In October, as well as South, I read a stimulating article in the London Review of Books by Bridget Riley, the artist.
It’s one of the best, blow-by-blow descriptions of the process of artistic discovery one could read. It begins with the recognition of her ignorance:
For me, drawing is an inquiry, a way of finding out — the first thing that I discover is that I do not know. This is alarming even to the point of momentary panic. Only experience reassures me that this encounter with my own ignorance — with the unknown — is my chosen and particular task, and provided I can make the required effort the rewards may reach the unimaginable. It is as though there is an eye at the end of my pencil, which tries, independently of my personal general-purpose eye, to penetrate a kind of obscuring veil or thickness. To break down this thickness, this deadening opacity, to elicit some particle of clarity or insight, is what I want to do.
Then she sets the background and the task ahead. Her chosen field is abstract art, and the time is the early 1960s with all the terrors and potential that abstract act, after the pioneers like Mondrian and Kandinsky, offered then.
She touches on the required sacrifices:
But to be excited by the prospect of a great adventure is one thing, to act is another. To make a start, I had to sacrifice some hard-won achievements and joys. For instance colour, about which I had only recently gained some understanding, now had to be laid aside until an abstract form equal to its purity could be found.
The first hint comes:
Although I had taken a few steps in the direction of abstract painting, I had not yet arrived at a point where I could establish a dialogue. One evening on my way to the studio, I thought of drawing a square. Everyone knows what a square looks like [...] a monumental, highly conceptualised form: stable and symmetrical, equal angles, equal sides. I drew the first few squares. No discoveries there. Was there anything to be found in a square?
And then the moment of artistic felicity:
But as I drew, things began to change. Quite suddenly something was happening down there on the paper that I had not anticipated [...] I drew the whole of Movement in Squares without a pause and then, to see more clearly what was there, I painted each alternate square black. When I stepped back, I was surprised and elated by what I saw [...] My experience of working with the square was to prove crucial. Having been lately becalmed, now a strong wind filled my sails.
*****
I also read a review in The Guardian Weekly of a book called The Dream Faculty by Sara Stridsberg. To the author’s surprise the book became a big hit in Sweden, her home country, and was voted book of the year for 2006. It is a fictional biography of the real-life Valerie Solanas (1936-1988), an American “writer, intellectual, prostitute and feminist legend,” who became famous in 1968 when she shot Andy Warhol.
Warhol survived, but only just, and Solanas went on to write the SCUM Manifesto (or the manifesto of the Society for Cutting Up Men).
For the reviewer it is a work of ”radical irony,” one that had more in common with Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal than other feminist works. However, with one murder attempt already under her belt, the irony sometimes got lost on the public. Whatever it is, the SCUM Manifesto is very funny and bracing to read. She certainly knew how to write an opening sentence:
Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.
Love that “thrill-seeking.”
Here are some other quotes:
Although completely physical, the male is unfit even for stud service. Even assuming mechanical proficiency, which few men have, he is, first of all, incapable of zestfully, lustfully, tearing off a piece, but instead is eaten up with guilt, shame, fear and insecurity, feelings rooted in male nature, which the most enlightened training can only minimize; second, the physical feeling he attains is next to nothing; and third, he is not empathizing with his partner, but is obsessed with how he’s doing, turning in an A performance, doing a good plumbing job.
Completely egocentric, unable to relate, empathize or identify, and filled with a vast, pervasive, diffuse sexuality, the male is psychically passive. He hates his passivity, so he projects it onto women, defines the male as active, then sets out to prove that he is. His main means of attempting to prove it is screwing. Since he’s attempting to prove an error, he must “prove” it again and again. Screwing, then, is a desperate compulsive attempt to prove he’s not passive, not a woman; but he is passive and does want to be a woman.
Women, in other words, don’t have penis envy; men have pussy envy. When the male accepts his passivity, defines himself as a woman and becomes a transvestite he loses his desire to screw … Screwing is, for a man, a defense against his desire to be female.
Interesting how genuinely seditious they read.
*****
To read the full Bridget Riley article from the LRB, click here:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n19/bridget-riley/at-the-end-of-my-pencil
To read the full SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas, click here:
http://www.womynkind.org/scum.htm
Images: Movement in Squares, 1961 by Bridget Riley (top)
Solanas did seem to have a bee in her bonnet about men.
However, I read the SCUM Manifesto with great interest, for I found myself thinking that Solanas’s observations about men were substantially right.
I also remembered a book I read thirty and more years ago, the theme of which was that we males have a deep and innate (existential?) insecurity about our masculinity, caused by the fact that our ability to – how can I put this delicately – “perform” at any appropriate occasion in the bedroom, is beyond our conscious control.
Among the phrases from the SCUM Manifesto I particularly liked, because I think them mostly (but not necessarily always) true when applied to males, were:
“……..males are emotional cripples…….”
“…….he is at best an utter bore……”
“……the well-behaved heterosexual dullard…….”
“…….every man is an island. Trapped inside himself, emotionally isolated, unable to relate……”
“…….the male’s `conversation’, when not about himself, is an impersonal droning on, removed from anything of human value…..”
“……..The male’s inability to relate to anybody or anything makes his life pointless and meaningless (the ultimate male insight is that life is absurd), so he invented philosophy and religion. Being empty, he looks outward, not only for guidance and control, but for salvation and for the meaning of life……..” (how better to explain why abstract philosophy is almost wholly a male thing).
