Women in Love: Part I

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 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 no 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 are generally 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’s personal, belonging 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 be when it filled 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.

After my experience with Candice I search for Mr. Rieneau at the pier. There he was standing under the dim amber light of a pier lamp surround by a night blue sky and looking out upon the ocean. It wasn’t long before 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 has introduced 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 it seems that 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. The God of the Bible 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 a woman would be given 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 of women lasted two-thousand years, and Christians sought to inflict genocide upon your people just as the ancient Jews did upon the nations of Canaan. 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 who, if they could, 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 spirit and body bear scars of loss. 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 and 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. But he also said not to trust the words attributed to Jesus. Yet, those words have mattered for centuries. He said the Matthew’s gospel is a gospel of hatred rather than love, and that such an attitude shouldn’t be attributed to Jesus. It’s true that Jesus doesn’t hate women—though I don’t find him expressing much love for them. The love comes from the women. In the passage by Matthew 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 is to be hated. But again Mr. Rieneau doesn’t blame Jesus for the hatefulness of the body but another writer, Apostle Paul, who also never met Jesus, but was influenced by Plato who disliked the material world.

So though Jesus was a protector of women, but his words imposed upon them the status of being humanity’s greatest source of corruption. Accordingly to them, 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 Candice 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 his followers, not by pagan men. And because of the Bible women would have to wait two-thousand 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? We know the Old Testament recommend the death sentence for homosexuals, though I don’t consider myself a homosexual. Just a loving person. He prevents a woman from being stoned for adultery, but if he follows his father’s advice he’d have us burn in the fires of Hell in the afterlife, which is infinitely cruel and morally unjust. The moral wisdom of Mr. Rieneau is simple: Immorality has to do with causing suffering, nothing more. 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 should be considered immoral. His response was that natural and unnatural are 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 in itself it isn’t 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. The greatest philosopher Aristotle said happiness is the central purpose of human life and a goal in itself, not philosophy unless studying philosophy makes one happy. A wonderful idea really, the 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 then it isn’t immoral. The foundation of morality is really that simple.”

That seemed reasonable to me, though I do not seek sexual pleasure without love. I need love and comfort first. Otherwise, I would feel worthless. And I would want any pleasure I give to be given with love. Apparently, he felt that there was no reason to discuss the topic further. I think he sensed that it made me uncomfortable, so I asked him to tell me why he spent so much time sitting alone, gazing upon the sea....