a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Last week registered pretty high on the scale of bald-faced lying in public. Of course, the topic of abortion does tend to bring out the worst in people for whom abortion represents the greatest threat to Christian civilization as we know it. Opposing abortion is a Crusade, not an effort to speak truthfully. With her usual verve and witty common sense, Gail Collins offered a perfect portrait of the Crusade in her Thursday (4/14)  New York Times column.  Senator Jon Kyl, thankfully in his last term in Congress, lashed out with a lie: “If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood and that’s well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.” When his staff, not a group of fact-checkers, was confronted with the fact that abortions (not federally financed) constitute 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s services, along with contraception, family planning, pre-natal care, and so forth, the reply was that the senator’s remarks were “not intended to be a factual statement.”

Hilarious, if it were not tragic. Collins is certainly accurate in noting that Kyl and his like are making an attack not just on abortion, but on contraception. And, further, they are attacking women, and women’s freedom to chose –to make the decisions about their own bodies and their own lives that they deem right. The idea that any woman who chooses to have an abortion is an “unborn child abuser,” or a murderer, is such a perverse idea, dreadful in its cruelty. That people will go that far to make sure that decisions about women’s bodies and women’s lives remain in the hands of representatives of patriarchal institutions, is dreadful. (I did not, speaking carefully, say that it is only men who are opposed to abortion, as some women are, too; this is a matter of patriarchal culture.)

While this horrible pseudo-debate over abortion continued to drive Congressional  decision-making over the budget, showing us once again how the Crusaders of patriarchy trample on their enemies, I was in San Francisco in an oasis of the New World. I am so grateful for this refreshment of my spirit that it makes me weep over my computer as I sit here on a plane headed to Philadelphia to visit for a few days with my mother before I go home to Toronto. The man sitting next to me on the plane has just very solicitously offered me a pack of Kleenex.

Caversham Productions, the small and young company that Christine Dunbar and I founded in Toronto is making a film about Carol Gilligan, author of a book, In A Different Voice, which came out in 1982. This is one of those books that “reframed the world.” It got people thinking –rethinking—how we human beings make moral judgments, by what processes of judgment, on what assumptions, in what frame of mind.   She suggested that there are two basic ways of moral judging: an ethic of care, and an ethic of rules.

Carol Gilligan was scheduled to be the keynote speaker at a symposium sponsored by the Oakland Dance Company (ODC) called “Woman who Frame the World.” ODC’s founding director, Brenda Way, had decided to celebrate her company’s 40^th anniversary by bringing together creative women in all kinds of fields, from her own, dance, to music, film, fine arts, theatre, journalism, culinary arts, and women in all kinds of entrepreneurial activities, from film producing to running magazines, to founding  companies. The symposium was about creativity, and it was about institution-building. Caversham Productions made a deal with Brenda Way –if she let us film Carol’s talk and the whole conference, we would give her an archival film record of her grand idea and its enactment. So, my two camera guys –Garrick Duckler and Josh Weaver—showed up on Tuesday, checked out the marvelous spaces ODC has built up over the years in their Mission District buildings, and set up our cameras. Then, through two action-packed days, the amazement began.

Carol set the tone with her talk, which was a blend of memoir, social commentary, philosophical reflection, and self-analysis. She is at a moment in her life –in her early 70s—when she finds herself thinking retrospectively about her developing creative life.  And thinking about her relationship with her mother.  “Our mothers, ourselves,” was laid down as one of the conference’s themes.  One of many.  Some talked about it, some demonstrated it.

We heard from Beverly Pepper, 89 years old, who has created an astonishing oeuvre of monumental sculptures over decades.  In her heavy Brooklyn accent, she talked with wit and verve about welding and casting, about cement and tiles and wood, and all the other hard, huge materials she works with. Some of her sculptures are built into landscapes; some reach up to the sky as dramatically as any Egyptian obelisk or Roman column. Later, during a panel discussion half way into the symposium, she was asked what, if anything, she feared as she worked. She answered, without skipping a beat: “Nothing. I don’t do fear.” The audience roared with laughter, as this was so obviously true. And then she amended herself, with another truth: “I do not want to feel fear. If I do, I put it aside. It does not, of course, disappear; it just does not stop me.”

