Rape, Control of Women, War and....Art

 

"Judith Slaying Holofernes" by Artemisia Gentilachi

 

"Control of female sexuality is fundamental to the patriarchal system.  This explains why there is so much controversy about the “simple matter” of access to birth control and abortion and so much anger directed at single mothers. "

~Carol Christ

I never cease to be amazed that the contemporary versions of Biblical Patriarchs continue to fight for control of  the bodies and lives  of the female population, even as they attempt to remove virtually all infrastructure to support or assist poor and single mothers.  Or the "right to rape" that is  so much in evidence in the power structure of our society.  I reflect on Donald Trump, the former President of the United States, bragging about his career as a "pussy grabber" as he virtually celebrated his sexual predations publicly.  I also remember marching in the Women's March with thousands of equally offended women.

As a long time student of art and mythology, the celebration of rape and war is to be found everywhere. The rape of young women is a prime theme in contemporary television drama, over and over and over.  How we seem to love our sadistic serial killers.   And if you look back at the his-story of Western art, it's all over the place as well.  In fact, much of it is on plain view in our most distinguished institutions of art and culture such as the Metropolitan Museum or the Smithsonian.  High Art, High Rape, rarely examined for the message under all those pretty colors and plump, seemingly  acquiescent women, who never seem to be wearing any clothes.*

I remember all those paintings, for example, of the rape of various mortal women  by those manly, if naughty, Greek gods, because the Masters were constantly forced on me as a young art student.  I tried to like them, but something I couldn't articulate bothered me.  Later I began to see them as a perfect  co-option of myth, often turned religion, used to justify the voyeuristic violence of men:  i.e.,  the gods rape  just the same as ordinary men do, with the head god, Zeus, leading the pack.  

In a popular  Renaissance theme like the painting below, "The Rape of Europa"  by Luca Giordano, the  abduction of a young girl is positively a party for all!   

"The Rape of Europa" by Luca Giordano

Or the "Rape of the Sabine Women", or the "Rape of the Trojan Women", or "the Rape of Persephone" or so on............it was  only years later, after all that Classic Arts Education, that  I finally understood that those paintings amounted to pornography for wealthy men of the time.  As well as propaganda.  

"Rape of the Sabine Women" by Sebastiano Ricci

Above we have a huge, and famous, Renaissance painting with a popular theme of rape, each man carrying off his prize.  I wonder how many women sat beneath this expensive painting at expensive dinner parties and felt a tad queasy without exactly knowing why?

Here's a more recent painting from the end of the 19th Century:  our proud warrior sits atop his "loot" - lots of gold, spoils, and several passive, helpless  women as "loot" too, one appropriately nude with a good pair of breasts exposed.  Oh, and we have a weeping, but worthless,  old woman on the side, just to show the artist's recognition that there is a bit of suffering in war.  

And then there is Atemisia Gentileschi"s "Judith Slaying Holofernes".  The daughter of a famous painter who was raped herself  as a young girl and publicly humiliated, I somehow don't think she found the subject at all sexy.   Her brilliant, honest,  and disturbing painting of a powerful Judith and her maid servant severing the head of Holofernes strikes a cord in the heart of any woman who has known the suffering of sexual assault.  

"Judith Slaying Holofernes" by Artemisia Gentilachi

I decided to take the liberty of sharing a  brilliant article (2013) from  Feminism and Religion  by the marvelously articulate feminist scholar, writer,  and theologian  Carol Christ that takes a long look at the issue, so deeply embedded in the violence of our world, and so very crucial to understand if there is ever to be change.  Thank you to Dr. Christ for her words, once again.* And thank you to Susan Brownmiller and her book Against Our Will (1975) which I have not read in many years, yet still stands as an important voice for the unspeakable.

And I also share, below, an image of what rape really looks like in war.  Because we need to remember.

