The Mother Tongue

Women Who Run With the Wolves: Why women's initiation stories require a uniquely feminine language. 

I gave my mother a copy of Women Who Run With the Wolves for her birthday when I was 16. It was both a well-meaning and a snot-nosed, prescriptive gesture; My mother was and remains a hard-line pragmatist who once dismissed psychotherapy as a form of "crawling up your own ass," and would eviscerate any book that bore even a whiff of Self-Help. But I scanned the first few pages and realised that she could read it as she did the Joyce or Tolstoy she squeezed into her few free minutes before sleep - as literature. From the first page, Clarissa Pinkola Estes' voice established for me what Yusef Komunyakaa calls the "music of trust" between reader and writer; I trusted her language and rhythm, her obsession with style; I trusted this voice to render something deep and true - and I thought my mother might catch and ride some of this trust, too.

But she didn't venture far; the book floated quickly from my mother's bedside to a bookshelf. So I read it, and managed to cart a copy from one shitty apartment to the next all through my twenties. I would open it at random in moments of (frequent) indecision or crisis, after praying for whatever clarifying wisdom I didn't possess at the time. It was one of the few books I took with me from Seattle to London where I moved with my husband two years ago, and it was the one I poured myself into during the wild bouts of insomnia that seized me in the first month of our arrival. In the wee wee wee hours of those weirdly ecstatic and sleepless nights I saw myself as the capsizing protagonist in every story: I was the girl seduced by the shiny red shoes and dancing to her death; I was the seal woman who lives with the man who stole her pelt until she is thin and dry; I was Bluebeard's dewy-eyed and hapless wife who didn't get enough home training to spot a predator; I was the weeping woman combing a dead river with long stick fingers for the creative progeny she had drowned years before.

Liberated from the specificity of history, it is the gift of a fable to let us jump in the skin of every one of its characters. They allow us to cycle through various dream bodies and visit, for a time, a possible fate. That said, the degree to which I identified with those women and girls was pretty unsettling; as if Estes herself was flaying me open nightly to expose all my unripe and chicken-hearted parts.

On my most recent reading I was less haunted and more nourished, struck most by the how-ness of the book: how it was made and what it reveals about the uniquely feminine genius of Estes' storytelling, and how it might stretch - and exalt - our notions of what constitutes a rite of passage in a woman's life. 

The tales told and then unpacked in Women Who Run were culled from Estes' memory of childhood yarns and decades of field research and historical study. These are stories that have been spun every-which-way, and Estes, by her own admission, has done a little intuitive patch work on the holes and smudge-marks left by time and the patriarchy. Later honed through performance in her role as cantadora, Estes says that the narratives chosen for the book were meant to smoke out a sinewy little character near-buried in the feminine psyche, and serve her greater mission: to help women remember their "alpha matrilineal being." 

This thru-line of feminine vitality is embodied, says Estes, in the 'Wild Woman' archetype which  has survived through stories - usually appearing in cameos and slender fragments, or tucked into margins - but is made whole and alive in this volume, and brought to the very centre of the page.

Estes is prone to gathering a lot of shiny buttons in her beak; she effuses with ideas and images, piling one on top of the other, and drills deeper and deeper into the strata of stories to find more and more of their liquid gold, an endlessly morphing substance that might illuminate the darker passages of women's lives.

Her primary excavatory tool is Big Language Magic. Estes' voice, equally at home in the primeval campfire rootsiness of storytelling, and with the depth-psychological exigesis of those stories, becomes a grounding and unifying force throughout the text. It is a language of the body, one that employs all the senses, and is devotedly animistic:

"What comprises the Wild Woman? [...] she is the incubator [...] she leaves behind on the terrain of a woman's soul a coarse hair and muddy footprints [...]She is the smell of good mud and the back leg of a fox. The birds which tell us secrets belong to her [...] She lives on quarter notes and grace notes and in the cantata, in the sestina, and in the blues."

