November 16, 198-
Dear Ruth,
Ever
since that day on the beach, I feel I have slipped into an abyss. I have given
myself completely to Candice. And when I am with her, I feel a wonderful, paradoxically
content yet excited. But when I’m away from her I’m haunted by guilt. Oh,
Ruth, am I so lonely that I must make love to another woman? Do I mistrust the
world so much, especially men, that I must turn to my own sex for love and
pleasure? I have suffered feelings that I believe I do not deserve, but which I
cannot drive away. They are the same feelings that drove me from Albuquerque.
And I can’t really blame Mother for making me feel like a freakish whore, though I wish I could. And if it were a
shallow, indifferent society that makes me feel this way, then I could simply
say no to its condemnation. But the condemnation comes from within me. I don’t
know what to think.
I
love Candice though not as I love you. I didn’t come to California looking for
love or expecting it. I came to be alone. It comes as a surprise how easy it
has been to find love when I wasn’t looking for love. Or did it find me? I
thought that love was no longer possible for me. And now I have friends whom I
love—Robert, Mr. Rieneau, Mr. Sage, Renée, Barbara and Candice. Why has that
happened? Is it because loving comes easy to me? I don’t think so. It doesn’t.
What I do know is that there is something about each of those people that makes
them lovable. I find that amazing because each is so different from the others,
unique in his or her own way. It’s a special kind of friendship that possesses
love. I suppose my love for Candice goes beyond friendship, but I’m not sure. I
do know the love you and I share is even more mysterious because it’s interwoven
with the earth-world, a mysterious tapestry, in the way the Indian life was once
interwoven with nature. When I’m alone in a wild place I feel at one with the
nature that surrounds me. It’s a strange kind of love. It is love. I know that because
here I love the ocean. We even play as children do. We intermingle as earthly
companions. When I’m with you nature truly become my neighborhood, one we share
with nature’s other residents. We see them as friends. We become wild like them,
not unruly but organic in the way clouds, trees, and mountains are organic. Your
love has defined me in some mysterious way that I don’t fully understand. I
don’t fully understand the relationship a child has with the ocean he or she
adores. It beckons to them. They rush to play in the foamy surf. I’ve watched
this amazing relationship between children and the ocean. Like the painter Edward
Potthast I find the relation mysterious. To me you embody everything. It’s as
if Earth sent you to me with her knowledge to instruct me in the ways of
nature. You complete my relationship with nature, with everything. That is why
I love you in the way I love the ocean, sky, and birds, trees and rivers, the
hot sun and cold wind and rain. They speak but not to me. They do not love me. But
they do not have to. You speak for them. You love for them. They embrace me through
you. That’s because you are one of them. I’m not, but you are. I know what
you’re thinking: “Silly Chrissie, you overthink life. Just live and enjoy what
can be enjoyed. Don’t let the haters prevent you from enjoying life. It comes around only once.”
How
can I not love Candice? She is beautiful, tender, and caring. As you once did, she
gives me the love and security and even meaning that I need here. She makes me
happy in a way the other people I care about here cannot. Still the guilt
returns, and I think it is as much for the pleasure I experience when I'm touched
by her as it is because she's a woman. I love being touched by her. I want to
lose myself in her embrace and in her touch—as I once did in yours. When I left
you and Albuquerque, I thought I was leaving those feelings behind, but I did
not.
Whatever
it is that attracts me to women and women to me, I guess it’s part of my being.
I don’t think this attraction has anything to do with my feelings toward men. I
like men well enough. You and I have enjoyed their company. But when we
returned home, it was always you and I together. It’s just that I feel at ease when
I’m with you and Candice, and usually apprehensive around men. It’s awful that
my first responses to men generally are suspicion and distrust, but I blame
them, not myself. Unlike women, they have to first earn my trust before I will
accept them into my life. I know you and Candice enjoy me as much as men do,
but you also respect me in a way most men don't. You’re women, too. You know
what it is to be consumed indifferently by a man. A man forgets that you’re a
person—another human being. He remembers that fact only after he has satisfied
himself, and even then his concern for you is not what it was before. Men feast
upon women as lions feed upon gazelle. And afterwards, they lie in the warm sun
of forgetfulness. You and Candice never forget me. To you I'm never merely a
fresh kill.
