I.
The dictionary defines holism as “a theory that the universe and especially living nature is correctly seen in terms of interacting wholes that are more than the mere sum of elementary particles” (Merriam-Webster, 2003). In reading Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”, I am struck by her clearly holistic view of the erotic, and its function in women’s lives. For Lorde, the erotic equals the “assertion of the life force of women” (Lorde, 1984), in its most comprehensive manifestation. The erotic makes women whole.
Without empty rhetoric or abstractions, Lorde makes quick work of explaining that, within “the context of male models of power” (Lorde, 1984), there can be no true feminine erotic reality. Phallocentric discourse reduces the erotic to cheaply sexualized images. Each woman is charged to look beyond the puritanical distortion that confines the erotic to the bedroom, where women can be “psychically milked” (Lorde, 1984) by men. Freed from this confinement, women find the true depth and breadth of the erotic possible within themselves. For Lorde, the erotic is not synonymous with its most predatory alteration in this society, pornography. While the erotic is fulfillment, pornography is “the abuse of feeling” (Lorde, 1984).
Erotic holism is a tall order to fill, a call to move “beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society” (Lorde, 1984). This movement requires, before all else, we look within ourselves and to leave no stone unturned in discovering our passion. In this pursuit, the aim is to find what makes one feel deeply about being, and the difference between one person’s passion for auto mechanics and another’s passion for poetry is not measured by quality. They are both equal if within both the “erotic kernel” (Lorde, 1984) can be found.
This requires courage: the force of the erotic is daunting, especially in this society, where it has been fashioned into “the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation” (Lorde, 1984). Once our inner parameters have been explored, and we learn the height and scope of our own fervent possibility, our power is limitless. Lorde asserts that once this fullness has been achieved, we can have a “celebration of the erotic in all our endeavors” (Lorde, 1984).
Women thus empowered are truly free to connect with others and begin to regain the things that have been taken from them – “our language, our history, our dancing, our work, our lives” (Lorde, 1984). There is a sharing with others on a more than casual level. There is an opening up, a baring of the self, which is an existential holism. The “dichotomy between the spiritual and the political” (Lorde, 1984), so villified by Lorde, can only be bridged when women who are self-aware and whole seek committee with one another, bearing their individual passions before them.
In addition, Lorde has succeeded in reshaping a tired, overused feminist polemic: making the personal political. She shuns an external locus of politics, preferring instead that “our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within” (Lorde, 1984). Lorde nullifies political correctness. There is no ideological, de facto imposition of “the truth”. Instead, there is the idea that ethical guidance from the depth of one’s self motivates action - renewal of the self as well as a transformation of society. Though the concept was developed by 1978, it foreshadows Adrienne Rich’s “politics of location”, creating a paradigm for modern feminism that suggests the meaning of women’s lives is rooted in the personal, as bounded and defined by cultural experience.
Lorde’s work suggests you must know yourself before you can know the world. This holistic self-knowing assures that real change can occur, and not just the “shifting of characters in the same weary drama” (Lorde, 1984).
II.
So, what does this mean to me, and why did I, who has little or no acumen or interest in politics, choose to handle Audre Lorde? Well, as it turns out, Audre Lorde and her essay are a part of my evolution, both literally and figuratively.
In late 1984, I became a student at Hunter College, almost by accident. Friends who were part of the Lesbians Rising student group there pushed me into a writing class I didn’t want to take. The teacher, they said, was phenomenal, intense, passionate, incredible. The teacher was Audre Lorde. I didn’t know who she was. I had no inkling of her status. I was singularly nonplussed at her zeal. But, on some level, I knew enough to pay attention.
As a matter of habit, I sat to Lorde’s left, watching her stalk across the terrain of the classroom, always challenging someone, usually gesturing wildly, often laughing. I would be lying if I said I did not sit through her classes like some slack-jawed yokel, in awe of her power. I would be lying if I said that when I read Sister, Outsider that semester, I understood it. And I would also be lying if I said Audre Lorde liked my poetry.
It was clear that she liked me – we often walked to the subway together, and I drove her home to Staten Island a few times. But it was also absolutely clear that she thought my poetry needed divine intervention. She spent the entire semester tough-loving me into authenticity.
Lorde called me on every weak and superficial verse, every obnoxious and erudite turn of phrase, sometimes not sparing my work from scathing invectives despite polite company. It was the first time I had ever simultaneously loathed and venerated a person. I was completely infatuated. And I finally did write one good poem.
SHE & me
Dandelion days, Bosco nights
and searching her purse to find the magic nutshells
that turned my stubby little fingers red.
I played hide and seek with the laughter
lurking in the folds of her dress
and paddycake with the workwise hands
of the maid/cook/babysitter/mommy.
“Anything for my pumpkin”!”
Until the almost-ever-present
knitted-brow smirk told me
I was breaking laws I never knew
blasting off to the planet Teenager.
During my stay, I was beckoned by memories
of Pine Sol and Chanel No. 5
and a voice teddy bear soft
beyond the new schoolmarmish cold.
I closed stinging red eyes to the stranger
searching for Mommy like a prospector
wading in the muck to find ore.
When the nugget surfaced, starshine from
her liquid amber eyes warmed me.
We hugged, nose to nose,
heart to heart.
Lorde wrote a single word across the bottom of the page – “Beautiful!”
Being in Lorde’s presence was like participating in my own autopsy. A dark reference, but I certainly don’t mean it to be so. You see, there was something about her words that prompted me to leave my disinterested, disconnected self behind and come to a new consciousness. Lorde did not seek to reform me, she was simply the archetypal reagent in my self-transformation.
Knowing what I now know, I can say that my twenty-year-old self had a brush with the erotic.
(References excluded.)
wow, Gina.
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