Flowing into the oblique, and resourcing all phenomena, Estes' language seems to make tangible what writer Ursula Le Guin, in a commencement address at Bryn Mawr in 1986, once dubbed, "the Mother Tongue," a language she describes as "always on the verge of silence and often on the verge of song."

Le Guin defines its opposite, the "Father Tongue," as the language she learned in college; it is the language of "social power and public discourse," used in lectures, speeches and debate, and whose function is "not reasoning but distance-making, a gap between the subject or self and the object or other."

The Father Tongue demands objectivity because "to be subjective is to be embodied, to be a body, vulnerable, violable." And while our public institutions - our universities and offices and the political theatre - not only banish references to subjective experience, but enshrine this banishment as law, the Mother Tongue lives on "clear as sunlight in women's poetry, in our novels and stories."

Estes exalts the subjective and crafts an associative, impressionistic language to carry it. She says that her proof of the "ineffable female numen" expressed through the Wild Woman archetype are the experiential and "intra-psychic" encounters women have in their waking and dreaming hours, and are, by Estes reckoning, entirely self-validating; gut-level knowing is proof enough. 

In many passages, especially those where she gets on a rapt descriptive roll, Estes is enacting the "relatedness" of the Mother Tongue, connecting this with that, encouraging a collapse of consciousness, asking that we let our sensing diffuse into every crack and corner - not only of the world, but of the individual and collective psyche. Here she is talking about La Mariposa, the Butterfly Woman:

"She is really big, like the Venus of Willendorf, like the Mother of Days, like Diego Rivera's heroic-size woman who built Mexico City with a single curl of her wrist [...] oh, she is very very old, like a woman come back from the dust, old like old river, old like pines at timberline [...] Her back is the curve of planet Earth with all its crops and food and animals. The back of her neck carries the sunrise and sunset [...]She cross fertilises, jus as the soul fertilises mind with night dreams. Just as archetypes fertilise the mundane world."

By bringing the whole world into the female body, and atomising a woman's feminine essence into every part of the world, Estes expands the depth and variety of initiatory possibilities in women's lives. She is offering a vast spectrum of potential thresholds for women to cross - edges that include the body, but are not limited by it.

Most traditional feminine initiation myths that herald women's developmental stages are blood-encoded: A girl bleeds at the time of her first menses and becomes a sexually viable woman; she bleeds again on her wedding night and enters partnership; she bleeds once more at the birth of her child and becomes a mother; she stops bleeding and becomes an elder.

In these stories, a woman's body does the essential work of evolution: She bleeds into her next stage of growth, inhabits the role, and her consciousness naturally follows suit.

Setting aside the fact that fewer and fewer women, in the West at least, experience all of these mythic 'stations' in their lives, the 'blood as initiation' story is in itself a myth, one that uses a biological phenomenon to uphold a social norm, and wholly ignores the interiority of women's experience of their own bodies; Many women bleed and mother without becoming true adults, and many women stop bleeding without acquiring any real wisdom. Many women achieve ultimate creative and emotional fulfilment without (or even in spite of) having children, and many more enjoy full sexual expression and maturity without the intervention of men. In the life of the feminine psyche, biology is not destiny, nor is it pass-key to evolution and growth.

Estes subverts the traditional blood-encoded myth by forwarding the often invisible initiatory moments in women's lives and wrapping them in the flesh and bones of Story: graduating from naive victim to discerning and self-preserving adult (Bluebeard), from buying in to the status quo to "hand-making" one's life and values (The Red Shoes), from bottomless grief to libidinous joy (Baubo), from fragmenting partnership to integrating solitude (Sealskin, Soulskin).

Such lessons and initiations are not celebrated in the culture; there are no showers or gift registries for the woman who has just reclaimed her erotic or creative powers and has found a way to move with maximum potency through the world. There is no Hallmark card for them - because the language is not available to most. We have no ratified "Mother Tongue" or rite for women's growth beyond the contingencies of blood: Sex, Motherhood and Menopause.