Hi Mr Pip. I suppose that’s one of the things about good satire: it contains some truth. Whatever that might mean in this context … something like “generally accepted”? Actually this is the part I find very interesting: that these ideas about man being “an island”, “trapped inside himself”, “emotional isolated”, etc have become mainstream views. Whereas the “pussy envy” bit hasn’t ;)
I have to confess I too used to think of men as emotional cripples. Ouch. It’s just sooo arrogant to think that, especially when I consider I used to merrily carry on having relationships even while I had this huge prejudice. And then one day, an embarrassingly short time ago, it suddenly occurred to me that some of the things I treasured most for their emotional exquisiteness, like, for example, the works of Nabokov and Flaubert, were produced … BY MEN!!!
Somehow this had completely passed me by. And then a final nail was put in that particular coffin for me when I did the Landmark course last year (not going to go on and on about LM again, promise). I was agog that it was the men who wanted to go to the microphone and “share.” In fact, of the people who “shared” about 70% of them were male, even though the gender mix in the room was roughly equal. And what they shared was deeply moving. So I concluded that the capacity in men had been there all along, and that I just hadn’t called it forth.
PS Mr Pip, re the existential insecurity of masculinity … maybe this means males are no longer insecure now they have little blue pills or whatever it is the 30 foot high billboards round Melb flogging “A longer stronger donger” are referring to, n’est-ce pas?
Regarding men “sharing” in the Landmark course. If it’s like est was, the “space” was safe for anyone to “share”. For the men who “shared”, it may have been the first time they’d ever done so. So for them to “share” was a welcome novelty.
Also, being so emotionally buttoned up, they may have had more unexpressed stuff to “share”, than do women, who are used to “sharing” with their friends, and therefore may not feel quite the need to “share” in a Landmark or est setting.
Also, the men in Landmark or est may not have been representative of men generally. Which is to say they weren’t “real”men, of the two-fisted beer-swilling kind.
Oh yes, regarding Nabokov and Flaubert. Why shouldn’t they have produced the literary masterpieces they did, even though men? Not all men are encased in emotional straitjackets. But most probably are.
Think also of the great romantic poets, like Robert Browning, John Keats (did you see “Bright Star”?)Percy Bysshe Shelley, Algernon Charles Swinburne etc. But, were they “real” men?!!
As for those who read novels and poems, most are women. It just isn’t done for a “real” man to read novels or poems. He would catch hell from his buddies (mates?) if he did.
Now you’ve really surprised me. Poems are read mostly by women? Wow! That must be a cultural difference cos here poetry is almost totally a male domain, both in the writing and reading of it. I’ve always thought it must be because it’s more abstract than prose. I don’t know any woman who reads poetry. Too much hard work! ;)
Don’t think Bright Star is here yet, but keen to see it after your review.
Yes, all of this is possible. So too I reckon is that the context called this forth from the men. What surprised me was that they had it in them to be called forth. That’s how profound was my prejudice still. Cos like all prejudices it was all-embracing, “All men are …”, “All women are …”, “Everyone is …” and so on. So just seeing it was possible for men to be self-expressed destroyed my delusion.
To put it in ontological terms: the context provided the conditions of possibility for men to show up in this way. Could it be that if all/most men appear to be “emotional cripples,” it’s due to our everyday lives not providing such conditions of possibility?
PS. I think est must have had a slightly diff demographic cos I understand it was very rigorous and intellectual and lengthy. LM is only three days and it’s a really wide cross-section. We had guys who were tradesmen, farmers, teachers, dancers, the whole spectrum.
…..I don’t know any woman who reads poetry. Too much hard work…..
I may stand corrected here. I wasn’t thinking when I said novels and poems are read mostly by women. Poems, as you said, could well be the bailiwick of the male.
Now that I think of it, it is males (I think) who write most of today’s song lyrics (poems in reality), as well as composing the melodies.
You said about the type of men who attended LM: ….We had guys who were tradesmen, farmers, teachers, dancers, the whole spectrum….
I think we had this cross-section of men at est too (many were cajoled into doing est by their female partners). There are, needless to say, exceptions to every generality. Thus some farmers and tradesmen are able to give expression to their feminine side at the likes of est and LM, and “share”.
…..Could it be that if all/most men appear to be “emotional cripples,” it’s due to our everyday lives not providing such conditions of possibility?…….
No doubt. But, even were men to raised in a more emotionally permissive environment, while they might turn out less “emotionally crippled” than they now are, it might only be of degree.
I read a couple of years ago a book called “The Female Brain” by Louann Brizendine (which I recommend) which showed how much the female brain differs from that of the male, and thus showed why women behave so differently from men (including why women are much better multi-taskers than men).
The genesis of these differences is thought to be the result of human evolution. Until quite recently, men needed the macho emotional characteristics, so to successfully hunt and kill on the plains or wherever, and do the other violent things to protect their womenfolk.
Evolution therefore favoured the survival of males who were tough, stoic, and emotionally repressed.
Ah, Mr Pip. You’re tempting me. I like to keep this blog free of polemic or only lightly-flavoured with it. I think of it as the Hello magazine of blogs. Cos polemic, to borrow something from Andreas, only encourages the trombones.
But really, I think a wee temporary dispensation is in order here. So here goes …
I do not buy into this biological determinism argument for one moment. And then to ratchet it up with the obligatory appeal to evolution and hunting and gathering. Puh-leeeese. This stuff does nothing for the dignity of either men or women. It overlooks THE most salient thing: we are human beings, and our various modes of being-in-the-world are determined by that fact and its implications (our finitude, for one) above all.
Also, the argument can be so easily overturned. For example, one can overturn it on logical grounds. It’s neither sufficient (ie, relying on an assumption that can never be verified or tested: ie, what life was like in the dim distant past), nor necessary (it appeals to some mythical behaviour in some mythical past to explain behaviour in the present, without first looking for explanations in that present).
There’s a perfectly rational explanation that’s under our very noses about why men and women have different ways of acting: because that’s what required in our world!!!
It must be because it’s so simple that people feel the need to mystify it.
Weeel, it’s your blog, and you get the last word!!