August 26, 2009
REPOSTED on 10.25.10…IN HONOR OF VIRGINIA WOOLF’S BIRTHDAY.
Dinner is served at Ragdale at precisely six thirty in the evening, which presents me with a wonderful conundrum, because that is also the perfect angle of light as the sun begins to set over the prairie. There are a few paths mown through the prairie – they criss-cross each other occasionally, which means I can catch various plants backlit on one side of the path, and spotlighted on the other. If I get there when the light is right, the veins in their leaves stand out, and I can run around collecting a full array of my desired shapes and geometries.
I love food. I love golden hour. Tonight I tried to do both – run out for an hour of good light and then high-tail it back home being only a little late for sit-down.
I look at my watch and it’s 6:30, and I decide I can go ahead and slip another couple rolls in the cameras…I was working today with the Czech cameras, and they’re so simple and elegant to interact with that it’s hard to find a stopping place…the cameras with the obnoxious loading apparatus are much easier to put down.
Around exposure three, I have hunkered down between a half-dead crabapple tree and a mutant milkweed pod, plotting the composition. I see a cloud approaching my precious sun, and I have only an instant to wonder damn, will that kill my light? before my querelous reverie is matched by another’s voice, with a familiar melody –
how do you catch a cloud and pin it down?
I look up at my tree – a flibertijibbit! says the voice. I look across at my milkweed pods – a will-o’-the-whisp! And then, before I even have a chance to think, the voice gets around to ridiculing me, tricked out with my crazy leather camera bandolier – A CLOWN! I nearly fell over into a bush of poison berries.
Now there is a chorus of voices: She climbs a tree, and scrapes her knee! Says another, her dress has got a tear! It does! Right at the hem! She waltzes all across the grass, and whistles at the bear! It’s true. I whistle at bears. I know it’s going to get worse. And underneath the crinkles, she has whirlers in her hair!
At this point, I realize that it’s nearly seven, unpredictable as weather, and I’m out on the prairie all sweaty and covered in brambles she’s as flighty as a feather and my hair is a disaster and I’M TERRIBLY LATE FOR DINNER!
As I leap up, gather my cameras, and stretch out into a gallop, the nuns are still arguing at it – SHE’S ALWAYS LATE FOR EVERYTHING! says one, and another replies, EXCEPT FOR EVERY MEAL! says another.
I begin to tune out as their voices fade into my breathless run (She’s always late for scrabble… but her penitence is real…) There are no edelweiss or Nazis here, but there is lots of Queen Anne’s lace, and quite a few mosquitos.
As I reach the dining room in a transfiguration of dishevelment, I see the candles are lit, and the twelve are gathered around the steaming plates of food, and when the heads turn in my direction I realize that yes, my Sound of Music fixation has finally come home to roost.
Other than a convent, how often do you have a house full of women, each with a room of their own, and the time and space for complete devotion to their own unimpeded self-expression, without distraction, without duty, without interruption, with none of the time-honored domestic responsibilities that all too often serve as the killer of dreams?
Perhaps I’m a bit sentimental, but I find it pretty powerful. I sit here all day and long into the night and even into the morning, working, and realize this is how boy artists managed to get such a remarkable amount of fame and fortune accomplished. For, oh, the past several thousand years.
My grandmother was unable to earn her PhD in mathematics at Harvard simply because that institution would not grant an advanced degree in mathematics to a woman. I wish she had had a room of her own here at Ragdale.
One of my colleagues here mentioned that at a certain esteemed Southern university campus, female students cannot live in the sorority house because that would violate the laws against brothels – defined as a house exclusively full of women.
Homosocial societies.
When I get up to forage for food at three in the morning, the lights are on under many of the other women’s doors as well. I know they are in there working. It makes me smile. I facebook with an artist in another studio, and we joke about my tower, and all the women writers who have resided here before me, and our shared awareness of that spectral figure, the madwoman in the attic, the tower, the garret…pacing, restless, and in pain.
“When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
– Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
All evening, that song from The Sound of Music has been chattering away in my ears, insisting from somewhere in my nine year old, firmly imprinted psyche, that something is there and needs attending to:
How do you solve a problem like Maria? How do you catch a cloud and pin it down? How do you make her stay, and listen to all you say? How do you keep a wave upon the sand? Oh, how do you solve a problem like Maria? How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?
I sit here writing in bed beneath my moon window, at the door of my tower, and the obvious answer is that she’s not a problem, she mustn’t be pinned down, she mustn’t be made to stay, she mustn’t be kept on the shore, and don’t ever try to restrain a moonbeam.
“Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh.”
– Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
I read a economic study recently that said that women comprise 1% of the world’s landowners. For all who think the idea of a room of one’s own is outdated, or trite, let that figure sink in.
In a world where such a tiny fraction own land, a room is still relevant – indeed, a room is the least we should expect. Or look around LA, where more women are urged to create fantastic bodies, than supported in creating fantastic bodies of work.
Since I’ve arrived, I feel so many women “walking amongst us in the flesh.” Each of us women who have in some way achieved rooms of our own are accompanied by so many others who walk beside us…either because they have made it possible, or because they lacked the possibility, or because they are quietly hatching their own possibility.
Yesterday, along a walk, I came across a bench dedicated to one of these women – the plaque said that in 1897 as a small child, she liked to play under that tree. Since it was built, Ragdale was a haven for the Shaw women, who came here to write and paint and compose and create and dream. “Howard himself an architect, his mother Sarah a painter, his wife Frances a poet and playwright, his daughter Sylvia a sculptor, his granddaughter the poet Alice Judson Hayes who endowed Ragdale as a colony.” A man surrounded by four generations of empowered, creative women – that says everything. That is a legacy. That’s what my father’s mother accomplished, and it is an eternal heritage. One hundred years later, Sarah’s lineage still inspires: there are photos on the walls of buxom Victorian women in expansive hats, wide-legged in front of easels in the open prairie, hair wild, painting.
I feel them here, the Shaw women who were blessed with Virginia Woolf’s prescription. Who had a man in their lives who used his privilege to improve their lives, and not add obstacle and disadvantage. Blessings to them for creating a feminist legacy. Every generation of women has it a little better than the one that came before – but all of us are standing there right at the edge of the promised land. Thank you, all the women who are older than I am by decades or by centuries, who worked so that I might be here. And thanks to my true love, who always shares the weight so that I can create. Take a look at that photo above – Howard built an outdoor theatre so that his wife could perform her plays. So to all my brothers out there…ahem.
My friend Marie told me of a friend of hers, quite advanced in age, whose kitchen is graced with an enormous poster of a witch. The poster reads:
FUCK
HOUSEWORK
So tonight, this goes out to all my sisters out there in Chinese orphanages, artist residencies, brothels, convents, sororities, domestic violence shelters, nursing homes, mental hospitals, chocolate shops, and all the other women’s communities out there in the world – may we all have a good night, tonight. May we all wake to climb a tree, scrape our knees, waltz, whistle, sing, and be always a bit more bold.
(and really, fuck housework.)