  Patriarchy as a System of Male Dominance Created at the Intersection 

  of the Control of Women, Private Property, and War 

 (Part 2), February 25, 2013

by Carol P. Christ

Patriarchy is a system of male dominance, rooted in the ethos of war which legitimates violence, sanctified by religious symbols, in which men dominate women through the control of female sexuality, with the intent of passing property to male heirs, and in which men who are heroes of war are told to kill men, and are permitted to rape women, to seize land and treasures, to exploit resources, and to own or otherwise dominate conquered people.*

In last week’s blog, I explained patriarchy as a system in which men dominate women through the control of female sexuality with the intent of passing property to male heirs.

 How did a system that identifies a man’s essence with his property and the ability to pass it on to sons come about? I suggest that the answer to this question is war and the confiscation of “property” by warriors in war. Patriarchy is rooted in the ethos of war which legitimates violence, and in which men who are heroes of war are told to kill men, and are permitted to rape women, seize land and treasures, to exploit resources, and to own or otherwise dominate conquered people.

My argument is that the origin of “private” property, defined as property owned by a single (male) individual, and as that which defines the “essence” of that individual, is the “spoils” of war, which are divided up by victorious warriors.  The “spoils” of war are the tangible treasures “looted” or taken by the victors from the conquered, such as jewelry and sacred objects.  The “spoils” of war include land “taken” as the result of warfare, along with the right to exploit resources, directly or through taxes and levies. The “spoils” of war also includes the right to “take” the women of the defeated enemy and to confirm ownership of them (and humiliate their fathers or husbands) by raping them.  The “spoils” of war also include the right to “take” these raped women and their young children home to serve as slaves and concubines.

Though many people were surprised when the rape victims of the recent war in Bosnia began to speak out about the use of rape as a tool of war by Serbian soldiers, in fact, rape has always been an “ordinary” part of war. In the “great” epic known as The Iliad which is said to be the foundation of western culture,  Achilles and Agamemnon are fighting over which of them has the right to rape a “captured” woman named Briseis.  The term “spear captive” is used to mask the reality that Briseis and other women like her were “rape victims” and that the “heroes” being celebrated were their “rapists” and “jailers.” I believe that the institution of rape and the (twisted) notion that men have a right to rape (certain kinds or types of) women originated with war.

The institution of slavery also originated in war. Both the Bible and the Greek epics testify to the ancient custom of enslaving the women and children of the enemy.  Slave women in every culture, like the slave women on plantations in the Americas, are at the mercy of their owners and his sons, who can rape them if they felt like it. The “custom” of taking slaves from the enemy and the “custom” of also taking enemy women sexually, is deeply intertwined with the history of war.  The Africans who sold other Africans into slavery in the Americas were selling Africans they had taken as the spoils of war.If we entertain the hypothesis that earlier matriarchal clan systems existed, then we can see that the notion of individual powerful men’s peri-ousia being defined as the treasures, land, and people they “stole” and then claimed to “own” would have involved a massive cultural shift.  The shift to defining men by the property they owned required that men would also ”own” and absolutely control their wives and daughters, who had previously been free.  Such a cultural shift could only have been instituted and maintained through violence.

Patriarchy is a system of male domination, rooted in the ethos of war which legitimates violence. Warriors who have learned the methods of violent domination of other human beings—not only other soldiers, but also the women and children of the people they conquer—bring the methods of violence home.  Violence and the threat of violence can then be used to control “one’s” wife or wives, in order to ensure that “one’s” children really are “one’s” own. Violence and the threat of violence can be used to ensure that “one’s” daughters are virgins who can be “given” to other men to perpetuate the system of patriarchal inheritance.  Violence and the threat of violence can be used to hold enslaved people “in line.”  In addition, violence and the threat of violence can be used to subdue those within one’s own culture who are unwilling to go along with the new system. Women who refuse to let men control their sexuality can be killed with impunity by their male relatives or stoned by communities as a whole.

How does such a violent system legitimate itself?  By religious symbols.  In Greece, warriors were “in the image” of the “warrior God” Zeus whose rape of Goddesses and nymphs was celebrated.  In Israel, the power of warriors is mirrored in a male God who is called “Lord” and “King” and who achieves his will through violence and destruction. Sadly, this is not an exclusively western problem. In all of the so-called “highly developed” cultures defined by patriarchy and war, symbols of divine warriors justify the violence of men.  Laws said to have a divine source enshrine men’s control the sexuality of their wives, permit some men to rape some women, and allow some people to own other people as slaves.

