of rigid categories neatly corresponding to the charming particularity of male and female genitalia; 4) that there is an ontological relationship between the self and the universe; and 5) therefore, to be human is necessarily to participate in reality (a necessary participation which is potentially active, conscious, intentional, and creative) [1]

My aim in that article (which was intended to open what I hoped would be an ongoing conversation) was to compare spiritual feminism with the esoteric tradition as it has been described by Antoine Faivre, and to compare "feminine" gnosis with esoteric gnosis.  I knew that such a comparison had never been done be­fore, and more importantly, I knew that it would be fruitful since it would show that these things are all cut from the same cloth.  After examining the work of several contemporary exem­plars of "feminine" gnosis (Deirdre Green, Margaret Miles, and Carol Christ), I discussed the androgyne as a model of human potentiality, and Eros and the dialectic of gnosis.  Throughout the article I took great care to make my language as precise as possible.  My mode of presentation was conventional (even though the substance of my remarks was not), and (for the most part) I used the analytic voice.  When I wrote it I was not sure whether or not "feminine" gnosis was inevitably linked to female persons.  Now I suspect that by its very nature gnosis is always "feminine," and that, like the Spirit, is something which goeth where it listeth, first here, then there, something which permeates and enlivens all things, not only those which happen to be biologically female.  That there is a real connection, perhaps even a privileged connection, between "feminine" gnosis and women still seems true, but the focus of inquiry must be on clarifying the nature of that privileged connection and the reasons for it, since I am almost convinced that the nature of the connection is largely accidental, not inevitable.  At any rate, while I had planned initially to confront the question head on in this paper, it has become clear to me this is not yet the right time.  This particular dish is still too raw to be placed on the table; thus, the quotes around the term "feminine" will remain.

"Feminine" Gnosis, Eros, and the Dialectic of Gnosis

The term "feminine" gnosis refers to a particular way of knowing.  While "feminine" gnosis as such is a-historical, it is by no means disembodied; it is a phenomenon; thus, just as any other, it can only be embodied, i.e., manifested, actualized, in time and space.  Less a method of knowing than a fluid way of knowing, "feminine" gnosis is deeply rooted in the body and in Nature, which contains the body.  "Feminine" gnosis is produced by Nature, supported by Nature.  Like Nature, it is characterized by emergence, process, and infinite creativity.  Like esoteric gnosis, "Feminine" gnosis approaches Nature as a repository of signs, a book which must be read, interpreted; more than that, however, "feminine" gnosis approaches Nature not only as a repos­itory of actual signs, but as a repository of potential signs, like a book which is still being written by us in participation with Nature.  "Feminine" gnosis places great value on personal experience, i.e., the subjective.  It is a way of knowing which entails opening, not closing.  It is a way of knowing in which a subject opens onto an object, and thereby enters into relation with it, and experiences a change in being as a result. [2] The enabling power of Nature (which I understand in the broadest possible sense, to mean all of reality, the entire universe) is Eros.  The movement of Eros is the dialectic of gnosis, which in the Tabula Smaragdina is called ‘thelema’, meaning 'the will of the world.' [3] Eros is fluid, processual, emergent, the source of infinite creativity; it is that which transmutes.  The opening of a subject onto an object is a dialectic movement; it does not occur in only one direction.  In other words, it is not simply a matter of a subject reaching out towards an object, but rather, of a mutual, reciprocal, exquisitely nuanced movement, on all levels, whether they are seen or unseen, said, or unsaid.   

As I explained in my article, when certain persons want to study something, to come to know it, it is because they are attracted to it, because of their personal experience, their disposition, and their temperament.  There is a dynamic relation between and the object of study and myself.  In Whiteheadean terms, the object of study possesses "causal efficacy" such that it is not only intelligible and attractive in itself, but is intelligible and attractive to someone.  Its nature is such that it reaches out to that person; he or she is drawn to it; and he or she reaches out to it subsequent to (or perhaps simul­taneously with) its reaching out.  Personally, for example, I find enormous difficulty in studying and becoming familiar with things that do not hold an attraction for me.  We all speak, by way of illustration, of subjects that do not excite us, and some­times, we call such subjects "dry."  But surely this is an example of projection! Such subjects are "dry" because they do not arouse us; putting it another way, they leave us cold, and therefore we do not desire intimate knowledge of them.      

In esoteric gnosis and in "feminine" gnosis, when we seek to know something, it is rather like falling in love--whether it is the divine or the world . . . we seek to become one with it.  Not identical to it, but intimately joined with it, so that we finally experience ourselves and that which we seek to know as participating in a single ontological condition.  In each case we are enlarged, so to speak, by our knowledge of what was previously the "other"; in each case we become transformed by that knowledge; in each case, there is a change of being. [4]

On account of the fact that this form of gnosis is used by women, as is attested to by their choice of themes, questions, approaches, language, and writing styles, far more often than by men, I have called it "feminine" gnosis.

"Feminine" Gnosis:  Gnosis in Modern Feminist Thought

This work on "feminine" gnosis is part of a continuing, multi-leveled process.  On one level, what I am presenting today is an important part of a comprehensive research program; on another, it is a single element in a very complex experiment; and on a third, it is an important stage in a spiritual journey.  All of them are interrelated, in ways I am only beginning to understand.  This particular phase began with the actual sitting down at my desk to write this paper, but of course both the experiment and the journey began long ago.  One reason that this phase is important is because no matter what the results turn out to be (I allow myself hopes, but no preconceptions) they will necessarily contribute to a deeper understanding (yours and mine) of what "feminine" gnosis means.

