We've learned a lot from the great psychologists. Wilhelm Reich wrote about the relationship between fascism and sexual repression. Freud rediscovered the underworld of consciousness that European rationalism had denied. But when you have a nation of people in therapy and counselling, "support" groups for every kind of human condition, where, in the clichés of that milieu, people "share" and "heal," the question, "What for?", "What now?" is no longer asked.
It iscrucial that we understand lesbian/feminism in the deepest, most radical sense: as that love for ourselves and other women, that commitment to the freedom of all of us, which transcends the category of "sexual preference" and the issue of civil rights, to become a politics of asking women's questions, demanding a world in which the integrity of all women--not a chosen few--shall be honored and validated in every respect of culture.
I think about the possibilities for empathy, for mutual solidarity among gay men and lesbians, not simply as people who suffer under homophobia, but as people who are also extremely creative, active, and have a particular understanding of the human condition.
We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth not only children if and as we choose but the visions, and the thinking, necessary to sustain, console and alter human existence-a new relationship to the universe. Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.
Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep.
Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.
The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.
The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.To "see the light" too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.