Patriarchy is not simply the domination of women by men. Patriarchy is an integral system in which men’s control of women’s sexuality, private property, violence, war, and the institutions of conquest, rape, slavery arise and thrive together. The different elements are so intertwined that it is impossible to separate one as the cause of the others.  Patriarchy is an integral system of interlocking oppressions, enforced through violence.  The whole of the patriarchal system is legitimated by patriarchal religions.  This is why changing religious symbols is necessary if we hope to create alternatives to patriarchal systems.

The model of patriarchy I have proposed argues that control of female sexuality is fundamental to the patriarchal system.  This explains why there is so much controversy about the “simple matter” of access to birth control and abortion and so much anger directed at single mothers.  The model of patriarchy as an intergral system can help us to see that in order to end male domination we must also end war–and violence, rape, conquest, and slavery which are sanctioned as part of war.  We must also end the unequal distribution of wealth inherent in the notion of ”private” property, much of it the “spoils” of war, which led to the concept of patriarchal inheritance, which in turn required the control of female sexuality.  As feminists in religion we must identify and challenge the complex interlocking set of religious symbols which have sanctified the integral system of patriarchy–these include but are not limited to the image of God as male.  Ending patriarchy is no small task!

*I am offering a functional definition of patriarchy that does not address the separate question of why it originated.  I will be publishing an expanded version of this dicussion in the future.

This Article is from Feminism and Religion, February, 2013 

Carol P. Christ 

_______________________________________________________________

* I am deeply saddened to note that Dr. Carol Christ passed away this summer of 2021.  She is profoundly missed. Among her important books:  She Who Changes and Rebirth of the Goddess and the widely used anthologies Womanspirit Rising and Weaving the Visions. 

**"Rape in warfare is not bound by definitions of which wars are “just” or “unjust.” Rape was a weapon of terror as the German Hun marched through Belgium in World War I. Rape was a weapon of revenge as the Russian Army marched to Berlin in World War II. Rape got out of hand when the Pakistani Army battled Bangladesh. Rape reared its head as American GI’s searched and destroyed in the highland of Vietnam. Rape flourishes in warfare irrespective of nationality or geographic location. Rape was outlawed as a criminal act under the international rules of war. Yet rape persists as a common act of war.

Men who rape in war are ordinary Joes, made unordinary by the entry into the most exclusive male-only club in the world. Victory in arms brings group power undreamed of in civilian life. The unreal situation of a world without women becomes the prime reality. To take a life looms more significant than to make life, and the gun in the hand is power. The sickness of warfare feeds on itself. A certain number of soldiers must prove their newly won superiority – prove it to a woman, to themselves, to other men. In the name of victory and the power of the gun, war provides men with a tacit license to rape. In the act and in the excuse, rape in war reveals the male psyche in its boldest form, without the veneer of ”chivalry” or civilization."

......Against Our Will by Susan Brownmiller, 1975, Excerpts

DNA validates Marija Gimbutas Kurgan hypothesis

DNA validates Marija Gimbutas Kurgan hypothesis

 about the demise of Old Europe

 For those unfamiliar with the work of Marija Gimbutas, whose revolutionary work with archeology in what she called "Old Europe" has had tremendous impact in re-envisioning our "his-story", as she re-discovered the ancient World of the Goddess, wide-spread, long lived, peaceful civilizations that displayed no art or artifacts dedicated to war or conquest, and whose prime Deity was a Goddess, a Great Mother.  She believed that this culture was gradually extinguished by waves of Indo-European, horse riding nomads coming west from the Russian steppes - she called them the "Kurgans".  They were a very different culture than that of the Old European agriculturalists, with an emphasis upon conquest and "sky Gods" of war.  Gimbutas' controversial findings have been challenged by conventional archeologists repeatedly, yet she has influenced a huge following (which includes me).

