1687 3064 1 pb

The Goddess As A Curved Line: Coding Women's Wisdom Pamela Collins We have rolled the stone away from the cave, stood together or alone in the sacred groves, among the circled stones, illuminated by moonlight and crystals and there we have called her name: Diana, Isis, Morganna, Ishtar, White Buffalo Woman. In Cerridwen's cauldron the blood, milk and tears of our body are held safely now, no longer poured on the ground and wasted but collected and transformed into music, art and poetry -- a way of knowing. The reawakening of the Goddess has been a boon to women, the extent of which we continue to explore. But everything that enters our lives, even (and perhaps especially) those things which are gifts, must be watched carefully, used with caution, and protected.

As we move our consideration of the Goddess from the sacred grove to the academy, we should be aware of the co-optation of Goddess imagery by the patriarchy. Classical mythology, from which we draw many of our Goddess images, derives from an already misogynistic society. If some of the "Goddess" philosophy that comes from that mythology doesn't always feel quite right, there are some very good reasons for it. Adrienne Rich, in Of Woman Born, cites some of the misogynistic attitudes that cover themselves with a false cloak of Great Mother worship, and notes that "feminists have sometimes become polarized between the ‘matriarchal' and the ‘Amazonian' ideal..." (p. 85). Eve or Lilith, Angel or whore, the age-old dichotomy that drives women into impossible choices and the fragmentation of the self is as easily supported by Goddess imagery as any other system or mythology. As in the case that Rich cites, the polarization supported by these images contributes to divisiveness within the feminist movement. While radical, separatist feminists and non-separatists struggle to maintain a dialogue based on mutual respect, anti-feminists claim evidence for their edification of the "matriarchal" or "love Goddess" image at the expense of the Amazon who is falsely represented as monstrously independent, man-mutilating and child-gobbling. The ease with which Goddess imagery can become co-opted is evident everywhere from Disney to the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated.

Despite their vulnerability however, literal images of the Goddess can be wonderfully vivid and useful. They compel creativity, visualization and identification. Like a totem, they embody characteristics and ideas we may wish to keep at a conscious level during our everyday activities. Sometimes when I daydream at my window, I let myself imagine the tall greycloaked women of the Irish Sidhe folk wandering among the birch and scrub pines of the woods behind my house. Before long, I find that I am out-of-doors myself, wandering the trails of Volume 13, Number 1

SPRING 2001

phoebe

61

The Goddess As A Curved Line the old rock walls, seeking nothing but what comes to me. I know I haven't the power to disappear into the woods. Eventually, I must return home to the work left undone, but I always do so soothed, satisfied to be a woman walking with the earth. The image of the Sidhe woman compels me, helps me break through lassitude and habit to become self-creative.

But literal images of the Goddess can backfire as well. They encourage what John Gardner refers to as the "ingested metaphor," an image so powerful, so pervasive that we lose sight of it as artifice, accepting it as unquestionable and immutable. In her book Mother Knot, Jane Lazarre considers the image of the Mother Goddess neither a comfort nor inspiration, but rather a nagging reminder of the exhausted sense of inadequacy that so often engulfs a new mother: I tried to piece all of our expectations into the image of a beautiful woman whose being I would then don like a golden gown...a strong but gentle Amazon whose body I might gracefully inhabit.

Mother, goddess of love, to whom we all can go for protection and unconditional love, perfect human being we have all been taught to believe in, whom poets have compared to the earth itself, who kneels down, arms outstretched, to enclose us and fend off the rains, whom none of us has ever met but who continues to haunt us mercilessly; Mother, I can't find you, let alone be you. (9) Estella Lauter reminds us, in Women As Mythmakers, that "once a myth is in place, it is nearly impossible to dislodge it by exclusively rational means. It must be replaced by another equally persuasive story or symbol" (l).

The transformative potential of the Goddess in the minds of women is too potent a force to trust to traditional mythic systems alone or encode only in directly observable signs. As a crafty dragon might reconsider hiding all her treasures in one cave, we need to create a variety of perceptual patterns for understanding the Goddess.

I believe we need to humanize the Goddess, understand her wisdom in a way that circumvents Lazarre's frustrated inability to "be" the Great Mother. We best accomplish that by temporarily moving away from physical images to consider exactly what she stands for in intellectual and philosophical terms. What is the way-of-being-in-the-world she signifies that we wish to study and emulate, even eventually to deconstruct?

Starhawk speaks of "the other mode of perception that is broad, holistic, and undifferentiated, sees patterns and relationships rather than fixed objects. It is the mode of starlight: dim and silvery, revealing the play of woven branches and the dance of the shadows, sensing pathways as spaces in the whole" (l8). The way of women's wisdom is a relational one that accepts paradox, escapes dualism and

The Goddess As A Curved Line understands circularity without being locked into non-evolutionary repetition.