Dr Hollie Jeanne Hannan wrote in her doctoral these Initiation Through Trauma:

"In my clinical work I find that many are in search of a more comprehensive female identity and are in need of images of the feminine Self...Many of us yearn for images of the sacredness of the so-called archetypal feminine in all its richness and complexity and a lineage of the female imagination in which to reflect upon in our lives [...] Yet culturally there remains a need for myths, rituals, and a tradition of storytelling in which women can deepen their experiences, share them with other women, and pass them on to their daughters, students, and younger-generation women and men."

This is why substantive books such as Women Who Run hit so hard in the feminine psyche, and why women lap them up hungrily, like a good broth. There are so few books that artfully and consciously add to the canon of the Mother Tongue, that allow women to see all of their complexity reflected and that reveal a path through - or at least point one in the direction of the path. That doesn't mean that Women is a palliative, 'feel-good' text. Estes knows that part of her work is re-instating the terror and horror that myth and fairy tale once held before 'parenting' became a gerund and 'mothering' a competitive sport:   

"Most old collections [...]  have been scoured clean of the scatological, the sexual, the perverse, (as in warnings against), the pre-Christian, the feminine, the Goddesses, the initiatory, the medicines for various psychological malaises, and the direction for spiritual raptures."

These stories bear all the stains and stitch marks of ages past when characters in children's fables met bloody deaths, or fucked their daughters, or sent them off to the woods to die. There are real consequences, real grief. Essential pain. Estes doles out hope but reminds us: You can lose chances and you can lose years. You can lose your very soul. There are choices to be made and real horrors to be faced. And you will get cut crawling through that hole in the chain link fence when you're finally ready to escape. Good stories are inherently homeopathic, poisoning us just a little in order to trigger our own healing powers.

In delineating an array of women's initiations and showing their archetypal significance, Estes is also asking that we take radical responsibility for engaging with them, that we proactively pursue our own healing and growth. And this is no small task. As Audre Lorde writes in Sister Outsider:

"It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society is to encourage excellence. But giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies."

I should say that on my second-to-last reading, Women Who Run didn't help my insomnia. I was coming to it after having experienced my own set of failures and limitations. I was newly married and had just moved across an ocean, but all of my carefully researched plans for our 'new life' suddenly felt, upon arrival, irrelevant and unworkable. I walked around the city in a daze. I had a recurring vision of myself with my head sheared off or my body cut in two, and was sometimes waylaid by panic attacks that left me doubled over in the street. I feared the move might have been a bad digression from my already switchback path. And worse, I feared I might have no wisdom with which to meet my life as it was unfolding. In Hannan's language, I was likely undergoing an "initiatory crisis," a crucial part of which is that "the person is uncertain whether she will survive."

When I gave the book to my mother she had lived through almost two decades of single parent hardship; years of soul-killing 9 to 5 desk jobs, and 8 to midnight service jobs, years of keeping her head down, her sights lowered. Years of peeling off chunks of herself to feed and fund two kids alone. She would spend weekends cleaning obsessively, scrubbing the corners of the kitchen floor, and break into tears when she thought of salvaging her creative gifts with piano lessons.

My mum kept herself really busy. So busy that the moments of reflection and quiet mulching necessary for transformation weren't available to her. She would have said there wasn't the time or money for such acts of self-reclamation, but as she would express to me later, there wasn't even a cohesive 'self' present to ask for or deserve such things. Maybe she rejected Wolves for the same reason I read it obsessively: the pain of recognition. 

Nourishing images of the feminine don't always come through mothers or grannies or wise aunties. So you get them from fantasies and dreams and visions. You get them from stories and strangers. But when you do get them, you hold them close and tight. Estes says "Stories are medicine," but sometimes they're simultaneously the medicine and the wound. They don't give you the ointment without poking you first, without making you bleed.