ADDENDUM:  Here is a further related corroborating article someone posted on Facebook:

https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/how-genetics-is-settling-the-aryan-migration-debate/article19090301.ece/amp/

Also,  this Commentary (much better than mine!) from the Association of Study of Women and Mythology(ASWM):  

It also shows how DNA evidence can upset established archeological theories and bring rejected ones back into contention. The idea that Indo-European languages emanated from the Yamnaya homeland was established in 1956, by the Lithuanian-American archeologist Marija Gimbutas. Her view, known as the Kurgan hypothesis—named for the distinctive burial mounds that spread west across Europe—is now the most widely accepted theory about Indo-European linguistic origins. But, where many archeologists envisaged a gradual process of cultural diffusion, Gimbutas saw “continuous waves of expansion or raids.” As her career progressed, her ideas became more controversial. In Europe previously, Gimbutas hypothesized, men and women held relatively equal places in a peaceful, female-centered, goddess-worshipping society—as evidenced by the famous fertility figurines of the time. She believed that the nomads from the Caspian steppes imposed a male-dominated warrior culture of violence, sexual inequality, and social stratification, in which women were subservient to men and a small number of élite males accumulated most of the wealth and power.

 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/12/14/the-skeletons-at-the-lake

link to full article from the new yorker (excerpt below):

In Iberia during this time (of the "Kurgan" invasions into Old Europe), the local type of Y chromosome was replaced by an entirely different type. Given that the Y chromosome, found only in males, is passed down from father to son, this means that the local male line in Iberia was essentially extinguished. It is likely that the newcomers perpetrated a large-scale killing of local men, boys, and possibly male infants. Any local males remaining must have been subjugated in a way that prevented them from fathering children, or were so strongly disfavored in mate selection over time that their genetic contribution was nullified. The full genetic sequencing, however, indicated that about sixty per cent of the lineage of the local population was passed on, which shows that women were not killed but almost certainly subjected to widespread sexual coercion, and perhaps mass rape.

We can get a sense of this reign of terror by thinking about what took place when the descendants of those ancient Iberians sailed to the New World, events for which we have ample historical records. The Spanish conquest of the Americas produced human suffering on a grotesque scale—war, mass murder, rape, slavery, genocide, starvation, and pandemic disease. Genetically, as Reich noted, the outcome was very similar: in Central and South America, large amounts of European DNA mixed into the local population, almost all of it coming from European males. The same Y-chromosome turnover is also found in Americans of African descent. On average, a Black person in America has an ancestry that is around eighty per cent African and twenty per cent European. But about eighty per cent of that European ancestry is inherited from white males—genetic testimony to the widespread rape and sexual coercion of female slaves by slaveowners.

In the Iberian study, the predominant Y chromosome seems to have originated with a group called the Yamnaya, who arose about five thousand years ago, in the steppes north of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. By adopting the wheel and the horse, they became powerful and fearsome nomads, expanding westward into Europe as well as east- and southward into India. They spoke proto-Indo-European languages, from which most of the languages of Europe and many South Asian languages now spring. Archeologists have long known about the spread of the Yamnaya, but almost nothing in the archeological record showed the brutality of their takeover. “This is an example of the power of ancient DNA to reveal cultural events,” Reich told me.

It also shows how DNA evidence can upset established archeological theories and bring rejected ones back into contention. The idea that Indo-European languages emanated from the Yamnaya homeland was established in 1956, by the Lithuanian-American archeologist Marija Gimbutas. Her view, known as the Kurgan hypothesis—named for the distinctive burial mounds that spread west across Europe—is now the most widely accepted theory about Indo-European linguistic origins. But, where many archeologists envisaged a gradual process of cultural diffusion, Gimbutas saw “continuous waves of expansion or raids.” As her career progressed, her ideas became more controversial. In Europe previously, Gimbutas hypothesized, men and women held relatively equal places in a peaceful, female-centered, goddess-worshipping society—as evidenced by the famous fertility figurines of the time. She believed that the nomads from the Caspian steppes imposed a male-dominated warrior culture of violence, sexual inequality, and social stratification, in which women were subservient to men and a small number of élite males accumulated most of the wealth and power.

