Chantal Akerman died at the beginning of October. She was a Belgian lesbian filmmaker. Her film,  Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, is her best known. The New York Times called it the “first masterpiece of the feminine in the history of the cinema.”
 
Jeanne Dielman is an unusual film. It runs about three hours and twenty minutes, during which we watch a lonely World War II widow go through her routine of household chores: cooking, cleaning, and shopping. It appears to be making film history with the world’s longest dramaturgical taxi down the runway… until we realize that what we mistook for a numbing prelude is, in fact, the life-and-death conflict of the protagonist. She is imprisoned by her routines, suffocating from them, even as she leans into them to preserve her sanity.

At the end of the film, we discover that Jeanne is supporting herself and her son by prostituting herself in her apartment while her son is at school. There is a scene where she is on the bed, underneath the john. He appears to be hardly moving which allows the camera to focus on her agony, as she attempts to get him to finish and leave. After she dresses herself, she picks up a pair of scissors and kills him.
 
And then the camera cuts away to a scene where Jeanne is sitting at a table in her apartment, in the blood-spattered blouse. She just sits. For six or seven minutes, she just sits. And we sit with her.  After a few minutes, she shifts position. After another few minutes, she appears to stretch and relax somewhat. Something like a prototype of a smile crosses her tense face… and then the credits role. (Note: The above video clip includes the john and the killing. If you want to see just the final scene, it begins at 4:50.) 

I am intrigued by these six or seven minutes. I watch them over and over. I suspect that these may be the raison d’etre for the film. Chantal’s mother survived Auschwitz:
 
“She never wanted to speak about Auschwitz… I asked her once to tell me more, and she said, ‘No, I will get crazy.’ So we could speak around, or after, or before, but the real moment, never. Not directly.”
 
I have the feeling that this Auschwitz legacy informs Jeanne Dielman, and especially the ending. Perhaps this is Chantal speculating on just what that “get crazy” might look like.
 
In any event, she spends a long time cinematically speaking, showing us the immediate aftermath. Watching the scene, I supply the narrative: “Oh, here Jeanne is in shock. Her heart is racing. She is holding her breath still. She can’t move. But now, three minutes later, she is becoming aware of some discomfort from not moving. She shifts position. There is a moment where she drops her head… is she assessing the blood on the blouse? Is she making a gesture of surrender? But her head is up again, the same expression. And then, about five minutes in, she shifts her gaze. She appears to stretch. Stretching: a good sign. People do that when they wake up. The do it when they are coming out of cramped positions. And when Jeanne comes out of the stretch, I swear I see a ghost of a smile. Or am I just imagining it? I keep returning to this scene to be sure. I would swear that she has arrived in her own life. Finally.

A friend of mine had set up a box with a monarch butterfly cocoon, so that she could watch the transformation. I happened to be visiting when the transformation began. It was a slow process, and at first the wings appeared to be flat and crumpled. What I remember most about the event was the pumping motion after the emergence.  The butterfly began to expand and contract in a subtle, rhythmic, pumping motion, and as it pumped, the wings began to fill out, as if they were inflating.

Watching that final scene of  Jeanne Dielman, I thought of that pumping of the monarch butterfly…  In the utter stillness of Jeanne’s posture and expression, I imagined a similar subtle pumping, something connected to her heart and to her breath, but now—post-emergence—with the special mission of actualizing some kind of mechanism for flight. In those endlessly intriguing six minutes, I imagine I am watching the incarnation of a woman with agency, a woman who has emerged, for better or worse, from patriarchy.
 
I have watched this scene a half-dozen times, and I feel an internal pumping in myself every time I watch it. I am studying Jeanne Dielman. Have I emerged? Am I arrived at myself?​​

“Where is the love in this scene?”

This is a question familiar to many acting students. Novice performers who tear into a scene filled with dramatic conflict are brought up short by the criticism that all their effort is coming across as just so much sound and fury signifying nothing… because the audience is unable to discover the love between the combatants. “But it’s not there! They’re enemies!” I remember arguing. To which the response is, “Then you must find a way to put it there.”

