Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her

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Woman and Nature

The Roaring Inside Her

Susan Griffin

CONTENTS

Preface to the Second Edition

Preface

PROLOGUE

BOOK ONE: MATTER

How man regards and makes use of woman and nature

MATTER

Wherein man’s ideas about nature and his attitudes toward women are revealed side by side and in historical order

LAND (Her Changing Face)

In which he shapes this earth to his use

TIMBER (What Was There for Them)

In which he makes the trees his own

WIND

In which he harnesses the elements

COWS (The Way We Yield)

In which he domesticates the animals

MULES

And the domesticated speak

THE SHOW HORSE

And the domesticated learn to please

HER BODY

And he makes her body over to his liking

BOOK TWO: SEPARATION

The separations in his vision and under his rule (wherein our voice rises)

WHERE HE BEGINS

Separation wherein he separates himself from woman and nature, and The Image wherein he makes woman and nature the object of his art, and Marriage wherein he makes woman and nature a part of himself

HIS POWER (He Tames What Is Wild)

The Hunt whereby he captures her wildness, and The Zoological Garden in which she paces in her cage, and The Garden wherein he civilizes wilderness

HIS VIGILANCE (How He Must Keep Watch)

Space Divided and Time Divided by which he guards time and space, and Silence which is recognized as her silence

HIS KNOWLEDGE (He Determines What Is Real)

What He Sees (The Art of It) wherein the method of his vision is examined, and The Anatomy Lesson wherein she has difficulty with his method, and Acoustics where the quality of his hearing is exposed, and Reason in which he calls her unreasonable, and The Argument wherein we see the separations in his argument

HIS CONTROL (How He Becomes Invulnerable)

Childish Fear in which we remember his fear of the dark, and Speed wherein he speeds past what women and children fear, and Burial wherein he buries himself in her

HIS CERTAINTY (How He Rules the Universe)

Quantity in which he calculates existence, and Probability in which he determines the future, and Gravity in which the laws of the universe determine his fate

HIS CATACLYSM (The Universe Shudders)

Prophets in which they warn us of the corruption of this earth, and Plutonium in which we accept their judgment, and Pollution wherein he poisons the world

HIS SECRETS (What Is Sleeping Within)

Dream Life where his right hand and his left hand never meet, and Nightmares where we glimpse another future

TERROR

In which he warns her with his vision of the universe

BOOK THREE: PASSAGE

Her journey through the Labyrinth to the Cave where she has Her Vision

BOOK FOUR: HER VISION

Now she sees through her own eyes (wherein the world is no longer his)

THE SEPARATE REJOINED

MYSTERY (How the Divided Come Together Again)

What had terrified him

THE OPENING

We enter a new space. We enter a new time (The territory beyond his vigilance)

OUR DREAMS (What Lies Under Our Stillness)

Our Flying, our Deviling, our Dancing, our Animals Familiar (What was kept secret from him)

OUR ANCIENT RAGES

We allow Turbulence and Cataclysm cannot be denied, and we say there are always Consequences (The universe he tried to deny)

THE LION IN THE DEN OF THE PROPHETS

The power he could not tame

POSSIBILITY

Gravity, what we have had to do, and Numbers, what we will not do, and Naming, all that we cannot say, and The Possible, what the universe reveals (Of what no one can be certain)

TRANSFORMATION

We Visit Our Fears, we are transformed, and Erosion, we transform (What he failed to control)

CLARITY

Vision to know the being of another, and One from Another (The Knowledge) what passes between us, and Acoustics how we listen for signs (What he would not acknowledge), and Our Labor by which we continue

MATTER REVISITED

THE YEARS (Her Body Awakens)

and The Anatomy Lesson her body reclaimed, and History what her hair tells us, and Memory what we know from her breasts, and Archives what is hidden in her vulva, and Letters what her clitoris says, and Records what is part of her womb

OUR NATURE (What Is Still Wild in Us)

THIS EARTH (What She Is to Me) Where we are

FOREST (The Way We Stand) Why we are here

THE WIND (How everything changes), and

MATTER (How We Know)

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

A Biography of Susan Griffin

These words are written for those of us whose language is not heard, whose words have been stolen or erased, those robbed of language, who are called voiceless or mute, even the earthworms, even the shellfish and the sponges, for those of us who speak our own language, and this book is dedicated in love to Adrienne Rich for her friendship and for her words

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

Two decades have passed since I wrote Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her. Measured against the scale of evolution, the time it took, for instance, for the first living cells to become trees or animals or human beings, twenty years seems like a very short period of time. Yet the book was written in the midst of a crisis that has deepened in the intervening years. When life as we know it hangs in the balance, even the smallest moments in time take on a greater weight.