Book Review: The Radiance Sutras

Translation as Rapture: The Radiance Sutras by Lorin Roche

In the fall semester of my junior year of college I embarked on a six-month study abroad program in India. Towards the end of the trip I stayed in Varanasi, the "holiest of the seven sacred cities," where I, a Religious Studies major, earnestly gorged on as many of the city's 2,000 crumbling temples as possible, attended evening fire arthis and dawn ablutions on the great and stinking Ganges, did strenuous Yoga and pranayama, and closet-smoked mango-flavoured beedis on the roof of my hotel.

One night I attended a lecture by Kashmir Shaiva scholar-practitioner Mark Dyczkowski. He played his sitar, propped up a painting of Kali lactating blood into the mouths of tiny Brahmins, and then talked about her body and attributes, the play of the sacred and transgressive in her image and myths. Afterward, I approached him about my own research on Indian Classical dance, and he proposed I meet him at his home the next day.

He lived on Narad Ghat in a building overlooking the Ganges, capped by a massive black mural painted with a red Yantra (or a red mural with a black Yantra - I can't remember which). I'd done interviews with dancers and artists and scholars, had practiced the dance in India and with a teacher back home, and was trying to make their accounts and my experience jive with all the seductively heady theory I'd ingested from books and articles. Or, more precisely, I was trying to shoehorn the theory into the practice because I wanted so badly for it all to be true.

We sat on the floor and, punctuated by a few shouty phone calls conducted in Italian to negotiate a villa rental, Dyczkowski gave a long, layered, funny, slow-winding, relentlessly brilliant, raga-like improvisation on Tantra and the body, performance, and mystical union through rasa.

I can't recall one word or salient idea from the talk. I took notes and it all made sense at the time, but it was a kind of spiralling, intuitive 'sense' held together with the slightest of linear threads that are meant to dissolve like surgical stitches from the mind and release a deeper realisation into the heart and blood. I do remember that he gave me a copy of his translation and commentary on the Aphorisms of Shiva to borrow, and then morphed into a solicitous Englishman and offered me a ride to the hotel on the back of his scooter. I found a shop with a xerox machine where I could make an illegal copy of his book, and upon returning the original a few days later, he recommended I also find a translation of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra.

So I did. When I returned to Delhi I made a tour of the Motilal Benarsidass publishing company where I scooped the Jaideva Singh translation of the VBT, an edition ‘guided’ by Dyczkowski's own root teacher, Swami Lakshmanju, and a score of other books. It sat entombed in my luggage, along with the dozens of other books and weird Ayurvedic pills and pastes I'd collected, until the end of the trip.

The idea of the Bhairava Tantra, a conversation between lovers extolling 112 practicable and embodied pathways to the Divine was, and remains, compelling to my deepest drives and in sync with my attraction to Yoga and dance: the body as vehicle of transformation; the body as instrument to be cultivated, sensitised, and made conductive of life energy for the purposes of awakening. That journey sounded inherently erotic, and I anticipated finding some of this rasa, this 'taste' of body magic in the text.

Instead, I found the Singh translation parched and clinical, adhering to an academic idiom, and scrubbed of sensuality and the more shadowy allusions to Tantric practice. (The skull cup used by tantrikas is called a "cranium bowl.") It was hard for me to enter the verses or ground them in a practice. Harder still to find the juice. To be fair, the dryness of the Singh translation could be a product of respectability politics; so many aspects of Indian tradition have been commodified, bastardised and sexually freighted - Tantra perhaps most of all. Indian scholars of previous generations had likely learned to ‘stick to the facts, ma’am’ when presenting it to Western audiences.

I offer this big preamble to communicate some of my gratitude for what I discovered in Lorin Roche's Radiance Sutras: the power of a work whose final form is inseparable from the process by which it was made. By the author’s own account, this process was aligned with the deepest heart of the original text. It is, as Roche calls it, "Translation as rapture."