Because I experience my own work with language--writing, speaking, teaching--as a form of "feminine" gnosis, I am very interested in what other women who write have said about their work, and in the stories they have told of their experience.    While I do not think that any of the women whose writings I discuss today have ever described their work as a form of gnosis, and probably do not conceive of their work in terms of the explanatory concepts and the categories which I use, the characteristics of spiritual feminism, together with the dialectic of "feminine" gnosis, are evident in their writings.  We are contin­uously astonished by the veritable celebrations of multiplicity, diversity, process, and possibility in modern feminist thought.  Almost without exception, what I call "feminine" gnosis is the modus operandi in these writings, while what I call Eros and the dialectic of gnosis acts as a golden thread of connection that weaves together the different approaches, themes, and ideas which are present in these writings.  Here I want to try and follow its glimmering traces, to see where it leads, by deliberately mixing my voice with other voices, and by moving back and forth between the realms of logos and pathos; in other words, between the voice of analysis and the voice of story. 

Nuance and Tones of Voice

It will become apparent very quickly that here I observe fewer of the conventions of academic discourse than I did in Wednesday's presentation.  This variation in the mode of presentation and in voice is self-referential; this mode of speaking is the outward form of a way of knowing which entails method inextricably woven together with substance, a method which reflects the substance of what is being said.  This mode of speaking, this speaking, is itself a way of showing what "feminine" gnosis is, or at least, of showing one form of "feminine" gnosis.  There are infinitely many more. [5]

I want to begin by telling you a story; actually, it is a story within a story . . .  

When I was a child I became enchanted with a story by Louisa May Alcott.  In it, the main character, Phoebe, at the extremely impressionable age of about sixteen, encounters her uncle, who had returned home from the sea, and had come to live in the household.  Like a breath of fresh air, this worthy, who was admittedly tired of conventions, deliberately set about to educate his niece, notwithstanding the consternation of Phoebe's aunts, who were either maiden or widowed.  Along with lessons in geography, mathematics and science, he supervised her diet, and even went so far as to instruct her to discard tight corsets, dresses with bustles, and uncomfortable shoes.  Phoebe discarded her stays, began wearing soft dresses with sashes, and flat shoes.  I seem to recall that her uncle also undertook to aid her in the discovery of her true self, and thus encouraged her to discard, along with her corsets, one mask after the other.  However, this last may be fantasy, not recollection at all, though I am sure about all the rest.  Unfortunately, although I still own my childhood copy of this book, I was unable to check my recollection.  None of the libraries in Istanbul, where I am presently, have this book, and my own copy, along with thousands of other books, and almost all of the rest of my possessions, is in a locked storage room in a small town in the mid-western United States.   

While the book itself might be inaccessible, the story has become a deep part of me, and my enchantment with it has remained, in spite of subsequent participation in the counter-culture of the 1960's, various forms of academia (which I have experienced now in seven countries and on three continents), several academic disciplines, and different persuasions of femi­nism.  Over the years, my interpretation of that story (and others like it) has been nothing if not fluid, and thus has served as a reliable barometer of the interior change I was undergoing at any given time.  It is accurate to say that my enchantment remains because my identification of myself with Phoebe in the scenario of her encounter with the Wise Man is a constant, whether I am railing against it, yearning to replicate it, altering my role in it (sometimes, for example, I become my own Wise Man), reinterpreting the meaning of the encounter, or simply ignoring it. 

The story contains a number of themes, but one in particular provides an ideal starting point for emphasizing important dif­ferences between "feminine" gnosis and other forms of knowing.  Namely, it is the pivotal encounter with the Wise Man.  The Wise Man abruptly enters Phoebe's life, causing no end of disturbance, and teaches her how to free herself from the tyranny of conven­tion, and from fear.  He shows her many things--about herself and about the world--so that she can become strong.  In this story he happens to be a man (in other stories he is a woman), yet his gnosis always belongs to the type I am calling "feminine." He doesn't have power, he embodies it, and it is the kind of power that is enabling, transforming, more precisely, transmuting. 

His voice is able to convey the entire range of nuanced tones that fall between that of the analyst and that of the poet.  He is a Master of Nuance, but in some traditions, like that of the Sufis, the Wise Man is referred to simply as "the Master." Throughout the institutional structures which are prevalent in the late twentieth century, e.g., those of education, government, religion, etc., in short, those which prevail in society in general, we also encounter someone called the "Master," but his voice, and his way of knowing, is something else.    

Rosa Braidotti -- Being Out of Bounds

Rosi Braidotti has encountered the Master in his particular guise within academic philosophy, as she tells us in an article entitled "Embodiment, Sexual Difference, and the Nomadic Sub­ject."  Braidotti writes about what she has discovered within her own discipline, but what she says could be applied more generally as well, to other disciplines, and to institutional structures beyond the academy.  She writes:

          I think it is time for feminists to get rid of the "anxiety of influence" of the masters, to break out of the paralyzing structures of an academic style that has turned philosophy into a machine of intimidation and exclusion . . . Taking leave from the masters, cultivating the art of disloyalty . . . I think it important for women to break away from the patterns of identifi­cation that the discipline of philosophy expects, demands, and imposes on its practitioners, especially women philosophers . . ." [6]