The DNA from the Iberian skeletons can’t tell us what kind of culture the Yamnaya replaced, but it does much to corroborate Gimbutas’s sense that the descendants of the Yamnaya caused much greater disruption than other archeologists believed. Even today, the Y chromosomes of almost all men of Western European ancestry have a high percentage of Yamnaya-derived genes, suggesting that violent conquest may have been widespread. 

INVOCATION by Robin Williamson at Mabon

Brushwood 2016 by Theresa Guzman

"I, the Song, I walk here."

........Lakota poem

I've posted this before..............and like a loop, it returns to my mind at this full moon Equinox,  so beautiful, this Day of Balance which was also, in olden times, Mabon, the Second Harvest Festival.  

You who will come with me

I will consider it Beauty

I will consider it

Beauty, beauty

,,,,,,Robin Williamson 

 

Every morning when I rise with the sun to water my garden, I find myself  talking to all the people that live there.  The tall sunflowers, making seeds beloved by finches and sparrows.  The desert tortoise, Augustus, who has decided to live here and occasionally makes his mysterious appearance.  My cats of course.  The green scarab beetles getting drunk on tree sap.  The bees, having a drink at the bird bath. The heavy pomogranates pulling the tree down now, the cosmos flowers as tall as I am now.  The  woodpecker loudly telling me that I need to fill the bird feeder,  butterflies and funny looking caterpillars eating holes in leaves. The morning is not so hot now, and it is tender, reminding me of some song I can't quite remember, but a Song that is infinitely sweet, with a touch of bitter sweet, like Irish music, which always seems to remember the transience of things.  

As a child, the garden was full of people.  Now, as an old woman, I seem to have returned to that happy experience.  I try, in my very little eco-system, to create Good Relationship with all My Relations that honor me by living there.  Even the ones that chew up my flowers.  

"To the native Irish, the literal representation of the country was less important than its poetic dimension.  In traditional Bardic culture, the terrain was studied, discussed, and referenced:  every place had its legend and its own identity....what endured was the mythic landscape."

    R.F. Foster

There was a time when humans thought of themselves as part of the Circle of the majestic cycles of the planet, and as part of the great family of life - when they negotiated with the animals and the elementals, when they listened to the voices of the trees and the medicine plants, when they thanked the buffalo or the reindeer or the seals for their sacrifice, when, I believe,  they celebrated the harvests and the auspicious days as part of the great Song, their voices adding to the chorus.   ("Chante:  to sing").  We can re-member ("to join")  this en-chanted paradigm,  and learn to speak to each mythic landscape again.   I feel Robin Williamson's beautiful poem so fully captures that vision.

I share it again and again because I love it, the Bard, because I want this Voice to not be forgotten.  And Oh!  As the moon shines down in its fullness on this day of quinox,  I wish all, all, all it's fullness and abundance and promise.

Found at the Chalice Well in Glastonbury, UK.

You that create the diversity of the forms:

Open to my words
You that divide it and multiply it

Hear my sounds

Ancient associates and fellow wanderers
You that move the heart in fur and scale

I join with you

You that sing bright and subtle
Making shapes 
that my throat cannot tell

You that harden the horn
And make quick the eye

You that run the fast fox 
and the zigzag fly

You sizeless makers of the mole
And of the whale:  aid me and I will aid you

You that lift the blossom
and the green branch
You who make symmetries more true

Who dance in slower time

Who watch the patterns

You rough coated
Who eat water

Who stretch deep and high
With your green blood
My red blood 

let it be mingled

Aid me and I will aid you

Silbury Hill, Wiltshire, UK

I call upon you

You who are unconfined
Who have no shape
Who are not seen

But only in your action
I will call upon you

You who have no depth
But choose direction

Who bring what is willed
That you blow love
upon the summers of my loved ones
That you blow summers
 upon those loves of my love


Aid me and I will aid you

I make a pact with you

You who are the liquid
Of the waters
And the spark of the flame:

I call upon you

You who make fertile the soft earth
And guard the growth of the growing things
I make peace with you

You who are the blueness of the blue sky
And the wrath of the storm
I take the cup with you