The fate of the earth was on my mind twenty years ago. But I was more sanguine about it than I am now. The times were generally more hopeful then—not because the world was a better place but because the atmosphere was charged with vision. In 1974, as I began writing this book, many women and men in my generation were thinking about the manner in which we live and about how we might create a more just world. We were asking probing and insightful questions about race and sexuality, about violence and power, and in the process scrutinized the culture we had inherited for clues to how we might see differently and thus change.

In the mid-seventies, while teaching and writing, I became interested in an old, stereotypical notion about women. Woven everywhere into the tapestry of European art and literature and seemingly an inseparable part of most philosophical and scientific texts—even embedded in the structure of European languages—is the assumption that women are closer to nature than men are. The notion is not intended as a compliment. In the hierarchical geography of European tradition, not only are human beings elevated above the rest of nature, but men are closer to heaven than women. In short, the idea that women are close to nature is an argument for the dominion of men.

During the most heady days of feminism, there were some who turned this idea on its head and argued that indeed women are closer to nature, a proximity making us superior to men. By the same token, the taxonomy of virtues through which men dominate—the capacity for reason and cool-headedness—was also reversed. Rationality itself became suspect, and passionate sensuality was enshrined.

I do not agree with the idea that women are closer to nature than are men in either its traditional or inverted form. Everything that exists on Earth, including rational thought, is part of nature. Thus, that one element would be closer to nature than another seems implausible to me. What does, however, seem very possible to me is that one gender may be more aware of being part of nature than another. And yet this difference in awareness must also be treated with subtlety. Today, largely due to the feminist movement, many more women are abandoning traditional feminine roles altogether and in some cases have become as divided from an awareness of natural process than any man. But even women who have a more direct knowledge of the stuff of earthly existence because they play traditional domestic roles are not born with this proclivity. They are shaped to it by society. As Simone de Beauvoir wrote in the mid–twentieth century, A woman is not born she is made. And the same can be said for the tendency of some men not only to think of themselves as apart from nature but to place themselves at a distance from actual life processes. This behavior has less to do with genetics than with another tendency. When civilizations come to embody certain ideas through the influence of art, science, and institution, we who are the citizens of those civilizations come to resemble those ideas. As Oscar Wilde has written, Life imitates art.

If society has succeeded in making men and women after a set of ideas that in the end diminishes human nature, we are now perilously close to making the earth after a philosophy that not only limits but even erases nature. As logical as the arguments for controlling women and nature appear to be, they veil a profound illogic, a heated fear, indeed a terror, that serve as the engines for a civilization in retreat from natural processes that must and do include change and loss, vulnerability, the rise and then ebb of powers, mortality. The association between women and nature has not only served to oppress women, it has also acted as a device for denial, a means to evade the simple truth that human existence is immersed in nature, dependent on nature, inseparable from it. By imagining women as closer to nature, it becomes possible to imagine men as farther away from nature. And in this way, both men and women can indulge in the fantasy that the human condition can be free of mortality, as well as the exigencies and needs of natural limitation.

It is popular now to speak in glowing terms of free markets, as if the marketplace had no relationship to earthly necessity but were instead entirely conceptual and could thus grow as numbers grow, without boundaries and without end. This is the latest fantasy of dominion over the earth, as if through the power of will human beings can make natural resources multiply on demand. But loving freedom as we do, we are ignoring another kind of freedom—liberation from a limiting philosophy, from a habit of self-deception that prevents us from treasuring what we actually possess: life.

