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Article Excerpt
This essay explores the desire, or more accurately, the need to write back through the body that pulses beneath the lines of Mary Swander's poetry and prose.
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How surprised we are to find we live here, Here within our bodies.--Eric Pankey, "Santo Spirito" Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies.--Helene Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa"
The desire or, more accurately, the need to write back through the body pulses beneath the lines of Mary Swander's poetry and prose. From her first book of poems, Succession: Poems, to her most recent memoir, The Desert Pilgrim: En Route to Mysticism and Miracles, Swander has made every effort to write and rewrite her way back through the flesh, the body she claims and which claims her, shaping not only the patterns of her life but her emotional and spiritual centre as well. Her Catholic heritage, her life as a citizen of the rural Midwest, her struggles with environmental illness and other physical maladies, and her particular feminist vision coalesce in her work in ways that not only challenge the dominant views of illness and the body that harbours it but also the traditional Western conception of the soul and the paths we may choose to better understand the relationship between body and soul, flesh and spirit.
Many feminist writers have worked to expose and critique the patriarchal prison-house of language and its accompanying ideologies and theologies. Much of this critique focuses upon the harmful and degrading vision of women's bodies bound up in the crass dichotomies of virgin and whore, mother and prostitute. This razor edge turn from beatific beauty to demonized object of lust leaves no space for the range of emotions and physical attributes that a woman may possess. Such objectification encourages in women the idea of abandonment: the leaving of one's body behind to be ravaged or used by its cultural counterparts but never to be known or explored in its integrative whole. To acquiesce to such pressures, although fully human and understandable, tells a tragic story of loss and the perpetuation of a sickness that not only poisons the individual but also the ecosystems in which we live, the environments that we help to create and sustain with our behaviours and beliefs. At the root of such abusive models is a profound ignorance about what comprises the act of human being. In "The Laugh of the Medusa," Helene Cixous explains that "by writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display" (337-38). To look at the self, embedded in the body, as somehow separate, set upon a pedestal for the world to ogle and use as it sees fit, is to undo the intricate webbing of flesh and spirit, to rend one from the other in an act so destructive that what remains is hardly recognizable. The outcome, of course, is to make another less than whole, to take away her very being, because implicit in the word being is the idea of activity not stagnation. When we objectify another, we first tear from his or her person any true sense of the active self and all of the prospects and conundrums such activity implies. With mobility comes the possibility for change, for difference, for potential beyond the present. When we objectify, we paint our limited idea of that person upon the page of utility, capturing her as a one or two dimensional object, holding her in a stagnant world, fixed in the present where the many dimensions of her person are denied, cut off from their sources to slowly vanish in a sadistic act of attrition. In such acts of denial, the threat of death lurks; we rob the other of any possibility beyond the lie we have created. For this reason, Cixous cries out to the woman artist, imploring her to "write your self. [...] Your body must be heard" (338).
This fundamental cry to write the body into existence becomes that much more poignant for Swander because not only is she marginalized as a woman artist but also as a person who has struggled with an ongoing battle against physical pain and its crippling effects. While at one time in the not-so-distant past disease and physical defects were considered the sign of moral imperfection, the result of some "sin" in the person's life, our contemporary view, although a bit more enlightened, still does not make much room for images or stories of those who struggle with disease or handicap. As Nancy Mairs, a poet and essayist who lives with the debilitating effects of multiple sclerosis, explains, "Physical imperfection, even freed of moral disapprobation, still defies and violates the ideal, especially for women, whose confinement in their bodies as objects of desire is far from over" (Plain 16). Despite, or perhaps because of these forces, Swander struggles mightily to rework and rewrite our culture's traditional ideas about the body, placing her own body in a matrilineal line that she seeks to recover in the stories she tells about her great grandmother, her grandmother, and her mother.
In Carnal Acts, Mairs contends that the pervasive dichotomy between body and soul, flesh and spirit, is reflected in our naming of these ideas as separate entities and in our hierarchical privileging of one over the other. In the Western world, Mairs explains, we say "I have a body," rather than "I am a body," and in doing so we "widen the rift between the self and the body," making it possible to "treat our bodies as subordinates, inferior in moral status" (84). To say one has a body suggests an act of ownership. In a cultural landscape that increasingly encourages us to believe that we may possess virtually anything we want and in turn to discard what we no longer desire, this is a truly frightening prospect. To be a body demands that we acknowledge the ways in which we are rooted in the physical world, to examine how our very flesh shapes the ways we think and act, to understand that there is no returning or discarding the bodies we have been born into for a refund or an exchange. As a poet, playwright, essayist, and editor, Swander's work continually explores the multifaceted dimensions of this crass and often unhealthy dichotomy, insisting that not only does she have a body, but she is a body--inseparable from it.
The title of her third book of poems, Heaven-and-Earth House: Poems, names this way of seeing most clearly. Our body houses both heaven and earth; the mind and soul are bound up in the flesh that must be fed, the body that must be allowed sleep and rest. In their research, the scientific community increasingly demonstrates the vital connections between one's psyche and one's physical well-being; the heaven of our emotions and intellect can rule the earth that is our body with either despair or hope. Out of this metaphoric and physical relationship, Swander writes about...
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