Like Dyczkowski, Roche is a scholar-practitioner. They are both also, it would appear, creatures of intense devotion. By his own account, Roche put himself into living relationship with this text, played and danced with it for decades until it was ready to live and dance “through” him. The result is accessible poetry in the 'Banter,' 'Yukti'  and 'Insight' verses, and a 'Transmission' commentary - riffs on the Sanskrit lifted from each of the Yuktis.

Other Tantric and Sanskrit scholars have balked at the sudden popularity of this text, as it is not a direct and ‘faithful’ translation of the original VBT. Roche has some mastery of Sanskrit’s lexicon, but not of its grammar; nor is he drawing from any contextualising works of the period or tradition that might offer a more direct and nuanced reading. The VBT, by most accounts, was intended for more advanced practitioners who had undergone the rigours of Tantric sadhana and could now safely apply a more creative and liberated approach.

For this reason, serious practitioners should read this as an ‘inspired’ work - one writer’s loose, contemporary improvisation on a complex philosophical text whose treasures need an informed guide to be fully revealed. Radiance is a text born out of intimacy and play, and as such, takes its liberties - but lends them as well. The primal elements of the poetry become palpable, the ‘practices,’ while not true to the original VBT, come alive. It loses in depth and gravitas but gains in charm. Radiance gives permission.

Like Dyczkowski's lecture/transmission, Roche’s work appeals to the intellect while bypassing it at the same time. It asks for another kind of attention, open and game; it asks to be read as one would read poetry or fiction, in willing submission to whatever spell it might cast. Roche’s transparency about his process helps to dissolve old binaries between theory and practice, idea and experience, between what is written and previous and what is sensed and now, between what you think you should want and what you really do. (Or between dutifully ujjayi-ing on a yoga mat and happily sucking down beedis on the hotel roof.) Roche's interpretation seems to want to make the work an expression of Devi, a feminine movement, descending down and in and through the body, instead of floating above, at the altitude of the mind's choosing.

Deep scholarship, painstaking study, diligence and proper contextualisation are vitally necessary to the tradition, and require years of dedicated work. Radiance is more like a historical novel, a fiction that tells the truth - or ‘a’ truth - sideways, through empathy and invention. It privileges and revels in the associative zone where an individual psyche bumps up against a complex - and at times fathomless - phenomenon.

In this spirit, here’s a little play on Roche’s text:

The final structure of the work as a whole is similar to a cycle of worship, wherein, as you stand before the altar, you might encounter a many-armed god or goddess. The attributes of the deity are encoded with wisdom: the arms held up and back tell you something about the nature of the universe. Bhairava's Banter verses constitute this 'backdrop' philosophy: 

"I am beyond space and time...There are no directions to me...I am the nourishing state of   fullness...I am not covered up, not even by a billion galaxies..." 

The arms placed in front, often held in a mudra or grasping some tool or instrument - a book, a mala, are showing you skilful means, or what you can do about those other arms, the immutable truths of the universe. Those hands in front Roche’s Yuktis, the instructions or practice:

"The instant a thought springs up/ Abandon it and move on. / Don't let the mind rest anywhere./ In this way gain entry to the bliss/ Of the silent depths beneath the surf."

The Insight verses are the darsan, or the loving and penetrating gaze of the deity. After you have offered your gifts and prayers, you are beheld - literally 'being held' by divine sight. It’s an intimate and personal gaze meant to develop your relationship with the deity and the private orientation of your devotion:

"The real transmutation,/ The most sacred offering,/ Is to pour the elements of your body/ All of your sensual impressions,/ Into the fire of the Great Void."

And finally, Roche's Yukti Transmissions, are the prasad, the offering that has been digested through the body of the deity and is being offered back - a plump coconut laddu or a kaju katli, a final sweet gift - to take on your journey:

"On Bhakti: Bhakti yoga says that you can be in an erotic, passionate relationship  with God; you can be friends and equals with God; you can even feel parental and protective of God. All rivers flow to the ocean."