Some months ago, I found the following quote in a book I was reading (I don't remember which book, perhaps Bulwer Lytton's Zanoni, but it doesn't matter), and wrote it on an index card, which I taped to the wall near my desk:  "Real philosophy seeks rather to solve than to deny."  While writing these words here I consulted the card in order to verify the exact wording.  I noticed how dark the writing was, and remembered the ferocity with which I had written.  It was a few days after giving an invited talk to the Philosophy Department of Boğaziçi University in Istanbul.  The title of my talk was "Rediscovering Nature: Some Thoughts About Values in a Technological Culture," an inten­tionally provocative title, since values are almost never discussed in Istanbul these days.  Technology, politics, and money are the topics that dominate conversation, even those taking place around the dinner tables of people who are thought to be the most cultured (but who often prove to be merely the most well-connected or the wealthiest).  At any rate, my talk occasioned some discussion, which might have led somewhere interest­ing, save for the fact that a single extremely hard-headed analytic philosopher derailed the whole enterprise by asking the kind of questions which tacitly permit certain responses, while prohibiting others.  There was no poetry possible there, and since poetry is one of the things that Istanbul desperately needs (perhaps even more than she needs money), and since I had yearned to give some to her, and had failed, I had been furious when I scrawled the words darkly on that card . . .

Braidotti knows about poetry, and revolts against the monot­onous voice of the academic Master, which insists on what she describes as the "categorical division of labor between the 'logos-intensive' discourses (philosophy) and the 'pathos-intensive' ones (literature) . . ." In contrast, she says:  "I would much rather fictionalize my theories, theorize my fictions, and practice philosophy as a form of conceptual creativity." [7] One reason Braidotti is inspired by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Luce Irigaray is because, as she puts it,

they focus on the 'desire for philosophy' as an epistemophilic drive, i.e., a will-to-know that is fundamentally affective . . . they build on the logophilic side of philosophy and remind us that philosophy used to signify the love of, the desire for, higher knowledge. [8]

          Pursuing Knowledge as the Lover pursues the Beloved, being compelled by our Desire to Know, all that is what doing Philosophy used to mean.  And it was so long ago one can easily imagine writing about it using the time-honored formula of fairy tales:  "Once upon a time," such a book might begin, "Scholars did what they do out of Love . . . "

Rosa Braidotti declares: 

The only philosophy I want to practice is that which both Irigaray and Deleuze defend as a form of creation of new ways of thinking.  I am interested only in systems of thought or conceptual frameworks that can help me think about change, transformation, living transitions.  I want a creative, nonreactive project, emancipated from the oppressive force of the traditional philosophical approach. [9]  

She knows there is work to be done (in philosophy in particular and in the world in general), and she uses her brilliance in the service of that work, while the Master of whom Braidotti writes does not use power to enable, but to suppress, intimidate, and suffocate.  I think we can infer that if left to his own devices, this Master essentially tries to use his power in order to kill. 

In contrast, Braidotti writes about "change, transformation, living transitions."   She is both survivor and warrior.  Knowing full well that a dead warrior is of no use at all--a dead warrior can no longer be a warrior--she fights, through her work, to stay alive so that she can continue to enliven.

Being out of bounds, being an outlaw is a condition that is intimately familiar to many women.  Braidotti too behaves as an outlaw when she takes what she needs from the work of others (I note that she always cites her sources), and uses it for her own purposes, thereby making a virtue out of necessity, and doing it in such a way that it also becomes self-referential.  She writes about an approach that permits the crossing of disciplinary boundaries without concern for the vertical distinctions around which they have been organized.  Methodologically, this style comes close to the 'bricolage' defended by the structuralists and especially by Levi-Strauss; it also consti­tutes a practice of "theft" or extensive borrowing of notions and concepts that are deliberately used out of context and derouted from their initial purpose. 

Deleuze calls this technique "deterritorialization" or the “becoming-nomad of ideas.” [10] Her article made me feel exhilarated and emboldened.  For one thing, it reminded me of something I had forgotten:  the empowering concept of bricolage. (I also remembered how delighted I had been with a methodological introduction in one of Wendy Doniger's books, in which she said that she would "much rather do it than talk about it," and explained, in defense of bricolage that "If the wall ends up looking like a wall, the stones belong together; it is a wall." [11] For another, the image of the "becoming-nomad of ideas" seemed so resonant with meanings as to be almost Kabbalistic.  Its self-referential qualities are delightful--they become par­ticularly obvious when the notion of borrowing ideas and then using them without respecting the context is itself appropriated and used for one's own purposes.  The entire constellation of ideas which we have been discussing is empowering:  the Master who uses power in an enabling way, nuance and tones of voice, "change, transformation, living transitions", "a creative, nonre­active project," "theft" . . . When we consider the exhilarating freedom inherent in borrowing ideas which strike us as promising, together with the prospect of working in a way which not only permits one to breathe, to explore, to delight, but actually cultivates such things, with the aim an atmosphere which virtual­ly teems with possibility, the vision is so attractive, so pleas­urable, that it almost seems that it must be illicit. 