Yesterday, I found out that my mentor in theatre had died. I had not seen him in thirty years, and I was surprised by the emotions that arose for me.

My relationship with Jack had been intense and transformative. For four undergraduate and graduate years I had tried to win his attention and his approval, and I had consistently failed. He had been the professor to please. The other professors were academics, but Jack had worked on Broadway for fifteen years. He had been choreographed by Balanchine, danced with Judy Garland and Ethel Merman. Jack had studied with Uta Hagen and taken classes at the Herbert Berghof Studio. He was carrying the DNA of Stanislavsky, the Group Theatre… and he had learned from the masters themselves the secrets of “the Method.” We all were competing to inherit the legacy.

Jack cast me in a lead role of a play that went on to win regional and state competitions, touring eventually to the Kennedy Center for the prestigious annual American College Theatre Festival. I remember the rehearsal we had the night before we flew out. Jack was giving little touch-up notes to the cast. When he got to me, he stopped, and then he said, “And as for you, I don't know what to say.” It was a devastating note. He had done it in front of everyone. I was, apparently, beyond help. My performance was hopeless. I was going to doom all of us to failure. I was the Jonah on board, but it was too late to throw me overboard.

Today, as a director, I know that, if an actor is truly that hopeless, giving a note like that can only assure an even more abysmal performance. When I think of that moment, I realize that Jack’s animosity toward me and his need to humiliate me were so great, he was willing to compromise his professionalism to indulge them.

In spite of the fact he had cast me in the leading female role, Jack gave the final curtain call to the supporting actress. This insult was emblematic of our dynamic for four years. He could not ignore my ability, but he could and did take every occasion to withhold acknowledgement of it.

Jack was my adviser for my directing thesis project, but I could not get him to come see the play until right before it opened. When he finally did attend, he gave me a list of changes that were too sweeping to implement at such a late date, but that left me with the understanding that the production was terrible.

I was on the verge of coming out as a lesbian and  I was twenty years younger than Jack. I had come of age in the era of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Jack had fled the oppressive Midwest with its suffocating 1950’s homophobia. His liberation had been the Broadway world of musical theatre, a world dominated by gay men. His heyday had been the era of post-war misogyny… the work of Miller, Williams, Albee. He either could not understand my restlessness as a woman wanting to be front and center, or maybe he understood it all too well for what it was: an assault on his refuge .

Jack and I finally came to a breaking point. It was close to the time of my graduation. I cannot remember the issue… it may have been one of my final attempts to get him to view my thesis work. What I remember was being in his office and breaking down in tears of rage and frustration. I remember Jack was appalled. It was if I had vomited on him. He didn’t know what to do, and I was beyond caring. I just sat there and cried.

Directly after this, I remember I went to a playwriting class. I was still crying, still sobbing. This is an odd memory, because I was normally a very reserved person. Whatever was happening to me that day was so momentous, I had become oblivious to my surroundings.

Jack personified the world of commercial theatre, and even though he had left it in the early 1960’s, and even though it was now the 1980’s, little had changed for women. In fact, today, thirty years later, there has still been little change for women. My experience with Jack, bitter as it was, turned out to be a blessing. It spared me years, maybe decades, of searching for a toehold in a male dominated industry that had a particular aversion to ambitious feminists. When I remember that afternoon with the out-of-control crying--which was a mystery to me at the time--I believe it signified my letting go of all my dreams of a career in theatre. I believe that I was understanding that there was no strategy that was ever going to gain me membership in this boys’ club of boys’ clubs, and that what I was experiencing with all those tears was grief, but also relief.

For thirty years I would struggle with the limited resources, the obscurity, and the internalized oppression of working in lesbian communities, but I was spared the dance of femininity and appeasement that engaged and exhausted the best energies of so many of my peers. I would never lend my talents to a “ladies’ auxiliary” in theatre. I would luxuriate in the freedom to write without compromise or censorship, and for a population of lesbians, feminists, girls, and especially survivors of sexual abuse whose stories are routinely appropriated, distorted, or erased in so-called “universal” drama of mainstream theatre.

