Monday, October 30, 2017

Vagina Dialogue: Eve Ensler & Anne Lamott


Two of the biggest names in second-wave women’s culture—Eve Ensler and Anne Lamott—shared the stage at Royce Hall, UCLA, on October 29, 2017.
            2017, with the end of 2016, marked the worst year US women ages 40-80 have ever endured.
            October 28 tolled a year since FBI Director James Comey ended the election campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton by alerting Congress to “new emails” and a re-opened FBI investigation—only to say “Never mind” within hours of election day.
            Yet Eve Ensler and Anne Lamott were asked the question “Where do you find hope?” 
            “I want to write a book called Doomed: A Book of Hope,” joked Anne.  “But I do radical self-care.  And I help the poor.”  
            “At first my friends and I were like bees bitterly bumping into glass,” she confessed.  “Then there was a tiny little change.  And now I’m kind of better.”
            “Women are rising up and breaking out of the confines of patriarchy!” declared Eve. 
            To get to hope, she explained, “I begin with something dark and painful”—such as the suffering of “comfort women” in the Philippines, used as sexual slaves by Japanese during World War II.
 “They couldn’t afford not to hope.  You have to hope,” she said.  As co-founder of the One Billion Rising protest movement to end rape and sexual violence against women, she has listened to personal stories of these now elderly women.  One billion refers to the statistic that one in three women world-wide will be raped or beaten in her lifetime.
Anne turned to listening and writing as a means of healing the world, citing “Telling Is Listening” by Ursula Le Guin in her book The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (2004).
When Anne’s life was at its lowest point, she said, “I was given salvation—the way you’re given salvation in Christ—by the women’s movement.  I say something.  Others say ‘Me too.’ Then we start laughing, sharing, recognition.”
Eve added, “I would be in a mental hospital without writing.  I wrote myself out of a catastrophic childhood.  Write or die of mental illness, explode.  It was a compulsion.”
Back to the present, Anne noted the “lack of language” in the President’s statements about building a wall, banning travel, imprisoning people.  “We need to be people listening and watching with empathy.”
“Look at everything that’s being done and do the opposite,” said Eve. When they make laws based on gender, we can support “gender-fluid, flowing sexuality.”
“I will not let them take my joy away,” Anne declared, adding a line from Wendell Berry’s essay “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”: “Be joyful though you’ve considered all the facts.”  Laugh, dance.
“Don’t engage the orange virus, or you’ll be poisoned by it,” warned Eve.  “I’ve never seen the Predator-in-Chief have a feeling.”
“You had to write yourself out of where you were,” interrupted Meryl Friedman, moderator of the conversation, who curates Spoken Word at UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance.  “How did you write yourself into a future?  Many of us feel obligated to have a certain kind of future—a job, iPhone, data plan—but you have stayed on the writer path.”
“In the 60s, 70s, the American dream was melting away,” answered Eve.  “There were civil rights marches, women’s protests, antiwar demonstrations.  I didn’t want to be in the system.  You have to listen to what’s inside you—not to the ‘win, compete, have it, get it’ voices.  Bill O’Reillys don’t matter when you’re on the path.” 
“My dad wrote hell or high water,” said Anne.  “He got up every morning and did it.  He wrote eight books and had three kids.  All dreams are based on discipline: you just do it.  You write 2-3 or 4-5 hours a day.”
Then she described a woman at her church whose son was in prison.  “But she never lost faith—as a decision. ‘I know my change is going to come,’ she said.”
“Do the one thing you know you can do,” Anne stressed.  “Do the one-inch picture frame.  Otherwise you’ll become overwhelmed and paralyzed.  Just take the action.”
“Our change is going to come,” echoed Eve.  “Struggle is the highest form of song.  Writing is learning to struggle.  You get worn down in the struggle, but I will work until I am nothing when I leave here.”
“We’re all insane, every single person,” she laughed.  “I’m okay with that.  You decide on the brand of insanity you want your life to be.  There are broken places in everyone.  There isn’t anyone in the world who isn’t traumatized.  We’re all damaged—no one has a clue.  Socrates wrote, ‘The one thing I know is that I don’t know anything.’”
“As Terry Richey wrote, the point is not to try harder,” added Anne.  “It’s to release, to try less.  That’s been healing for me and for other sober women.”
“Seeing what you see, feeling what you feel” is the key to recovery, Eve observed.  “Instead of ‘I can’t ever talk about that,’ it may be exactly where you need to go.”
When Meryl asked about their writing habits, Eve said she writes every day. 