Sara Ruddick -- Work and Pleasure

In "A Work of One's Own," another philosopher, Sara Ruddick, writes of her experience in discovering pleasure in work.  Ini­tially drawn to study literature, she gave it up.  What is significant is that she did so only after experiencing some success:

I did not continue my studies in literature.  I stopped writing stories after a short story was well received.  I stopped writing poems after two of my poems were published.  I stopped studying literature after my happiest, most successful summer.  I recognized even then that success somehow, mysteriously, made the work dangerous.  Success in work that I viewed as feminine and which felt naturally mine would have forced me to risk failure, to know myself and confront my desires.  I retreated to spectatorship. [12]

In the end, Ruddick turned to philosophy, completing her graduate training in that.  Throughout she continued to be in­volved in being a wife (her husband is also an academic, was continuously employed, and has always been supportive of her work) and a mother.  She is wife and mother still.  In spite of this apparently ideal situation, Ruddick underwent a long period of not being able to work; a time when she found herself unable to think about, let alone write, her dissertation, Eventually she was able to turn to her thesis and write it, but thereafter continued to experience a problem with writing, a complex problem having many facets.  One of them is directly related to the connection between pleasure and writing.  Here is her description of the insight that arrived while she was working on Virginia Woolf: 

            . . . when pleasure turned into work, I became vaguely uneasy with work's pleasures.  I realized the source of my disease one afternoon while reading Leslie Stephen's touching letters to his wife.  I was amply protected from the charge of frivolity by an array of serious reasons for reading this correspondence, for spending my time so pleasurably on a weekday afternoon.  My defenses held up as long as the letters yielded some insight into "Victorian family structure" for "Woolf's early masculine identifications."  I felt virtuous when the letters were painful to read . . . I was especially content when I could take notes.  But I was undone when I came to Stephen's quaint description of a Harvard football game, replete with cheerleaders . . . the tale was charming, delightfully amusing-- and completely without general implications for understanding life, love, and death.  I couldn't read on.  With a great show of purposefulness, I packed up my notebooks and went home.  It was only on the bus down­town that I realized my folly and reflected on the toll such folly must have extracted over the years.  No wonder I so feared work, if work was pleasure's enemy. [13]   

          The point here is not what Sara Ruddick found pleasurable (personally, I take absolutely no pleasure in working on things which are not "without general implications for understanding life, love, and death").  Rather, the point is the fact that the moment she experienced herself connecting work with pleasure, she was stopped in her tracks. 

I recognize what Ruddick describes.  Sometimes, when I am working on something that gives me great pleasure, I too think, oh, no, this can't be "real" work. 

* * *

How many times do we find ourselves caught between two chairs?  How many times, for example, do we find ourselves read­ing material we hate only because we are "supposed to" (according to whom?), or working with material using perspectives or approaches which are utterly alien because those are the ones which are considered "scholarly" (by whom?).  How many times do we find that the materials, perspectives, and approaches we love are regarded as ad hoc, peripheral, minor, or at best as things to be deferred until later, like a dessert one is permitted to eat only after finishing all the carrots on the plate?

* * *

In Sarah Ruddick's case, she writes that she had to unlearn the divisions that had burdened my life--divisions between work and pleasure, male and female, professional and amateur, political and person­al, all aspects of the damaging separation of work from love.  [14]

Hélene Cixous -- First Music from the First Voice of Love

I am by no means the only woman to have embarked on an exploration of the nature of these interrelationships.  Listen to the words of Hélene Cixous:

I shall speak about women's writing:  about what it will do.  Woman must write her self:  must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies--for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal.  Woman must put herself into the text--as into the world and into history--by her own movement. [15]

Listen to the words of Hélene Cixous, who describes women's language as "the language of 1,000 tongues which knows neither enclosure nor death . . . " Our language "does not contain, it carries; it does not hold back, it makes possible . . ." [16]

So, she asks, why don't you write?  Write!  Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it.  I know why you haven't written.  (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven.)  Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great--that is, for "great men"; and it's "silly."  Besides, you've written a little, but in secret.  And it wasn't good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn't go all the way, or because you wrote, irresistibly. . And then . . . we go and make ourselves feel guilty--so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time.

Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you . . . [17]

That is Cixous on women writing. 

And as I sit here now, rereading her words, thinking about all this, an insistent chorus of tumultuous questions rises up inside:  Why do we hold back?  They are followed by doubts:  Where is the golden thread I glimpsed at the beginning of this, the one that seemed to connect this chaos, would make it cohere, cosmicize it?  I was sure I had seen it, but now it's lost.  Was it real?  Can I find it again? 

Here is an excerpt from a Sufi tale about a mythical bird called the Simorgh that seems to bear on this:   

Finally at the end of several weeks, I was discouraged, and I abandoned this quest that now seemed to me to be a little ridiculous.  I laughed at my naiveté‚. I had been enthusiastic about a bird which perhaps did not exist, and which I had seen only in a moment of delirium.  All because of that old lunatic Colonel Klioutcharev with his bizarre ideas.

I would have wanted to see him again to tell him all this, but he had gone away on a trip . . .

So I returned to my habitual way of life, business, the Consulate, walks in the bazaar, reading, my studies, as if I had never met Bahaudin, and searched for the feather of the Simorg.

My wife saw the end of her nightmare.  She smiled at me and once again called me "son petit mari adore."  [18]

Doubt:  "I was sure I had seen it, but now it's lost.  Was it real?"  Followed by renewed certainty and self-doubt, both, implicit in the question:  Can I find it again?" 

* * *

Now let us consider what Cixous says about women speaking.  One thing it suggests is that when women scholars talk about a corpus of work, they really do mean a body.  

Listen to a woman speak at a public gathering (if she hasn't painfully lost her wind). She doesn't ‘speak,' she throws her trembling body forward; she lets go of herself, she flies; all of her passes into her voice, and it's with her body that she vitally supports the 'logic' of her speech.  Her flesh speaks true.  She lays herself bare.  In fact, she physically materializes what she's thinking; she signifies it with her body.  In a certain way she inscribes what's she's saying, because she doesn't deny her drives, the intractable and impassioned part they have in speaking. 