At the heart of what I discovered as I wrote Woman and Nature is a vision of freedom from an imprisoning state of mind. The book is written in poetic prose, a style that allowed me to move underneath the seemingly logical propositions of our culture, not only to discover the machinery of our fear but to find evidence for a wisdom that is at once old and new, forgotten and yet still alive.

If the next twenty years are crucial in the history of the planet, so is the future of this wisdom—logical and sensual, realistic and imaginative—that is in us all and is indispensable to our survival. Read this book playfully, read it to the edges of the pages and then over the margins into other books, other worlds, other possibilities.

SUSAN GRIFFIN

Berkeley

July 1999

PREFACE

This is an unconventional book and so, it was felt, needed some preface. I began writing this book roughly three years ago, after I was asked to deliver a lecture on women and ecology. I was concerned that the ecological movement had often placed the burden for solving its problems, those that this civilization has with nature, on women. I said in that lecture that women were always being asked to clean up, and to this I added the observation that men consider women to be more material than themselves, or more a part of nature. The fact that man does not consider himself a part of nature, but indeed considers himself superior to matter, seemed to me to gain significance when placed against man’s attitude that woman is both inferior to him and closer to nature. Hence this book called Woman and Nature grew.

In the process of writing I found that I could best discover my insights about the logic of civilized man by going underneath logic, that is by writing associatively, and thus enlisting my intuition, or uncivilized self. Thus my prose in this book is like poetry, and like poetry always begins with feeling. One of the loudest complaints which this book makes about patriarchal thought (or the thought of civilized man) is that it claims to be objective, and separated from emotion, and so it is appropriate that the style of this book does not make that separation.

Since patriarchal thought does, however, represent itself as emotionless (objective, detached and bodiless), the dicta of Western civilization* and science on the subjects of woman and nature in this book are written in a parody of a voice with such presumptions. This voice rarely uses a personal pronoun, never speaks as I or we, and almost always implies that it has found absolute truth, or at least has the authority to do so. In writing this book, this paternal voice became quite real to me, and I was afraid of it. It sprang out at me in the form of recognized opinion and told me that the reactions I experienced in my female body to its declarations were ridiculous (unfounded, hysterical, biased). You will recognize that voice from its use of such phrases as it is decided or the discovery was made. Much research went into the reconstruction of this voice: I tried to preserve its style and tone accurately.

The other voice in the book began as my voice but was quickly joined by the voices of other women, and voices from nature, with which I felt more and more strongly identified, particularly as I read the opinions of men about us. This is an embodied voice, and an impassioned one. These two voices (though you will find more than two in the text) are set in different type styles; thus a dialogue is implied throughout the book.

I begin the book by tracing a history of patriarchy’s judgments about the nature of matter, or the nature of nature, and place these judgments side by side, chronologically, with men’s opinions about the nature of women throughout history. From this philosophical beginning the book becomes more actual, treating of the effect of patriarchal logic on material beings. And so the first book, Matter, continues the analogy drawn between woman and nature into explorations of the earth, trees, cows, show horses and women’s bodies as we all exist in patriarchy.

The second book is entitled Separation, and beginning with the separation of a womb from a woman’s body, lists and protests against all those separations which are part of the civilized male’s thinking and living—mind from emotion, body from soul—and reveals that separation which patriarchy requires us to make from ourselves. The third book, called Passage, finally separates our consciousness from the consciousness of patriarchy, and thus the fourth book is called Her Vision: Now She Sees Through Her Own Eyes.

In Her Vision, all that we have seen in the first two books from the eye of patriarchy is now reseen. Thus the book is not so much utopian as a description of a different way of seeing. And so the section called The Zoological Garden is reflected in Her Vision as The Lion in the Den of the Prophets. I had thought, in writing Her Vision, that this book would be like a mirror, and hence tried to put the sections in the same order (except backward) as they appeared in the first two books. But this proved impossible. Her Vision would not be so constricted.

While I was writing Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, the spaces I created within it began to be real for me; passing over into work on Her Vision, I would feel as if I had entered a free zone, and breathe a sigh of relief.

I hope the reader will enter these spaces as I entered them, moving through these ways of seeing with passion, and will hear the voices as I hear them, especially the great chorus of woman and nature, which will swell with time. And I hope the reader will know, too, though this is just a book and thus just a fiction, that the feelings which enter these words are very real, and that in this matter of woman and nature, we have cause to feel deeply.