Starhawk chooses the spiral to represent the play of women's wisdom in the world.

She speaks of the "gifted shamans" who "could attune themselves to the spirits of the herds, and in so doing they became aware of the pulsating rhythm that infuses all life, the dance of the double spiral, of whirling into being, and whirling out again" (3). Starhawk's explanation of the helical nature of the universe mirrors the recent theories of the quantum physicists who now recognize that our previous conception of life as fixed and solid is inaccurate. Starhawk explains: "All things are swirls of energy, vortexes of moving forces, currents in an ever-changing sea" (l8). "We are all ‘swirls' of the same energy, yet each swirl is unique in its own form and pattern" (25). "Matter sings, by its very nature. The song is carried forth on waves that become spheres. The waves are the waves of orgasm, light waves, ocean waves, pulsating electrons, waves of sound." (Starhawk 26) As apt as Starhawk's spiral image is, I would like to reduce it further, to its smallest recognizable component: the curve. Frail though this tiny image appears, like the magic bag that holds the four winds, it nevertheless swells with the potentiality of new perceptions of Goddess wisdom as well as being discernable in traditional goddess imagery.

Curve becomes spiral becomes coil becomes horn Idea becomes substance becomes change.

The moon, mirror, cauldron, horn are all items associated with the Goddess. Their metaphorical implications are rich - some immediately recognizable, others providing inexhaustible grist for our creative mills. The curved line functions in relation to these images and can expand their implications.

Of all the Goddess's accessories, the mirror speaks most to the self-sufficiency and secrecy of women's knowledge. With the help of the mirror, a woman can know her own body and heal it. In patriarchal mythology, the mirror often represents narcissistic self-absorption, but a broader look exposes the limitations/error of that perception. The mirror is the curved concavity in which one experiences not just the reflection of the self in the Now but how one stands in relation to others in the passage of time. It both contains and reflects, expresses movement out and movement in. Who stands behind us as we gaze past the reflection of self? How do the images we see compare to what we saw yesterday -- and what we expect to see tomorrow? In her poem "The Mirror," Sylvia Plath speaks of the past and future rising toward the mirror-gazer: "in me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman/Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish."

The Goddess As A Curved Line If the mirror is the most personal of Goddess images, the moon is certainly the most popular -- almost clichĂŠd in some of its interpretations. When we apply the "curved line" abstraction to the moon's symbolism, however, we find a powerful vehicle for escaping dualism. In the traditional view, the moon epitomizes polarity both in its perpetual travel between full and new as well as in its relationship to the sun. But if we focus on the curve, the half moon, the time of waxing and waning, we move into Starhawk's dance of the shadows. The so-called poles of the new and full moon are perceived as such only because phallocentric thinking is predisposed to dividing experience up in a dichotomized way. The new and full moon are no more terminals of a process than is the half moon. We gain much by freeing ourselves from such linear, polarized thinking. Focusing on the curved aspect of the moon can facilitate the paradigm shift many of our best thinkers are now calling for, a shift in perceptual set nicely evoked by writing theorist George Kelly. Kelly calls for "our recognition of the essentially active nature of our universe. The world is not an abandoned monument. It is an event of tremendous proportions, the conclusion of which is not yet apparent" (in Emig l65). The moon's flux is continual, its face a play of light and shade. The dance of the curve across the sphere continually reminds us of the "essentially active nature of our universe" inviting speculation on its "proportions" and "conclusions."

On occasion, I am treated to the sight of the moon rising on its back. The crescent appears as a saucer or dish, inspiring me with a tremendous urge to fill it with something I needed to be rid of. In its hugeness the moon can hold it, absorb it, as a giant's palm might hold a single tear. On one such occasion, I chose to give away frustration – to let it go, lost in the bottom of the moon’s bowl, or the magical cauldron of rejuvenation.

Cerridwen's cauldron, from Celtic mythology, has the power to rejuvenate soldiers killed in battle, but they return to life without voice for they have been the subject of women's mysteries and must therefore remain silent. The cauldron, vessel, or earthen pot has the power of transformation. Through the ability to "contain," it derives its power to store, transport, ferment and cook and hence its centrality as a symbol of civilization. Its power emancipates us from the drudgery of daily food gathering, and encourages the higher activities of self-actualization and creativity. Curved ropes of clay coiled together form the pot, the saucer, the curve of transformation. Thus the curved line is both form and substance.