Her speech, even when 'theoretical' or political, is never simple or linear or 'objectified,' generalized:  she draws her story into history . . . In women's speech, as in their writing, that element which never stops resonating, which, once we've been permeated by it, profoundly and imperceptibly touched by it, retains the power of moving us--that element is the song:  first music from the first voice of love which is alive in every woman. [19]

This bears repeating:  "she draws her story into history . . . " To speak is to give form, body, to that which was potential.  When we are not afraid, our voice resonates through our bodies, from deep within, and our words are cosmo­gonic; our words bring forth worlds.  The golden thread shines in these words:  "In women's speech, as in their writing, that element which never stops resonating, which, once we've been permeated by it, profoundly and imperceptibly touched by it, retains the power of moving us--that element is the song:  first music from the first voice of love which is alive in every woman." In speaking of "the song:  first music from the first voice of love" Hélene Cixous is also, even if unwittingly, speaking of Eros and the dialectic of "feminine" gnosis, that

which permeates, enlivens and enables everything.

Tillie Olsen -- Writing as Survival

Writer Tillie Olsen says that she herself "did not publish a book until I was fifty." [20] Why not?  For the same reasons many other women do not write, or find it difficult, if not impossible to write.  The reasons are so ordinary, so mundane, so banal, in principle at least, that it is difficult, except for anyone who has ever writhed in the grip of them, to believe that they exist, and that they have such extraordinary efficacy.  "We who write are survivors . . ." [21] , she says.    

* * *

In what realm beyond the metaphorical can it be said that we women) who write are struggling to survive, that we are fighting for our lives, and that those who could not write have perished?  No war has been declared.  Why, then, do so many of us feel that our very lives depend on our writing?  In what way is our writing a weapon?  Against what enemy is it raised?

* * *

Here is what she says about women in relation to the Masters in our culture:   

“In a writer's young years, susceptibility to the vision and style of the great is extreme.  Add the aspiration-denying implication, consciously felt or not, that (as Woolf noted years ago) women writers, women's experience, and literature written by women are, by definition, minor. [22]

* * *

Olsen also observes:  "[Norman] Mailer will not grant even the minor:  "the one thing a writer has to have is balls." [23]

Perhaps, if our writing is always, and inevitably, and by definition, "minor," this is why so many of us hide it.  Standing on the shoulders of giants is one thing; being crushed beneath their feet is another.  What is it about our writing that makes us hide it?  Is it that we are female?  Is it our tone of voice?  Is it the writing itself?

Women often hide their writing, at least some of it.  It is true that Anais Nin used to read portions of her fabled journal aloud, but it is also true that she never let the current volume out of her sight, and as each volume was filled, brought it to a safe deposit box at a bank.  That was not simply fear of fire at work, but seems to have been another kind of fear, not unrelated to fear of being burned at the stake, for heresy . . .

Tillie Olsen quotes Anais Nin's reference to "The aggressive act of creation; the guilt for creating.  I did not want to rival man; to steal man's creation, his thunder.  I must protect them, not outshine them."  [24] It is heretical for a woman to create.  The very act of a woman writing threatens the structures of culture.  We may carry the human child to term, but not the word. 

And apropos of all this, Susan Griffin has written:  “ . . . it was here . . . that the hatred came upon him.  She was trying to steal something that belonged to him and of which she knew nothing.  Her ignorance showed all over her as she tried to claim that her words were spoken with as much weight as his.  And in this moment she made a mockery of his judgment.  By imitating his gesture, she made him uncertain . . . Suppose that gesture of hers meant her soul was like his." [25]  

It doesn't have to be that way, does it?

* * *

Here is what Tillie Olsen says about what happens to women who are mothers in our culture:

In motherhood, as it is structured, circumstances for sustained creation are almost impossible.  Not because the capacities to create no longer exist, or the need . . . but . . . the need cannot be first.  It can have at best only part self, part time . . . Motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, responsible.  Children need one now . . . The very fact that these are needs of love, not duty, that one feels them as one's self; that there is no one else to be responsible for these needs, gives them primacy.  It is distraction, not meditation that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity; spasmodic, not constant, toil.  Work interrupted, deferred, postponed makes blockage--at best, lesser accomplish­ment.  Unused capacities atrophy, cease to be. [26]  

* * *

It doesn't have to be that way, does it?

* * *

The years when I should have been writing, my hands and being were at other (inescapable) tasks.  Now, light­ened as they are . . . I pay a psychic cost . . . The habits of a lifetime when everything else had to come before writing are not easily broken . . . habits of years:  response to others, distractibility, responsi­bility for daily matters, stay with you, mark you, become you.  The cost . . . is such a great weight of things unsaid, an accumulation of material so great, that everything starts up something else in me; what should take weeks, takes me sometimes months to write; what should take months, years. [27]

The fact that these are most often the reasons women don't write, and are not the reasons men don't write, and the fact that all of the themes and ideas we have been discussing are those that come up repeatedly whenever we consider women and women's writing contribute to making the question of the nature of the connection between "feminine" gnosis and women so difficult. 

The work of those who have survived to write can be thought of as fruits on a tree.  Their words and their writings contain living ideas, ways of seeing, articulations of possible worlds, which can nourish the rest of us.  All that is the realm of the actual, of what has been said, written, and it is real. 

Yet we cannot speak of "women writers . . . without speaking also of the invisible, the as innately capable:  the born to the wrong circumstances, the diminished, the excluded, the lost, the silenced." [28]   

We cannot forget 'what could have been.'  'What could have been is the life experience and the hopes of those who have perished.  It belongs to the realm of the potential, of the unsaid, the unwritten, and it too is real.     