SUSAN GRIFFIN

Berkeley

November 1977

*I have purposely limited the scope of this book to Western civilization.

PROLOGUE

He says that woman speaks with nature. That she hears voices from under the earth. That wind blows in her ears and trees whisper to her. That the dead sing through her mouth and the cries of infants are clear to her. But for him this dialogue is over. He says he is not part of this world, that he was set on this world as a stranger. He sets himself apart from woman and nature.

And so it is Goldilocks who goes to the home of the three bears, Little Red Riding Hood who converses with the wolf, Dorothy who befriends a lion, Snow White who talks to the birds, Cinderella with mice as her allies, the Mermaid who is half fish, Thumbelina courted by a mole. (And when we hear in the Navaho chant of the mountain that a grown man sits and smokes with bears and follows directions given to him by squirrels, we are surprised. We had thought only little girls spoke with animals.)

We are the bird’s eggs. Bird’s eggs, flowers, butterflies, rabbits, cows, sheep; we are caterpillars; we are leaves of ivy and sprigs of wallflower. We are women. We rise from the wave. We are gazelle and doe, elephant and whale, lilies and roses and peach, we are air, we are flame, we are oyster and pearl, we are girls. We are woman and nature. And he says he cannot hear us speak.

But we hear.

BOOK ONE

MATTER

How Man Regards and Makes Use of Woman and Nature

So this was how it looked, the determining, the crucial sky, and this was how man moved through it, remote above the dwindled earth, the concealed human life. Vulnerable life, that could scar.

TILLIE OLSEN,

Tell Me a Riddle

MATTER

It is decided that matter is transitory and illusory like the shadows on a wall cast by firelight; that we dwell in a cave, in the cave of our flesh, which is also matter, also illusory; it is decided that what is real is outside the cave, in a light brighter than we can imagine, that matter traps us in darkness. That the idea of matter existed before matter and is more perfect, ideal.

Sic transit, how quickly pass, gloria mundi, the glories of this world, it is said.

Matter is transitory and illusory, it is said. This world is an allegory for the next. The moon is an image of the Church, which reflects Divine Light. The wind is an image of the Spirit. The sapphire resembles the number eleven, which has transgressed ten, the number of the commandments. Therefore the number eleven stands for sin.

It is decided that matter is passive and inert, and that all motion originates from outside matter.

That the soul is the cause of all movement in matter and that the soul was created by God: that all other movement proceeds from violent contact with other moving matter, which was first moved by God. That the spheres in perpetual movement are moved by the winds of heaven, which are moved by God, that all movement proceeds from God.

That matter is only a potential for form or a potential for movement.

It is decided that the nature of woman is passive, that she is a vessel waiting to be filled.

It is decided that the existence of God can be proved by reason and that reason exists to apprehend God and Nature.

God is unchangeable, it is said. Logos is a quality of God created in man by God and it is eternal. The soul existed before the body and will live after it.

And I do not know how long anything I touch by a bodily sense will exist, the words of a saint read, as, for instance, this sky and this land, and whatever other bodies I perceive in them. But seven and three are ten and not only now but always … therefore … this incorruptible truth of numbers is common to me and anyone at all who reasons.

And it is stated elsewhere that Genesis cannot be understood without a mastery of mathematics.

He who does not know mathematics cannot know any of the other sciences, it is said again, and it is decided that all truth can be found in mathematics, that the true explanation is mathematics and fact merely evidence.

That there are three degrees of abstraction, each leading to higher truths. The scientist peels away uniqueness, revealing category; the mathematician peels away sensual fact, revealing number; the metaphysician peels away even number and reveals the fruit of pure being.

It is put forward that science might be able to prolong life for longer periods than might be accomplished by nature. And it is predicted:

that machines for navigation can

be made without rowers so that the

largest ships on rivers or seas will

by a single man be propelled with

greater velocity than if they were

full of men

that cars can be made to move with

out the aid of animals at an un

believable rapidity

that flying machines can be con

structed

that such things can be

made without limit

It is decided that vision takes place because of a ray of light emanating from the eye to the thing perceived.

