Holy Retrospective Week

Actually, it was more than a week, and, actually, it was more of a “Holy crap!” week when it started on Good Friday. The church where I hang out was open for an hour and a half on Good Friday for those who wanted to contemplate. Since it’s in the neighborhood and it was a decent day, I walked there and back. So many flowers were in bloom in people’s yards. It was in keeping with Wagner’s sunlit meadow in Parsifal, where Gurnemanz explains that the world is being renewed and purified by the “Good Friday Spell.”

Then, in the pew, my contemplation flat-out kicked my behind, with a “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” moment. It was personal renewal and purification, but it came in the form of my unconscious coughing up a totally depressing worldview moment from the days when I was struggling to survive physically and emotionally. It was something so bleak it likely would have utterly devastated me back in the day; now, however, I apparently was ready to upchuck it so these suppressed feelings could leave my psyche for good.

That was a good thing, but it left me rattled for days. I relived feelings of awkwardness, even physical awkwardness, from when I had been emerging into a balanced adulthood from having been the weird, nerdy kid—a process compounded by having gotten “trashed” (read: canceled) by angry lesbian feminists who’d had it in not just for me but for my little non-conforming lesbian communities. I have been thrilled with—and grateful for—having come to be a calm, happy, content, and secure adult woman. My subconscious actually helped with this process of its own accord.

They say, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.” I reckon it’s never too late to have to do the processing to get there. I’m so happy the reverberations have subsided.

I had a good moment of “It wasn’t me!” when I came across an article, “Further basic evidence for the dark-ego-vehicle principle: Higher pathological narcissism is associated with greater involvement in feminist activism.” (See https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12144-023-05451-x) From the abstract:

“According to the dark-ego-vehicle principle (DEVP), individuals with so-called dark personalities (e.g., individuals with high narcissistic traits) are attracted to political and social activism not for the achievement of prosocial goals but to repurpose the activism to satisfy their specific ego-focused needs. In this pre-registered study, we … examin[ed] the associations of pathological narcissism with involvement in feminist activism. … Paralleling previous research, higher pathological narcissistic grandiosity was found to be statistically significantly related to greater involvement in feminist activism. … In exploratory secondary analyses, we found that higher pathological narcissism was associated with specific feminist conversational interaction behaviors (e.g., correcting other’s non-feminist language).”

So it’s not just that feminism—and I’d add lesbian feminism—attracted “mean girls.” I’ve attributed their meanness and obsessions with telling other people what to do with the New England puritanism that has underlain progressivism. Not so oddly, lesbians in Northampton, Massachusetts brag on their town as being “the lesbian capital of the world.”

My lesbian feminist communities back in the day were, actually, kind and loving. We were, though, beset from time to time by harridans insistent on our adopting their sometimes-paranoid views and their extreme ideologies. In time, thanks to non-lesbian women who wanted to make “lesbian” a primarily political identity, the harridans stomped on our happy little groups. We experienced women trying to take over our efforts to gain “attention, status, fame etc.” It didn’t help my growing up and establishing myself as a competent, centered adult.

Fortunately, happier retrospectives were on the way. One of my DAR sisters hipped me to an upcoming reading by Dennis McNally from his latest book, The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties, in Sausalito. McNally, who’d stumbled into being the publicist for the Grateful Dead, had been asked by the California Historical Society a decade ago to curate a photo exhibit celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love. Every museum in the Bay Area was planning something. McNally pointed out, correctly, that the real Summer of Love wasn’t the Summer of 1967 but the Fall of 1966, before the media got ahold of the hippie phenomenon and aided and abetted the Haight-Ashbury scene’s getting overrun and trampled like daisies in a meadow. And the lightbulb turned on over his head.

This timeline was the timeline of my childhood and adolescence, and it took place where I lived. The Beats were poets turned onto Zen by Alan Watts and his radio talks. They were cool, downbeat, and into jazz. And then, younger bohemians discovered rock and roll, in no small part, says McNally to the phenomenon of the Beatles. They also discovered psychedelic drugs. The original ethos had been one of using them to explore consciousness; indeed, their potential for psychological healing is being rediscovered. But, these explorers came to be outnumbered by those out to party, and here we are.

Both generations of bohemianism played out in local journalism and in popular culture. I hadn’t remembered the Kukla, Fran and Ollie episode in which Ollie riffed on Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts. It was news from me to McNally that cartoonist Bob Clampett had had a recurring beatnik artist spider, Vincent Van Goghman, in his Beanie and Cecil show. The effects on young, impressionable me were, perhaps, inevitable. All this was part of my environment.

And what should come back to the theaters, briefly, in IMAX format, than Werner Herzog’s 3D Cave of Forgotten Dreams? Discovered on December 18, 1994, the Chauvet-Pont-dArc Cave in southeastern France is considered one of the most significant Aurignacian art sites. Herzog learned of it in 2008, and worked out an arrangement with the French government for six four-hour days of filming. He and his crew had to pack in custom-built equipment by hand, forbidden from touching anything but the two-foot-wide pathway on which they carried cameras whose lights gave off no heat.

They more than pulled it off, both technically and artistically. Even the 2D DVD is well worth watching.

Not all of the footage is of the incredible cave paintings that used the contours of the rocks. There is local scenery, and there are interviews with the associated paleontologists. One scene that stunned me was of the “Venus figurines” in the local collection. They are Goddess figurines, basically, originally interpreted as the fertility fetishes some may be. They were an academic specialty when they made lasting impressions on some young second-wave feminists like myself. They spoke of a long history of veneration—and even fear—of “the power and diversity of female spiritual beings across global cultures.” That’s a tag line from the “Feared and Revered” British Museum exhibit I got to see at the National Museum of Australia my last time down under.

Their significance is that they counter the notion that women have always and everywhere been seen as inferior, that perhaps we have been completely worthy of being kept in a subordinate state and deprived of autonomy and personal power. The mean girl feminists jumped on the phenomenon for a hot minute, until they decided the Goddess/ancient woman-affirming cultures thing was a distraction from the real politics. Nonetheless, their existence of not only Goddess art but epic poetry, over such a long, long period of time, is something that has transformed many a female life.

I knew, of course, of the famous Venus of Willendorf, and even of the Black Venus of Dolni Vestonice and others. Nothing, though, prepared me for the sight of a French archaeologist opening drawer upon drawer filled with these figurines. These were the artistic, and probably spiritual, expressions of an entire widespread culture from 30-32,000 years ago. My heart leapt in my breast. Specifically, beneath the left one. It felt like an affirmation of my young feminist self.

That young bohemian and feminist self is now older and wiser, as irrelevant ephemera and over-idealistic hopes have given way to a deeper and more profound understanding of myself nonetheless informed by these environments I’ve been getting to revisit and celebrate. Did my having gotten rattled on Good Friday shake off some complaisance? Perhaps. Maybe it’s a case of being renewed and purified by a “Good Friday Spell.”

It’s been a ride.