Here is what Tillie Olsen says about those who have not survived:

I speak of myself to bring here the sense of those others to whom this is in the process of happening (unnecessarily happening, for it need not, must not continue to be) and to remind us of those (I so nearly was one) who never came to writing at all. [29]

* * *

Perhaps it doesn't have to be like that.  Perhaps, after all, there is hope.

* * *

Adrienne Rich -- On Being Outlaws From the Institution

In Of Woman Born, by Adrienne Rich there is a remarkable description of an experience which allows us a glimpse into what being a mother outside the boundaries, divisions, categories and definitions of our culture, could be.  It is significant and revealing and so I quote the passage in its entirety. 

I remember one summer, living in a friend's house in Vermont.  My husband was working abroad for several weeks, and my three sons—nine, seven and five years old--and I dwelt for most of that time by ourselves. 

Without a male adult in the house, without any reason for schedules, naps, regular mealtimes, or early bed­times so the two parents could talk, we fell into what I felt to be a delicious and sinful rhythm.  It was a spell of unusually hot, clear weather, and we ate nearly all our meals outdoors, hand-to-mouth; we lived half-naked, stayed up to watch bats and stars and fireflies, read and told stories, slept late.  I watched their slender little-boys' bodies grow brown, we washed in water warm from the garden hose lying in the sun, we lived like castaways on some island of mothers and children.  At night they fell asleep with­out murmur and delicious and sinful rhythm. I stayed up reading and writing as I had when a student, till the early morning hours.  I remember thinking:  This is what living with children could be--without school hours, fixed routines, naps, the conflict of being both mother and wife with no room for being, simply, myself. 

Driving home once after midnight from a late drive-in movie, through the foxfire and stillness of a winding Vermont road, with three sleeping children in the back of the car, I felt wide awake, elated; we had broken together all the rules of bedtime, the night rules, rules I myself thought I had to observe in the city or become a 'bad mother.'  We were conspirators, outlaws from the institution of motherhood; I felt enormously in charge of my life.  Of course the institution closed down on us again, and my own mistrust of myself as a "good mother" returned, along with my resentment of the archetype. [30]

Rich's description of being a mother in a space free from the boundaries imposed by patriarchal culture, a space which was out of bounds--of being "conspirators, outlaws from the institu­tion of motherhood"--enables us to imagine what being a woman outside those boundaries could be, what being a woman writer outside those boundaries could be, what being a man outside those boundaries could be.  All of the themes and ideas we have dis­cussed throughout this paper are present here, either implicitly or explicitly:  the monotonous voice of the Master who insists on the rigorous division between logos and pathos, while valuing all that is associated with the one, and devaluing or excluding all that goes with the other; the connection between that which is pleasurable and that which is illicit; the idea of getting away with something, of breaking the rules; embodied experience; the freedom to work and to live according to one's rhythms, inclina­tions, and needs--"I stayed up reading and writing as I had when a student, till the early morning hours"--in an atmosphere free of artificial conflicts; the freedom "for being, simply myself"; the freedom to be "in charge of my life."    

I said that Eros and the dialectic of gnosis is the golden thread which connects all of the ideas and the themes we would take up here, and that I wanted to follow it, to see where it would lead us. 

Following that thread we have arrived at a clear space, a vantage point from which to look afresh at the different varie­ties of boundaries and divisions which threaten us, can hurl us into situations, plunge us into conflicts, in which we feel we are cornered like a hunted animal.  Adrienne Rich expresses this in a powerful way:  "The depths of this conflict, between self-preservation and maternal feelings, can be experienced--I have experienced it--as a primal agony." [31] She speaks here of women who are mothers, but no woman who is struggling to carve a true Self out of the myriad false selves, will fail to recognize this anguish.  Rich is very well aware of this.  Again, speaking as a woman who also happens to be a mother, she writes: 

If I could have one wish for my own sons, it is that they should have the courage of women . . . the courage I have seen in women who, in their private and public lives, both in the interior world of their dreaming, thinking and creating, and the outer world of patriarchy, are taking greater and greater risks, both psychic and physical, in the evolution of a new vision.  Some­times this involves tiny acts of immense courage; sometimes public acts which can cost a woman her job or her life; when it involves moments, or long periods, of thinking the unthinkable, being labeled, or feeling, crazy; always a loss of traditional securities.  Every woman who takes her life into her own hands does so knowing that she must expect enormous pain, inflicted both from within and without." [32]  

* * *

NO, it doesn't have to be like that. 

* * *

Earlier I said that although it appears there is a real, perhaps even a privileged connection between "feminine" gnosis and women, it is not inevitable, but accidental.  I said that I thought that what was needed was for us to clarify the nature of the connection, although as I also said, this is not yet the time to attempt a full-blown exploration.  However, it does seem to me that in the course of this paper we have discovered an important key to understanding.

I think there is only one possible escape from the monotony of the false Masters, only one possible way to survive, and it concerns the very categories on which all the institutions, in­cluding that of motherhood, rest, and from which they derive their power.  The divisive categories which spawn these endless boundaries and visions, laws, rules, regulations, are not inevitable, but accidental.  All of them are the result of a wrong ontology, an incorrect understanding of reality.  As Helene Cixous writes:          

The future must no longer be determined by the past.  I do not deny that the effects of the past are still with us.  But I refuse to strengthen them by repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the equivalent of destiny, to confuse the biological and the cultural.