Earth shakers

And with you
the sharp and the hollow hills
I make reverence to you

Round wakefulness 

We call the Earth

I make wide eyes to you

You who are awake

Every created thing
both solid and sleepy
Or airy light,
I weave colors 'round you

You who will come with me

I will consider it Beauty

I will consider it

Beauty, beauty

by Robin Williamson 

Published by  WARLOCK MUSIC, LTD.

https://youtu.be/7xvIDX9gKhg

David Whyte and "Belonging"

It doesn't interest me if there is one God or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned.
If you know despair or can see it in others.
I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need to change you.
If you can look back with firm eyes
saying "this is where I stand."

I want to know if you know how to melt
into that fierce heat of living
falling toward the center of your longing.
I want to know if you are willing to live,
day by day,
with the consequence of love
and the bitter unwanted passion of sure defeat.
I have been told, in that fierce embrace,
even the gods speak of God.

 

.............from "Fire in the Earth", by David Whyte

 

I increasingly crave refuge from the harshness and distracting speed, speed, speed of modern life, and perhaps most of all, the awful numbing desensitizing of it all, the lack of focus or passion in the midst of nano-second, scroll down life .  

I found my way back to the familiar poetry of visionary David Whyte.  Although the second poem is a winter poem, and it is almost Mabon, the Harvest and advent of beautiful fall, still, I wanted to  absorb it again. 

David Whyte's poetry has always had a way of bringing me home.

 

From "The winter of Listening"

All this petty worry
while the great cloak
of the sky grows dark and

 intense round every living thing.

 

What is precious
inside us does not
care to be known
by the mind
in ways that diminish
its presence.

What we strive for
in perfection
is not what turns us
into the lit angel
we desire,

what disturbs
and then nourishes
has everything
we need.

Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.

Even with the summer
so far off
I feel it grown in me
now and ready
to arrive in the world.

All those years listening to those
who had nothing to say.

All those years forgetting
how everything
has its own voice
to make itself heard.

All those years
forgetting how easily
you can belong to everything
simply by listening.

And the slow difficulty
of remembering
how everything is born from
an opposite 

and miraculous
otherness.

Silence and winter
has led me to that
otherness.

So let this winter
of listening
be enough
for the new life
I must call my own.

. . . . . . . . . .

by David Whyte

Remembering 9/11: "On the Beach"

 

"I call you back, girl, I call you back.

I am at the other end of this life now

yet your footprints touch mine beneath the sand,

I follow them.

On the beach your sand prayers

ring here still,  the Earth

is my witness."

I wrote this poem on the beach at Mendocino, California, exactly a month after the twin towers fell in New York on September 11th, 2001.  It was a beautiful day, children were playing in the surf, seagulls calling overhead.  And there I sat, while I felt a great cloud of death and destruction gathering far away, a cloud that would soon affect all our lives.  And so it was:  we saw a 20 year war in Afghanistan, and the invasion of Iraq.  Millions died, mostly civilians.  All for what?  

As I sat there I remembered a famous  1959 movie with Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner,  based on the book by Neville Shute  "On the Beach".  Written at the height of the Cold War, it was about a radioactive cloud that had destroyed America and Europe and Russia as the aftermath of a nuclear war,  a doom that  was slowly moving toward Australia.  The people of Australia had just a year  to wait for their own demise, and the film depicts how they do that.  

Since then a new Tower has been built, Afghanistan has returned to the same tyrants that controlled  the country before 9/11 and George Bush's wars,  the dead are mostly forgotten, and a whole generation of young people view the whole thing as ancient history.  What remains,  then and now?  Gaia. 

ON THE BEACH (Oct. 11th, 2001)

One month after the world ended

The little island world we,

the privileged few, could pretend

was safe, forever, and righteous

The fallen towers, fiery messengers

of unfathomable destruction yet to come.

Tourists walk barefoot on the familiar beach.

They came here, I imagine,

as I have, not to forget, but to remember.

To remember driftwood and high tide -

a red dog and a yellow-haired child

as they enter the water -

their cries of goodly shock and honest forevers

always new, always cold,

always blue.