“I write five days a week, not weekends,” admitted Anne.  “But I’m always gathering.  I have a Dr. Seuss inside me, a rag-bag guy.  I write it down.  You’ve got to waste more time, wasting paper.”
“Yes, I’m always gathering ideas, hunting,” agreed Eve.  “One book leads to another book.  But when I’m working on something, everything else stops happening.  It’s deeply lonely work; the hardest thing is the loneliness.  I use a candle, music to keep the aloneness flamed and fluid.”
A last question from Meryl: “Do you ever feel overwhelmed by what people expect of you?” 
“When I was a young mother writing a book, I felt ‘I have two kids, and the one I feed wins,” said Anne, adding that “Now I just have two dogs, but there’s always ‘KFUK radio’ inside my head.”  When someone says Anne has done good work, that radio in her head says, “You are a fraud.” 
“You have to tell yourself encouraging things, nurture yourself,” she continued.  “People are always branding you, saying that’s who you are.  My father is always there in my mind, but I don’t know who I’m going to be next.  I don’t know who I am today.”
“Don’t freeze into one identity,” Eve explained.  “Seven years ago I was diagnosed with stage 3 or 4 cancer.  I morphed into a new person.  Expand, don’t brand.”
“We’re frightened, but we get up,” Anne said.  “It’s like Mr. Rogers’ mother, who used to tell her son ‘Look for the helpers’ when you feel flattened.  I’m, like, a really cranky optimist.  You think X was a bad thing, but often it turns out that it was the very best thing.”
Eve gave an illustration.  During this difficult time of the Trump presidency, “Many people are finding each other.  We found ways to stop the Muslim ban; now we’re working to help women mend.”
This conversation between Eve and Anne came after a week in which each day another actress came out with accusations against Harvey Weinstein: Zelda Perkins on Monday, Brit Marling on Tuesday, Mimi Haleyi and Dominique Huett on Wednesday,  Natassia Malthe on Thursday, Daryl Hannah on Friday, Rose McGowan on Saturday.
“Each of us needs to know that what has happened to us, has happened before,” said Eve.  “We have to be unleashed, too.  As Hitler gained power, no one took him seriously.  He was just a narcissistic clown with a domineering father; the bourgeoisie didn’t want to give up their comforts.  We need to go into the street!"
“And we need to encourage men who are with us,” noted Anne. “Men at the women’s marches.  We all need a softening of the heart, becoming tender.  Movements begin in truth, justice, freedom, and a few crazy people.”
“Also you need courage,” chimed in Meryl, the moderator.  “You two have en-couraged us.”
“And we need forgiveness, mercy—like the Amish town who urged the mother of the killer not to move away; instead they offered her forgiveness, the mercy of God,” added Anne.
“We are in an emergency, so we are emerging,” declared Eve.  “There are 850 million people living in hunger in the world.  We cannot be alone right now.  We are all profoundly traumatized right now.  We need a new paradigm—not hierarchy and a big leader.”
The finale of the evening was a reading by each of the speakers.
“Every person’s story is important,” said Anne and began to read a story she had posted on her son’s website, Hello Humans, just a month earlier.
 “Six years and one month ago, I stood on the street… holding a sharp pencil,” she confessed, “… to stab my enemy in the throat, if necessary….  the enemy was my grown child….”  Use this link to read her story of freaking out over her son’s drug addiction.
Eve then delivered a thundering rendition of her signature piece, “I’m Over It,” an update of which had appeared on the Huffington Post a week earlier, October 18.
“I am over rape,” she began.  “I am over rape culture…  I’m over thinking about rape every day of my life since I was five years old.”
The evening ended with Eve’s call to rise up, followed by a riot of applause.
“There are approximately one billion women on the planet who have been violated.  Can we rise together?  Can we rebirth the culture because we know that when women are free, safe, equal and allowed to be alive in all their intensity, the whole story will finally change?”
Helga, Suzy, and I rose to applaud and to congratulate each other and everyone else for being present for such an empowering evening.  During these hours in Royce Hall we had felt the same energy and joy we’d had a year earlier, just a week away from electing the first woman president. 
That victory had been stolen, and the credulity-stretching year of 2017 in politics was getting worse each day as more disgusting pedophilia, rape, and sexual harassment by famous men was revealed and hashed over in the news.
But Eve Ensler and Anne Lamott had given us hope.  Each of the three of us is working on a book about our own life journey, having met in a memoir class led by Shawna Kenney, author of I Was a Teenage Dominatrix.  We walked out of Royce Hall surrounded by others whose lives had been energized by these two women. 
Words are events, they do things, change things,” as Ursula Le Guin put it.  “They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it.”



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