Anticipation is imperative.  [33]

Anticipation is imperative.  On one level (and it is critically important to be absolutely clear that this is true on one level only), whenever we who fight to survive are cornered, like a hunted animal, it is because we have allowed it to happen.  We have allowed it to happen because somehow or other (the details are unimportantly) we ourselves have acted as if these categories were laws of nature.  As Adrienne Rich states:  "We have, in our long history, accepted the stresses of the institution as if they were a law of nature." [34] Since categories like 'outside' and ‘inside' define each other, and in fact, are meaningless without each other, throughout this paper I have focused on being out of bounds, of being out laws, of being outside the boundaries.  We can see the divisions very clearly. 

Now that we see them, now that we are clearer about the nature of the boundaries, a brief excursus into the reasons for their development seems in order. 

Human beings have an innate capacity to distinguish one thing from another, but somewhere along the way we have also developed a conceptual schema that promotes the separation and arrangement of things in terms of a hierarchical dualism; a schema which also functions to justify our valuation of them as necessary and appropriate, as having to do with their intrinsic nature, rather than as having to do with our own individual or collective whims, or our political, theological, philosophical, and intellectual biases. [35] Although this framework is chang­ing as we become more aware of the dangers that inhere in the wholesale and non-reflective application of categories that only pretend to be universal, this schema continues to underlie much of our thinking. It is this framework within which all of the divisive categories and boundaries originate.  But, as I have said, it doesn't have to be that way.  Here, I want to make a suggestion:  Somehow, we have to make our way safely through them.  And this reminds me of a story:

* * *

For some months I have been living in Istanbul, and although the libraries there have very little that relates directly to my research, I nevertheless continue by nature to be drawn to libraries, and find myself in them anyway.  Perhaps guided by something I've heard described as the "library angel phenomenon," whenever I go to the library, since there is no use looking in the card catalogs, I just go to the stacks, where I almost invariably stumble on something which proves unexpectedly useful.  One such serendipitous find was a collection of Sufi stories.  This one concerns the fabled Mulla Nasrudin. 

Nasrudin used to take his donkey across a frontier every day, with the panniers loaded with straw.  Since he admitted to being a smuggler when he trudged home every night, the frontier guards searched him again and again.  They searched his person, sifted the straw, steeped it in water, even burned it from time to time. 

Meanwhile he was becoming visibly more and more prosperous. Then he retired and went to live in another country.  Here one of the customs officers met him, years later.

'You can tell me now, Nasrudin,' he said.  'What ever was is that you were smuggling, when we could never catch you out?'

'Donkeys,' said Nasrudin." [36]

* * *

My intuition tells me that we must neither go outside the boundaries, and we certainly must not remain inside them (to do either one is to perpetuate them).  The only way we can survive is if we learn how to go through them, and thereby move into the free space that lies beyond them.  This is the "space" of “feminine" gnosis.  I must admit, however, that while these last two sentences may qualify as beautiful prose, they certainly do not amount to a precise recipe that tells us how to do this. 

What we have yet to learn is related to this last story: 

* * *

When Ho Chi Minh was teaching the principles of guerrilla warfare to his soldiers, he reminded them that in order to sur­vive, they needed to learn to be like the little fishes who swim in the waters, amidst the nooks and crannies of submerged rocks, where the big fishes cannot go.

* * *

This would appear to be a lesson for all of us who would survive.  Vis a vis the question of how to survive and what to do about boundaries, I am entirely serious when I say that all of us, men and women, have to learn to be like those little fishes. 

I do think that women are better at learning the lessons of guerrilla warfare than are men, and that we do indeed have a privileged connection to "feminine" gnosis.  Why?  Partly because of our physical beings, and partly because of our evolution as a species in patriarchy.  Both are real.  Stated most simply, first of all, it is because our bodies change, sometimes subtly, some­times very obviously.  Physically, we are continually in flux.  At the onset of puberty our body begins to change.  Then we begin to menstruate.  That entails huge physical changes--each and every month, month in and month out, for decades.  If we become pregnant, we grow big with child.  After the birth, our body changes again.  Our breasts swell with milk, even if we do not nurse the child.  If we do nurse the child, this happens several times every day.  When we are older our menstrual cycles stop, and that too results in bodily changes which are evident to us, if not to others. Men's bodies do not change in this way.  Thus, women are physically constituted so that we are sensitive to change.  Our sensitivity to physical changes means that we also have a tendency to be sensitive to nuance, to small details, in many areas besides the physical.  In at least this one respect (and there may be more), women are more complicated than men.  So, that is one thing about women that is inevitable.  Secondly, our sensitivity has been enhanced by centuries of living in a context comprised of negative cultural attitudes about what our particular physicality and our much-vaunted sensitivity imply.  Like animal species who over centuries have adapted to their environment by developing the ability to see in the dark, or by acquiring protective coloration, women have had to become almost preternaturally sensitive, simply in order to survive.  There is an unforgettable passage in Susan Griffin's book, Woman and Nature, which alludes to this sensitivity to nuance.  She calls it grace.

And if we find this grace through our labor, our ears late at night hearing the cries no one else hears, the body bent over rocking, the grace of crisis, the fever, the steady application of cold clothes, or the seeing of the barely seeable, the unnamed, the slight difference in the expression of the eyes, the mood, the slow opening, the listening, the small possibility, barely audible, nodding, almost inarticulate, yet allowing articulation, words, healing, the eyes acknowledge, this grace of the unspoken, spoken in movement, the hand reaches, the blanket is wrapped around, the arms hold this daily grace without which we do not choose to  continue, and if we find this, we have something of our own.