It is decided that God is primordial light, shining in the darkness of first matter, giving it substantial being. It is decided that geometrical optics holds the key to all understanding.

It is said that the waters of the firmament separate the corporeal from the spiritual creation.

That the space above is infinite, indivisible, immutable, and is the immensity of God.

That the earth is a central sphere surrounded by concentric zones, perfect circles of air, ether and fire, containing the stars, the sun and the planets, all kept in motion by the winds of heaven. That heaven is beyond the zone of fire and that Hell is within the sphere of the earth. That Hell is beneath our feet.

It is stated that all bodies have a natural place, the heavy bodies tending toward the earth, the lighter toward the heavens.

And what is sublunary is decaying and corruptible. The earth is so depraved and broken in all kinds of vice and abominations that it seemeth to be a place that hath received all the filthiness and purgings of all other worlds and ages, it is said.

And the air below the moon is thick and dirty, while the air above shineth night and day of resplendour perpetual, it is said.

And it is decided that the angels live above the moon and aid God in the movement of celestial spheres. The good angels, it is said, hold cheap all the knowledge of material and temporal matters which inflates the demon with pride.

And the demon resides in the earth, it is decided, in Hell, under our feet.

It is observed that women are closer to the earth.

That women lead to man’s corruption. Women are the Devil’s Gateway, it is said.

That regarding the understanding of spiritual things, women have a different nature than men, it is observed, and it is stated that women are intellectually like children. That women are feebler of body and mind than men, it is said: Frailty, thy name is woman.

And it is stated that the word woman is used to mean the lust of the flesh.

That men are moved to carnal lust when they hear or see woman, whose face is a burning wind, whose voice is a hissing serpent.

It is decided that in birth the female provides the matter (the menstruum, the yolk) and that the male provides the form which is immaterial, and that out of this union is born the embryo.

And it is written in the scripture that out of Adam who was the first man was taken Eve, and because she was born of man he also named her: She shall be called Woman.

And it is written in the bestiary that the cubs of the Lioness are born dead but on the third day the Lion breathes between their eyes and they wake to life.

It is decided that Vital Heat is the source of all vital activity, that this heat emanates from God to the male of the species, and that this vital heat informs the form of the species with maleness, whereas the female is too cold to effect this change.

It is decided also that all monstrosities of birth come from a defect in the matter provided by the female, which resists the male effort to determine form.

It is decided that Vital Heat is included in semen, that it is the natural principle in the spirit and is analogous to that element in the stars.

It is decided that the Vital Heat of the sun causes spontaneous generation.

The discovery is made that the sun and not the earth is the center of the universe. And the one who discovers this writes:

In the middle of all sits Sun enthroned. In this most beautiful temple could we place this luminary in any better position from which he can illuminate the whole at once? He is rightly called the Lamp, the Mind, the Ruler of the Universe; Hermes Trismegistus names him the visible God, Sophocles’ Electra calls him the All-Seeing. So the Sun sits as upon a royal throne ruling his children the planets which circle round him.… Meanwhile the earth conceives by the Sun, and becomes pregnant with an annual rebirth.

And it is decided that the Sun is God the Father, the stars God the Son, and the ethereal medium the Holy Ghost.

Mutability on the earth, it is said, came to the Garden of Eden after the Fall. That before the Fall there was immortal bliss on earth, but that after the Fall all things decay in time and to their end do draw.

That the face of the earth is a record of man’s sin. That the height of mountains, the depth of valleys, the sites of great boulders, craters, seas, bodies of land, lakes and rivers, the shapes of rocks, cliffs, all were formed by the deluge, which was God’s punishment for sin.

The world is the Devil and the Devil is the world, it is said.

And of the fact that women are the Devil’s Gateway it is observed that sin and afterward death came into the world because Eve consorted with the devil in the body of a serpent.

That the power of the devil lies in the privy parts of men.

That women act as the devil’s agent and use flesh as bait.

That women under the power of the devil meet with him secretly, in the woods (in the wilderness), at night. That they kiss him on the anus. That they offer him pitch-black candles, which he lights with a fart. That they