When Beverly Pepper’s daughter, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Jorie Graham spoke, you could sense, before she talked about it, what life with Beverly Pepper had been like. Beverly was the opposite of Carol Gilligan’s mother, who was the soul of convention and attention to social relationships, while, on the inside, secretly, she was artistic, enjoying her own taste and style, the beauty of her housekeeping and hospitality (her “domestic arts”). Beverly Pepper is all about public art; she is driven to fill public spaces with her art, her monuments. Jorie Graham found her own way, her own genre, but she is a poet concerned with political and social issues, a poet of environmentalism. She has women poets in her mind and memory who are her ideals: only a few women poets, she said, have “framed the world,” changed the territory of poetry: Sappho, Dickinson, Moore, Bishop, Plath.

Jorie Graham made explicit another theme of the conference: what is our present immersion in electronic technologies and new means for communicating doing  to our creative minds? Every woman at the conference, young or old, was worrying over this question, even while they marveled at what the new technologies make possible. Jorie Graham worried beautifully, talking about her students and how so many of them “have no reality.” They do not see the world they live in, they see only the world on their cell phones and computers. She teaches them how to recover with their senses birdsongs, trees, the grass they walk on to get to class, so that they will have nature in their experience, but also so that they will understand what they must not destroy, what they must save.

Another theme that recurred throughout the two days was about women –and men–experiencing their bodies. The ODC troop performed two of Brenda Way’s pieces on Tuesday night, and these young people were a living demonstration of body-attention. Magnificent dancers!  The choreographer Liz Lerman, who has her own company, the Dance Exchange, gave what was, in effect, an explanation of how a creative community works. Not on the classical ballet model –an authority model, with energy flowing form the choreographer/director down to the dancers—but on “the horizontal model.” Collaboration, with as little competitiveness within the company or between companies as possible

I had the pleasure to be the cameraperson for an astonishing demonstration of embodied creativity. Tina Packer, founding director of Shakespeare and Company, based in Lenox, Massachusetts, gave a workshop on “Creativity in the Spoken Word.”  Earlier, she had spoken in big forums –at one point, offering a talk about the evolution of women’s roles in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, which was a whole semester packed into thirty minutes—but in the workshop she did something different. She helped a few of the workshop participants find their voices, literally. I was watching a psychoanalytic session conducted in the medium of “voice coaching.” She removed blocks, eased tense throats, got a full, rich voice projecting outward, talked about why, when and how women stifle their voices and thus themselves. “Your voice, your self.”

On Wednesday evening, Tina Packer and her acting partner Nigel Gore, did a composition of scenes from Shakespeare, not a play within the plays, but a play of the plays, a microcosm of the macrocosm of Shakespeare’s works.  I have never in my life seen –and heard—Shakespeare played with such emotional intelligence and gusto. Tina believes that part of Shakespeare’s genius was that he was an actor, he knew in his body how his words would sound out, how they would enter into the ears of his audience. Into his audience’s bodies and minds.

Watching Tina work, like watching the ODC dancers dance, kept before our minds another theme of this conference, which had to do with artistic communities in their settings, in this contemporary world of ours. Tina’s Shakespeare is for NOW. Because we need him, and need her and her troop playing him.  But of all the many presenters and performers who brought this theme home to us, the one who touched me most deeply was Claudia Bernardi, who does community-based visual arts projects.

Claudia, an Argentine, is, like so many of her countrypeople, haunted by the years of the military junta (1976-83) and the fate of those who were “disappeared.” She has worked with the Argentine Forensic Anthropology team exhuming mass graves all over South America, investigating human rights violations, returning the bodies of massacred loved ones to their families. A truth–telling project, and a healing project. In the village of Panzos in Guatemala, she also slowly and thoughtfully organized the villagers to paint a mural depicting the massacre they had survived. It centered around the large figure of the grandmother who had been the leader in Panzos before she was murdered. It showed the United Fruit Company trains that came to haul away fruit from confiscated orchards, and the soldiers who destroyed any village in the path of those trains–not just the buildings, but the people. Murdering men, women, and many, many children, hideously.

With the help of Claudia’s slides, we could watch how the mural painting began, how the mural developed, how the villagers united planning it and making it, how they became artists. How the making of the mural empowered the villagers. One told Claudia that he would never again believe that he was just a worthless illiterate peasant when some rich man exploiter told him so. He was a painter! One of his village’s historians! He held the truth. This is how the people of Panzos mourned their lost children and cared for their living ones.

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