And
yet, and yet…as much as I care for Candice and enjoy being with her, isn’t
there something more than love and security that I should be seeking? Is the
meaning of life reducible to passion and pleasure? Perhaps I have allowed California—where there is no mystery—to have too
great an influence upon my state of mind. Here everything is veneer. And if I
scratch the veneer, will I find only nothingness? I don’t know, Ruth. You
always seemed to be in touch with some deeper meaning, but it seemed personal, to belong to you alone. But then you belong to the land of deserts, mountains,
mesas and endless sky—the primordial world of mysterious meanings. It and you
are one. Each day since I arrived in this place that borders the sea I have longed
to return to the land of enchantment—to see the red sky and the purple desert. Yet,
it was more than seeing as if I were only an observer. I learned from Mr.
Rieneau that it was always a matter of being, being a part of what he calls the
primordial world, the lifeworld. “We are Earth-clan,” he once said to me. And now I better
understand you. Your people are the original Earth-clan, the people who have always
belong to Earth.
Perhaps
it too is only an empty mystery. But how can that have been when it fill my
life? It was there to see, touch, and smell. To feel all about me the wind,
snow, and rain, the warmth of the sun. Perhaps nothingness lurks there as well.
An idea also learned from Mr. Rieneau. If
so, at least the nothingness is not hidden behind a plastic veneer. It’s there seen
in old and dead things, Georgia O’Keeffe shows us. Her painting Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock-Hills reveals the
Earth-world trinity. The hills represent Earth, the hollyhock flower life
created from earth, and the ram’s skull representing death the return all
things to their earthly substance. Death is at the center of the painting as it
is the final destination of all things. One’s own ultimate nothingness can be
meaningful when it is confronted and experienced as part of the life-death
cycle. Mr. Rieneau would say it’s meaningful because it’s the truth. It’s
frightening, yet beautiful, a world that creates beauty that is eventually
reclaimed by death. That is amazing really. And that’s what O’Keeffe is
telling us or at least me. Death does not deny the beauty of the Earth-world.
It makes it heartbreaking. The skull tells us to pay attention to our
primordial home-world and see its beauty that is more than its appearance. It
is the beauty of the life-death cycle that all things are a part of. The
struggle and suffering. Mr. Rieneau says that the most meaningful experience he
has comes when he is most intensely aware of the insignificance of his own
life. It’s then, he says, when he becomes a true child of the cosmos and a
brother to all living and nonliving things—though for him, even that
distinction is an artificial one.
I
went to him the day after my experience with Candice and we got into another long
conversation on just about everything, but it was all connected to the meaning
of life. It was another philosophical conversation, the only kind I ever seem
to have with him. He introduces me to so many ideas that I feel overwhelmed,
yet I don’t want to lose them. Since I met Mr. Rieneau I’ve been going to the Pacific
Beach library. I almost feel as if I’m back in school. But I don’t mind.
There I sketch out what we talked about and look up some of the people and
ideas that Mr. Rieneau mentioned. I now jot down notes when I talk
with him, which makes him smile, but he never teases me about it. Then I go
home and sketch out our conversation. It seems somewhat artificial but I feel
this need to get it all down, all the details of what was said, but to do that I
must first get the ideas straight in my head. Besides, I want to understand
these things and not just have bits and pieces of names and information. So my letters are becoming like a book describing not only what
I’ve been doing but what I've been learning and thinking about.
All
this is good for me. My life is in such turmoil right now, yet you would never
know it to look at me. I wonder how many people look normal yet are living
lives in turmoil? I think the reading and writing and my conversations with Mr.
Rieneau give me a way of dealing with the turmoil, and give my life some
purpose while I’m in this state of limbo. I’ve discovered that I love talking
with people, not just with Mr. Rieneau but everyone. In New Mexico I had long
conversations only with you, which was all I needed. When I came to California
I thought I would live in silence, like I had after being separated from you.
But your absence has been filled by others, which is good because it was an
unbearable emptiness. Besides, I’m interested in the people I’ve met here. Each of
them has a story to tell, and now I realized that I’m not the only person who
has problems, who has suffered. I hate my self-pity.