A white heron,

balanced in perfect equanimity on one leg.

Wave forms overlay my feet......

transparent hieroglyphs of infinity.

Her way of speaking.

Gaia.  Her manifest, unspoken words.

A brown man lies beside the mossy cliff,

spread-eagled between sky and sea and land.

Sand sunk, leaf-molten,

blackberry thorn,

into the green:  

toes, fingers, flesh

reaching into the green

redeeming Earth.

He is rooting himself.

He is taking himself back.

I lie down in grateful imitation,

a stranger in companionable human proximity

sharing this rite of remembering.

I  see her now,  I see a girl

walking on this very beach.

Yesterday, and 40 years ago.

Sourcing, she is 

sourcing the one who lives here

a river Goddess with no name.

She has made a mermaid offering

of sticks and sand and seaweed.

Companions arrive, offer shells,

and return to Berkeley.

To Vietnam, the Cold War, the Berlin Wall,

the war, the wall,

the war, the walls.

The war,

and the summer of love.

("the revolution will not be televised")

A generation to end war, raise hell,

raise consciousness,

raise Atlantis,

and raise the new and Golden Age

("the revolution will not be televised")

How did we get here from there?

I call you back, girl,

I call you back.

I am at the other end of this life now

yet your footprints touch mine beneath the sand,

I follow them.

On the beach

your sand prayers

ring here still,

The Earth

is my witness.

Lauren Raine (2001)

from APHRODITE IN BROOKLYN and Other Mythic Voices 

The Rune of Ending

I see now that posting poems  from APHRODITE IN BROOKLYN and Other Mythic Voices  has become a means for me to explore my memoirs as well as my poetry.  I find it good to see where these poems came from......they are all touchstones along the way.

This one was an Obituary for the end of my second marriage.  I wrote it shortly after the divorce was finalized, and just before I left my home and the community we shared  on the East Coast and headed West with my cat and worldly goods in my van,  for destinations  unknown.  I felt very much that I had to begin a new life at that time, and I had to give honor to the life that was over with the divorce.  Which included grief, anger, and remorse for my own unconscious  and sometimes abusive behavior.  Sometimes the end of a relationship is as much a gift for growth as the beginning.  

Eventually I ended up in California, back in Berkeley, where I had started from more than  20 years before and a whole new adventure began.   But that is another story, fraught with synchronicities and creativity.  But first I had to grieve and praise.

I have never done marriage well, and I bear my ex no ill will, indeed, I think of him with affection.   I doubt he shares my opinion, which is ok.  At the end of the day, are relationships really "failures" when they end?  They last however long they last.  Or don't last.   What we take away, be it friendship or enmity, memories kept or discarded,  is experience and growth.  At the time I wrote this poem he had just met a woman who, I believe, he is still with, and I am glad that he found a partnership I could not give him. 

 

The Rune of Ending

 What can be said, now

when all words are spent

and the word has finally been spoken: 

we go now to our separate houses

relieved.  At least a course has been named.

 

Our lives are severed, our story is told.

We will each surely tell that story, and strive and laugh

and talk late into the night, and kiss lips salty

with tears and love;

but not with each other, not again.

 

Here the tearing ends, here ends remorse and reprisal,

here end dreams and plans.

 

We will not travel to Scotland,

Walk together among ancient monoliths

in the white mists of our imagination.

We will not walk, again, on a warm beach in Mexico,

toasting each other with margaritas.

That was once.  It has to be enough.

 

I will not call you mine, husband.

You will not call me yours.

And our cat is now your cat, our teapot is now my teapot.

I touch a potted plant,

remembering its place on our breakfast table.

We divide the spoils, humane, courteous, fair.

 

A canyon has opened between us, we are each old enough

to know its name, to view its depths without passion.

There is no bridge to cross this time.

 

Beloved, I must now forgive myself as well as you,

cast my stone into this abyss

and bless the woman who has not yet come

to stand by your side,

wave with grace from across this canyon's lip,

then turn,

and walk my own path.

(1997)

from APHRODITE IN BROOKLYN and Other Mythic Voices