Play invites play. Through Roche’s translation I was able to experience the eroticism of the initiating conversation between Devi and Bhairava. Aligned with the conventions of classic bhakti poetry and narratives, the Banter Verses begin with the aspirant/lover (Devi) in a state of viraha, or protracted, overwhelming desire - a metaphor for the ache of longing for union with the divine. The Shaivite myths describe the god and goddess getting down to love, but Bhakti poetry revels in elaborate foreplay. I recall one text in which Siva takes on the feminine role; he adorns himself with Devi's earrings and rouge and dress and dances for her. Devi makes a coordinate change, sitting in a meditation pose and enjoying the show. This honey-held-on-the-tongue-tip feeling is the the duende, the aliveness that comes from unmet desire. Or in the words of a sevdalinka musician, (sevdah is the Bosnian verison of duende) you are "feeling good because you feel like shit."

In more conservative translations of the text, Devi is at first a demanding student; she’s done her homework and interrogates Shiva, offers argument, demands truth - and Shiva lauds her for it. In Roche's translation Devi's initial question, "Yet still I am curious./ What is this delight-filled universe/ Into which we find ourselves born?" plays not as genuine inquiry, but erotic appeal; it’s an expression of her desire to start their play. Devi knows the nature of the universe, just as Siva is intimate with manifest creative power, or Shakti. But she's inciting him, signalling her openness by taking up the polarity - Shiva plays Master, Devi plays dumb - as a prelude to their "embrace." It is Devi's version of, "Can you help me with my zipper? I just can't seem to reach back there..."

The Transmissions, basically an infusion of Roche's own voice into the text, is framed more as the bi-product of immersive focus that spontaneously gave rise to impressions harmonious with the VBT itself. But doesn’t one need to know the rules before one can transcend them?

In a recent interview, Kashmir Shaivite scholar, Paul Muller Ortega, describes the "modes of knowing" laid out in Indian philosophical texts: the perceptual and the inferential. But he delineates a third category, bhavana, or the "knowledge reality has of itself."

This spontaneous knowing arises from the body and cannot be "born of our surface intellect or cleverness," but emerges "fully shaped." It occurs after a process of profound psychic cleansing, at which point the aspirant has created the terrain where they might "invite sequences of insight" by placing their inquiry at the "door of the absolute." This intimate spring of insight and knowledge - and its improvisatory freedom - has to be earned. It comes from committed study and years of steeping oneself in the niceties of a text or practice.

Roche’s technique seems more aligned with a technique of literary criticism that has been used in China for centuries. Yi Jing is a process whereby a writer or viewer intuitively ‘collaborates’ with another artist to unearth the true meaning of their work. Yi means 'mind or consciousness' and Jing means 'space or environment.' One first ‘records’ what is called the "pictorial environment" of a text or piece of art in the mind. Only after the work has been deeply imprinted - imbibed whole and on its own terms - does one blend into this understanding their mental reflections on the text or work. The intent is an intuitive, full-body and generous way of seeing, a blending of one's consciousness with that of the artist in order to create new forms. It’s a kind of next-level fan fiction, with some hardcore spiritual prep. Yi Jing, like bhavana, requires a great emptying and opening, a willingness to let go and be taken over.

I recently did a search for Mark Dyczkowski, and by the grace of Vimeo, there he was, white-haired now and plushly bearded, giving a teaching from his Aphorisms called "The Heart." I was listening while making a big pot of soup and my ears pricked up when he said in his ragbag accent, "We don't have this alternation between theory and practice in India. We have the alternation between attention and inattention."

Roche's method, his rapture, his particular way of attending to this work bears with it an implicit promise: if we listen openly and devote ourselves to paying attention - if we play hard and love harder - a text, like the world, like the universe, might invite us in and body forth its full revelation. In light of other scholarship of the VBT, however, Radiance invites another conversation about the distinction between truth and what - to our modern, fragmented ear - simply feels true. Right or wrong, the liberating lure of this translation is the idea that we needn’t bother with the difference.