Sirens off Corfu

The push to promote ‘women’s voices’ in literature is a Trojan Horse based on fallacious claims that women were underrepresented in previous centuries.

What they really intend is to push a certain type of voice from writers who happen to be women (i.e. progressive liberals).

We don’t need to hear about Toni Morrison or Margaret Atwood or Joyce Carol Oates when the 19th century alone had the Bronte Sisters, Austen, Shelley, George Eliot, Georges Sand, etc.

In the 20th century, there were several bestselling novelists who were women, including Ayn Rand, Agatha Christie, Daphne Du Maurier, Iris Murdoch, as well as literary authors like Anais Nin, Sylvia Plath, Katherine Mansfield, Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf—and intellectuals too: Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and Simone de Beauvoir.

There was never a shortage of “women’s voices” in literature. Telling people this isn’t good enough and that they ought to be reading contemporary authors is like arguing that readers should focus on Stephen King and Clive Cussler rather than Tolstoy or Flaubert or Proust.

What exactly is a “woman’s voice” anyway? We don’t speak of literature in general as male-voiced. Ulysses is a literary work. The Count of Monte Cristo is a novel. Kubla Khan is a poem. Are any of these works the exclusive product of a masculine mind or male brain? Should we emphasize the phallic thrust underlying the desire to create? Woman creates too—she gives birth to life, ideas, things. She is also the reason men create anything at all. All stories are about women. Not always real women, but woman nonetheless.

A woman who writes about womanhood is just a woman who is writing about her personal experience of a broader reality, just as any man who writes about fighting in the trenches is telling a story about war, about death, about civilization, about suffering. The emergence of the conceptual becomes the greater truth the artist expresses through particular narrative.

These are just various aspects of human life refined by the aesthetic craft of writing and no longer apply exclusively to any vulgar notion of male or female experience. Anais Nin, for example, took the experience of female sexuality and made it universal; she can derive greater metaphysical and poetic intuitions from a very personal and intimate experience of sex, love, and passion—in other words, a particular woman in love becomes erotic. Eroticism is the universalizing of the act of love among several partners. Her story is our story. Is.

I can not love a woman as much as I love the concept of beauty as an absolute aesthetic distillation of several false partial broken loves. I’ve never loved in the sense of having had sex with any of the women who I loved most—these were all Muse-Sisters and goddesses who have appeared to me and stood at a distance romantically, but whose influence makes them more meaningful than whoever is going to be my wife. Sorry wife, I cannot ever say “I love you” because it is not true—I do not love you in the way I love the perfect-experience of absolute Woman. Anais Nin has given me more than you could ever give me. You will never match Ayn Rand in terms of intellectual sustenance. I cannot pretend that one woman is The One—you are just duty and responsibility and whatever-happened-to-be-in-my-way-to-have and so am I to you and I cannot be your God or All-giving Father so why pretend we are more special than we are by calling ourselves “I love you”?

I might as well love you only functionally as conditioned circumstance and you might as well be a whore because that would be more honest than pretending we are monogamously singularly and romantically meant for each other. Let’s not have children so we don’t have to give up the vision of the Other-One who is the true One while we occasionally pretend we love each other.

You will probably not match the attributes I’ve come to love but I shall list them regardless because I pay tribute to the goddess who has blessed me with her presence:

I prefer tall women as all the women I’ve loved are tall and shapeless.

Pandora was my first relationship, a prelude that lasted only a month and so I never thought to count it before. But she is important—mythically—and stood at five feet ten inches. She looked like D’Arcy Wretzky. Then came Elizabeth who looked like Jessica Chastain and stood at 5 ft 5 and wore a size nine shoe and had long fine boned fingers.

This is the manner in which biographer Deirdre Bair described Anais Nin. I did not know this before reading Bair’s work. Now it all makes sense.

I’ve spent my life dreaming about things I’ve never done to women I’ve never had—oh but how I love them still. Had they given any more, had I gotten any closer, the beauty would vanish.

The women I’ve actually been with or had a chance to be with were not women I could write songs or poems or books about.

Only those who remained inaccessible were the best—I can only love so long as She remains a distant light on the horizon.

Sing me to sleep again, sirens. Sing me to oblivion.