I
was going to say that Mr. Rieneau has become like a surrogate grandfather to
me, but that’s not true, except perhaps in the way your people refer to old
wise men and women as grandfathers and grandmothers. He’s like a priest but a
philosopher priest. From what he tells me the Greeks had philosophers you could
talk to about anything, like Socrates and Epicurus. Even women priests who
could be consulted until they were banned when Christianity abolished religious
freedom during the persecution of the pagans of the Roman Empire. Speaking to a
pagan priestess would have been illuminating. Talking with a Christian nun that
serves a masculine religion wouldn’t be the same. Jesus would be all they could
talk about. Greek priestesses could offer advice from a dozen goddesses on wild
animals, nature, vegetation, childbirth, care of children, beauty, love and
chastity. From the goddess Athena she would have knowledge of how a woman can
be skillful and wise. Jesus protected women but a woman could learn nothing
from him about how she should live. He ignored his family and would have families torn
apart by his religious ideology. Besides, could nuns really speak their minds? I
find it dismaying that the oppression lasted for two-thousand years, and your
people were its final victims. I understand even better your hostility toward
the white man. The violence and oppression were the product of masculinity, not
femininity.
Still,
the old cultures did have their wise men, men like Socrates, Buddha and Lao-Tzu.
But not today except for mavericks like Mr. Rieneau and Mr. Sage who exist on
the outskirts of society. What we have are ministers and psychotherapists.
That’s pretty sad. Either you’re confessing or mentally ill. Either way you’re
messed up. With Mr. Rieneau it’s just talking about life and ideas, not about being
judged. Yes, he is a man and I thought my anger wouldn’t allow me to have
anything to do with men, at least for a long while. Robert changed that. Sometimes
life just doesn’t play along. Besides, I don’t think of Mr. Rieneau in terms of
gender. Well, yes, he is an old man, which does fit the stereotype of wisdom,
but believe me, Pacific Beach and La Jolla have many old men who don’t seem
very wise to me. Old men driving Porches and Jaguars. Old men trying to hold on
to their youth by dating women our age. Old men who continue to live like
adolescent beach bums on roller-skates. They seem foolish to me. Like the old
women who drive Rolls Royces or cute little white convertible Mercedes.
However,
I do enjoy watching the old men sea swimmers at the Cove. They may or may not
be wise, but they look like old sea lions, and I like that. There are of course
old women who swim there. They love the ocean. You can see it in their coffee-colored
sun-tanned bodies and wrinkled faces. I think anyone who loves the ocean as
they do must possessed wisdom of some kind. They love the sea more than they
love the land because it’s still wild and primordial. They want to be immersed in
it. For them it’s a baptism that renews them. It remains primordially pure
because it will not allow itself to be destroyed by developers. I’m sure that
if they could they would build giant floating platform communities upon it. Suburbs upon the Sea! Robert said
developers pave over open space with tracks of homes as if they were putting
down asphalt or Astroturf. I didn’t know
what he meant until one day he drove me to where I could see swaths of homes
covering the hills like a carpet. The sight depressed me. For the first time I
saw a form of urbanization worse than the city of Albuquerque. Lego communities
is what Robert called them—clean, hygienic, tidy and soulless.
Robert
said they’re called bedroom communities, but that they’re not communities at
all. They’re manufactured barracks for commuters. They indicate how reason and wisdom
are not always the same thing. Mr. Rieneau said that reason must be used wisely.
He said high-rise public housing and suburbs were a rational solution to a growing
shortage of housing after the war. They were an efficient use of space, but
their designed prevented them from becoming communities. Living space that
works for bees doesn’t necessarily work for humans. For one thing, the residents
were strangers thrown together. Bees are not strangers to one another. He
believes that communities need a unifying principle that used to be ethnicity
or the local economy—farms, fishing, and factories. They grow from a single
seed, which means that genuine communities are organic even if they located in
cities.
Grungy Pacific Beach seems organic to me, even if blemished by endless cars, cheap apartments, and oil stained driveways. What is the unifying principle? The ocean. The name of the town says a much. It grew over time. It doesn’t look like a Lego community as do the manufactured suburbs, but more like quilt made from scraps of fabric randomly yet aesthetically pieced together. My grandmother made quilts with other women. The process was organic. Anyway, I like Mr. Rieneau very much. He’s an old human being full of ideas. And he has lived. His life bears scars of the spirit and body (he was wounded in the American army during the invasion of Italy). He reminds me of an old oak tree scarred by time and the elements yet still standing.