For me, the cauldron is one of the most compelling images associated with the Goddess. In its multiplicity of powers to receive, transform, and give, its implications are fertile and elusive. Not until I began working with the image of the simple curve did I realize the most potent relationship of all: the connection between the cauldron and the outstretched hand. A close friend has been sending me cards featuring the art of Frank Howell. My favorite is "The Gift," a picture of an elder Native American woman. White feathers float among the locks of her thin gray hair; a black cloak covers all but her face and a single weathered hand,

The Goddess As A Curved Line stretched out, palm upward, in offering. I've stared at this card for hours, contemplating the many gifts given from the grandmother's hand, and I suspect the picture of having inspired my concept of the curve. I've been thinking a lot about hands lately. My hands. They persistently remind me of my own aging.

Horribly wrinkled - especially noticeable next to the unblemished smoothness of my daughter's hands -- they're less strong these days. They're marked with brown "age spots" too, like those I remember seeing on my grandmother's hands.

But those spotted, wrinkled hands of my grandmother were the hands that built the patio at our summer camp, reconstructed the stone fireplace so it wouldn't smoke any more, and taught me to find the delicious wild spearmint that grew in the woods. In that way, the age spots are a comfort. If they signal a resemblance to my grandmother, perhaps they assure me I will learn her ability to do what's needed with excitement rather than complaint, to bring a sweetness to life while never ceasing to be adamantly realistic.

Brooke Medicine Eagle teaches us of the "Grandmother Lodge,� the societal role of elder women. When women pass the stage of giving away the power of their blood, they enter the time of teaching their wisdom, of guarding and encouraging the "Law of Good Relationship" which teaches us to be "in good relationship with all things and all beings in the great hoop of life." Brooke Medicine Eagle suggests that "many of us who are younger and don't yet experience ourselves as elders are being called into the Grandmother Lodge because there is an urgent need for the awakening of this function among women."

As the Grandmother stretches out her hand I feel her gift of connectedness but sense she is also asking to receive something from me. As she sweetly speaks "Here," she commands me to "Come," to commit myself beyond awareness to action. Perhaps this is the gift of grace, of knowing a way of Being that keeps one going despite the apparent futility of it all. When the Grandmother asks for commitment, it carries the force of age. As we age, we often contemplate the ease of "retirement" from the struggle of life. How easily we succumb to the urge to shut down, to stall the mind, freeze the heart, expect the young to find the lost paths.

On the other hand, vital age is, in itself, a statement of persistence, open-heartedness. The active, outstretched hand of the Grandmother suggests we use all our resources, to seek together useful patterns for the complexities of our age. The simple curved line can codify this evocation of relationship and involvement.

In The White Goddess, Robert Graves theorizes that the ancient Druids developed a secret code based on the Ogham alphabet that they transmitted through hand gestures. In that way, the "knowing" could secretly communicate the ancient wisdom among themselves in the midst of hostile forces. And so it seems to me that a single hand can become our mutable and portable reminder of the complex imagery of the Goddess. A hand held out, curved, palm upward can signify the cauldron of life and transformation, the sacred vessel. The same hand

The Goddess As A Curved Line moved toward the face becomes the mirror in which we read the history of our lives in the lines of the palm. The hand moved sideways is the half moon. Joined by the other hand in a mirrored position, we can imagine a flower, a tree, a vulva – the concavity from which life emerges. Together our hands dance, and together our hands make our lives meaningful.

Now that we have explored the relationship of the curved line to Goddess wisdom, we can easily see it in unexpected places. We will feel it in the touch of a friend, see it in the curved lines that make up language, design, billboards.

“Curve ahead”? Quite so. Just as the curved line pervades most of what we see in the natural world (and some of what humankind produces although we tend to construct everything from our homes to our thoughts in straight lines), we will come to see the Goddess in everything, in unexpected places, sometimes concealed, sometimes predominant. In every circle, we can see the curve that segments it, that implies an impulse to circularity but defies over-determinism or premature closure. Let the curved line remind us there is always more to be said, some aspect that hasn't been seen, a voice that has been overlooked. As we struggle to find a benign way of living with the earth, I suggest that it is the business of the Goddess, of women's wisdom, to find the curve in things.

Works Cited Emig, Janet A. The Web of Meaning. New Jersey: Boynton/Cook Publishers. l983.

Graves, Robert. The White Goddess. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. l948.

Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. l984.

Lauter, Estella. Women as Mythmakers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. l984.

Lazarre, Jane. The Mother Knot. Boston: Beacon Press. l976.

Medicine Eagle, Brooke. "Grandmother Lodge." WILDFIRE_Magazine: Vol. III No. 4. l9-22.

Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born. New York: W. W. Norton. l986.

Starhawk. The Spiral Dance. San Francisco: Harper and Row. l979.