This is our secret grace, unnamed, invisible, surviving. [37]  

Of course, in another possible world this might not have happened, but in this world, the heightened sensitivity I have described has happened; now, it has the character of necessity:  it has become genetic, inevitable.  Both of these things are what result in women's privileged connection to "feminine" gnosis. 

These are the facts about what it means, biologically, physically, to be a female being.  These things are inevitable.  What is accidental is the way in which these facts have been combined with cultural attitudes about women and the nature of women.  What is accidental is that the conceptual framework that I described has almost never, until recently, been distinguished from ontology.  This framework has not only shaped and distorted our thinking about women, but also about the body, about sexuali­ty, and about Nature.  Each has been devalued. 

Let me quickly sketch this devalued position in the case of each of the four: 

     1.  Body.  With respect to body and spirit, we not only distinguish one from another, but we consider one to be so superior to the other that we conceive them as elements in an opposi­tion; we dichotomize them.  Depending on variations from one theory to another, this dichotomy will be expressed in different ways.  Sometimes spirit is considered to be superior to the body, while the body is frequently thought of as mere dross, to be ignored, or even harmed as part of our quest for transcendence. [38]   It is spirit that is closest to the divine, which partici­pates in the divine; it is spirit that is eternal.  The body is thought to be an "Other" relative to spirit, our true self; the body is illusory, spirit is real. 

     2.  Nature.  That understanding of the relation between spirit and body is analogous to our attitudes toward Nature, that is, Body with a capital 'B.' Just as the body is thought to be an "Other" relative to spirit, so too is Nature regarded as an "Other," relative to persons.  Nature is an object, to be subdued and used, or used up, for human ends (we have conceived, for example, the insane idea of "disposable land," land which has been specially set aside to use for dumping the waste from the manufacture of nuclear weapons and thus rendered unsafe for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years). 

     3.  Women.  Women have been regarded as spiritually other than and inferior to men.  This used to be very explicitly stated:  "Give not the power of thy soul to a woman, lest she enter upon thy strength, and thou be confounded," [39] and "You [i.e., women] are the devil's gateway;" [40] thus in some ways perhaps it was simpler to counter.  Today however such attitudes have gone underground and are usually manifested in more subtle ways. [41]   

     4.  Sexuality.  The sexual function and sexual energy has been regarded as other and inferior to more respectable or more "spiritual" functions and energies. 

There is a complex web of connections among the things I have mentioned:  women have been identified closely with the body and with Nature and sexuality, while men have been considered closer to spirit, made in the image of God. While these miscon­ceptions remain problematic for any number of reasons, positing an essential relation between women and Nature, or a privileged connection between women and "feminine" gnosis is not inherently problematic.  Problems arise when people refuse to acknowledge that men too have a similarly essential connection to Nature, because we are all part of Nature, and when they ignore the potential for men to deliberately undertake to become learned in the ways of "the seeing of the barely seeable," "the unnamed," "the unspoken, spoken in movement," and "the small possibility."

For women and for men, learning how to go beyond the boundaries means learning about nuance and tones of voice; it means taking care: to read signs, to pay attention to small details, to distinguish between fantasy and what the alchemists called "active imagination."  This would be a radical departure from the past, to be sure, but fortunately, it does not depend on the past; in fact, such a departure represents discontinuity with it.  Quantum leaps are also part of Nature.  The way of "feminine" gnosis is what will allow us to be protected as we negotiate a circuitous path around the boundaries, and beyond.  

* * *

The golden thread that connects and enables all this is Eros, the dialectic of gnosis.  What is needed now, if we are to survive not only as individuals, but also as a species, is that we begin to move toward what could be described as the Eroticisation of culture.  Realizing and articulating the implications of that are precisely what all of the work I have been doing, and will do, is about.  But it isn't important if I do it, or if someone else does it. [42] What matters is that the work is done.  By definition, this work, regardless of who does it, is an open-ended process.  We continually follow the golden thread, we are always moving towards something; the moment we arrive, we poise there, in the space of clarity, of balance, in the center, for only a moment, before we move beyond.  In the deepest sense, it will always be true to say "This is just the beginning . . . "

* * *

Karen-Claire Voss

August 1994

Istanbul

APPENDIX  I

The Emerald Table

1.  The truth, without lie, certain and most true.

2.  What is below is just as what is above, and what is above is just as what is below for the purpose of penetrating the miracle of each thing.

3.  And just as all things have been from one thing, while that thing is meditating, just as all things have been born from this one thing, by the adaptation of this one thing.

4.  Its father is Sun, its mother is Moon, the wind brought it in its belly, Earth is its nurse.

5.  The father of all, the Thelema of the whole world, is here. [43]

6.  The strength of it is complete if it is transformed into earth.

7.  You will separate earth from fire, subtle from gross, gently, but with great intelligence.

8.  It ascends from earth to heaven, and repeatedly descends to the earth, and receives the power of upper and lower.  Thus you will have the glory of the whole world.  Therefore, all obscurity. will flee from you.

9.  Herein is the strong strength of all strength:  because it overcomes each subtle thing, and penetrates every solid. [44]

10.  Thus the world has been created. [45]

11.  Hence there will be miraculous adaptation of which this is the way. [46]

12.  For that reason, I am called Hermes Trismegistus, I hold three parts of the philosophy of the whole world.

13.  I have completed all that I have to say concerning the operation of the Sun.

Notes:

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