I told him that I felt guilty about my experience with Candice. It wasn’t easy confessing my love for a woman to a him, but I needed to confess to someone. And that person had to be someone I felt comfortable with and most of all trusted. And Mr. Rieneau shows no interest in sex. He seems indifferent to it. He has evolved to a higher mental and emotional plane, perhaps a level that is spiritual. One would say he is like Jesus, but he isn’t. Jesus wasn’t indifferent to sex. He hated it because it has to do with the body. He says,
But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.
I read
the Gospel of Matthew because Mr. Rieneau talks about it all the time. He says
that it is a gospel of hatred rather than love. Clearly Jesus doesn’t hate
women—though I don’t find him expressing love for them. The love comes from the women. Here he characterizes
sexual attraction as lust, a word that condemns rather than celebrates sexual
intimacy. Why? Because it has to do with the body. And, rightly or wrongly, the
woman’s body has been considered the epitome of seductiveness, thus the primary
cause of lust so hated by Jesus.
So
he might be a protector of women, but he has also imposed upon them the status
of being humanity’s greatest source of corruption. He would send to the fires
of Hell the adulterous woman he protects from stoning! At least the scribes and
the Pharisees consider stoning sufficient punishment of an adulterous woman.
According to what he says, Jesus would have you and me and Candace the three of
us burn in the fires of Hell. Jesus didn’t improve the status of women. The philosopher,
astronomer, and mathematician Hypatia was brutally murdered by a mob of
Christian men, not pagan men. And because of Jesus women would have to wait
two-years before they could once again study philosophy, astronomy, and
mathematics. They are still waiting in many countries all because of a religion
born somewhere in sands
of the Canaanite desert with “a gaze blank and pitiless” toward women.
I’m
not comfortable with physical intimacy. That was ruined by a man who deserves
to go to Hell for terrifying and abusing a child. Still, I wouldn’t want the man tortured. Not because I
think he was a sick man. He wasn’t. Men have abused women and children since
forever. The Jewish saint Abraham and King Agamemnon prove that much. From what
I’ve read Mary was barely a teenager when God impregnated her. She surrender to
God’s will when she was engaged to be married, thus against her wishes. And men
have taken God’s behavior as permission to take advantage of women.
And advising gouging out an eye that sees another person as physically enticing is barbaric—as barbaric as symbolically eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the God a person worships. What would Jesus think of you and me or of Candice and me? That we should be stoned? He prevents a woman from being stoned for adultery, but then says he would have her burn in the fires of Hell in the afterlife, which is infinitely more cruel—and equally unjust. The moral wisdom of Mr. Rieneau is simple: Immorality has to do with causing suffering. And unlike Jesus he loves the physical world. He said this world is miraculous and deserving of reverence and appreciation. I would add joyful appreciation.
So
I asked him if such a relationship that seems unnatural be considered immoral. He
said natural and unnatural is irrelevant to moral judgment. He said, “The poet
Tennyson rejected nature as a basis for morality when he condemned nature for
being ‘red in tooth and claw.’ He
asked, ‘Are God and Nature then at strife,’ associating God with love and
being oppose to strife. However, the God he believed in encouraged and
participated behavior red in tooth and
claw. Thus, neither nature nor God are relevant to judgments of morality.
“If
one seeks love and security, if one seeks pleasure but is uncomfortable those
who usually provide it, then one naturally turns to someone else who can
provide those things.” He seemed to sense my discomfort with men, but then he
said, “If your relationship with Candice makes you happy, then it can’t be
wrong. It’s certainly not morally wrong. Morality condemns causing suffering,
not happiness. Altruistic morality commends
actions that enhance people’s happiness. Happiness is what morality seeks to encourage
and protect. Aristotle said happiness is the central purpose of human life and
a goal in itself. A wonderful idea really, more happiness the better. And Kant
would add as long as your pursuit of happiness doesn’t interfere with someone
else’s pursuit of happiness. The foundation of morality is really that simple.”