So, Jack… I missed your memorial service.  I would have liked to have gone. And if there had been an occasion to speak, I would have made “Where is the love?” my text. I know where the love was for you. It was theatre, and good acting . It was the honesty of a scene, the integrity of the action. And I know from your obituaries that the love was also in the volunteer work of your post-retirement years. You worked as a counselor on a substance abuse hotline, an ombudsperson for eldercare, and as a Court-Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) for neglected and abused children.

And where was the love for me, in my experience as your student? Well, I will just  have to put it there.

There is a revolution, and a young brilliant leader emerges in the struggle. She writes a book that makes a compelling, ardent, and persuasive case for the revolution. As a result, tens of thousands of women rise up, our lives changed forever.

Something happens to the leader. She is attacked, she is maligned. She shows some signs of fatigue, some signs of weakness. She falls into enemy hands, but they are careful not to make a martyr of her.

What do they do? They administer massive amounts of heavily addictive, psychotropic drugs. The side of effects of these drugs enable multiple diagnoses that justify a perpetuation and proliferation of the drugging. The prisoner becomes numb, docile, apathetic, amnesiac… distanced from her former identity and alienated from her former causes. She identifies herself as a patient. The enemy’s mission has been accomplished… almost.

Underneath the prisoner’s drug-benumbed, listlessly synapsing brain, the spirit of the rebel lives on. There is something she needs to tell someone, but what is it? And to whom should she tell it? She can’t… quite… make the connections. It has something to do with what she is living, what she is experiencing. Must… make… observations… Must… tell... someone…

Slowly, across a period of years, the prisoner begins, agonizingly, to write brief one- or two-page essays documenting her observations of her life and the lives of her fellow inmate/prisoners. Some of them are no more than a paragraph. There is no political analysis. There is no context, no induction, no conclusion. Tiny bursts of lucid observation, like matches struck in the dark. There is no candle to light. There is no fuse to ignite. Just these pinpoints of momentary illumination. Someone else will have to piece it together. Someone else will have to map out the cartography of the dungeon from these distress flares.

Two things stand out in the prisoner’s missives: the agents and the subsequent affect. Ativan, Haldol, Valium, Tegritol, Depacote, Trilifon, electro-convulsive shock… And then she describes the damage:

“… due to the medication, her biggest trouble was she couldn’t care about anything, and love was forgotten. That left getting through the blank days as comfortably as possible, trying not to sink under the boredom and total loss of hope. She was lucid, yes, at what price. She sometimes recognized on the faces of others joy and ambition and other emotions she could recall having had once, long ago. But her life was ruined, and she had no salvage plan.”

“Every time she went in [to the mental hospital]… she felt submerged, as if someone was holding her under water for months. When she came out she was... helpless, unable to make the smallest decision, speechless, and thoroughly programmed by a rigid hospital routine, so that even her stomach grumbled on time… “

“Her indecision was awful, for no sooner did an impulse arise to do something, than it would be crossed by a contrary impulse; she was conflicted. (She watched herself undergo this in slow motion as it were, but was powerless to avoid it.) Or she was confronted by so many choices of things to do, that must be done, that she could choose none of them.”

“She could not read. She could not write… the words bounced off her forehead like it was steel; she simply could not care about the content of any written material, be it heavy or lightweight. Why? Why read it? Why absorb?”

“Once in a while she prodded herself to write, but the old excitement of creation did not return, or if it did, it fizzled by morning after her nightly medication.”

Her former revolutionary comrades are confused. What has happened to their leader?  Why is there no naming of an enemy anymore? What happened to the call to arms?  Did she desert the cause? HAS SHE LOST HER MIND…?

Can’t they see that this little book is in code, that it has been smuggled out from behind enemy lines at great risk? Can’t they see that she is writing about the fact she can’t write? Can’t they see that she is naming the inability to name?  Can’t they see that this is the most dangerous and difficult revolutionary tract she ever wrote? Don’t they understand that she is no longer pointing out the horror, the endgame that awaits us in patriarchy, but that she has become the living manifestation of it?

The book is titled Airless Spaces. It was published, after many rejections, by Semiotext(e)  in 1998. The author is Shulamith Firestone, who, at the age of twenty-five, wrote The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for a Feminist Revolution, the book that changed my life forever.

In Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, he depicts the endpoint of breaking the spirit to be the moment when the hero is threatened with rats eating off his face and he shouts out, “Do it to Julia!”—signaling his betrayal of his beloved, as well as his loss of humanity. But this is not the endpoint. Orwell’s anti-hero still loves his own life. The true endpoint is described by Firestone: “... hearing of a death, she often wished she could trade places with that person.”

The author of this fierce, unbearable book died on August 28, 2012. Her body was not discovered until almost a week later. According to the media, Shulamith Firestone died of natural causes.

Frontispiece of Airless Spaces:

"I dreamed I was on a sinking ship. It was a luxury liner like the Titanic. The water was slowly seeping up from below, and the people aboard the ship knew that they were doomed. On the two top decks it was gaiety and mirth, with people dressed to the nines, eat drink and be merry for soon we shall all die. But a note of hysteria hovered in the merrymaking and here and there I saw strange goings on, like in a Grosz cartoon.

I fled down some metal stairs to where people were starting to get their pantslegs wet. Wasn't I looking in the wrong direction? But I desperately searched the equipment in the basement for something that would supply an air pocket, and I succeeded in finding a refrigerator into which I stowed myself, hoping to live on even after the boat was fully submerged until it should be found.

I woke from this dream in a panic that the disaster was real, and that I was picking all this up by e.s.p. I even called UPI to ask if there was any recent news of a sinking liner, and they said yes, but it was in the Bermuda Triangle, so no attempt would be made to find the ship."

_ I have just discovered that Tonia Thelma Grant died in 2005, and I don’t remember reading any memorials about her passing, so I wanted to write something.

Tonia was born in Brooklyn on March 28, 1927, and she moved to Gilboa, New York, in 1971. Here she founded Damas Gracias Writers’ Workspace, where lesbian writers could offer workshops and retreats for women.

_The year before Tonia’s death, I had the privilege of teaching a lesbian theatre workshop at Damas Gracias, and one of my favorite memories is sitting around in the evening and listening to Tonia’s stories of being an early “out” lesbian in Brooklyn. I believe she said she had worked as a reporter for the Amsterdam News, one of the historic African American newspapers.

She had a passion for lesbian culture that was undiminished, and Damas Gracias, located on a beautiful creek, reflected the dream of a “room of one’s own.”

The one obituary I have, sent to me by Basil Kreimendahl, who attended my workshop, notes that “She is survived by two sisters, Hazel Chambers of Brooklyn and Ruby Grant of Gilboa; a brother, Edgerton Grant of Brooklyn; a son, Tonio M. Grant of Gilboa; and two grandchildren, Mychal and Amaya Grant of West Virginia.” And, it notes,  there was a service for her in Grand Gorge. 

_Basil, who wanted Tonia to perform in one of her plays, added this:
"I also remember Tonia telling me how much she enjoyed every year going to the Carribean and that she had family there. She also told me that she had a brownstone in Brooklyn. At one point, she had a private club for women in it. This was when that was the safest way to meet. She was also an actress."

Because I am unable to locate more information about Tonia, I  want to turn to the land she chose for her dreams : the small town of Gilboa located in the Catskill Mountains.There are two facts about this small town that seem to me to stand as metaphors for the greater and seemingly lost story of Tonia’s life.

First, in 1926, the year before Tonia’s birth, the original town was razed and flooded by the damming of the Schoharie Creek. Many of the townspeople fought “eminent domain,” right up to the flooding and for two decades beyond. The project was built by African American and Italian immigrant labor.

_ “Hello?” I picked up the phone.

“Do you know who this is?”

I had to think for a minute, before I realized that the voice on the other end of the line was that of Barbara Grier, the publisher of Naiad Books. The year was 1987.

Did I know who she was? Well! How about, did she know who I was? More to the point, did I know who I was. I had just come out as a lesbian, and my world was upside down. Most of the patterns of the first three decades of my life made no sense in the new world I found myself attempting to navigate.

Did I know who she was? Of course I knew. She was the publisher of lesbian books. Everyone knew that. Especially lesbian writers.

_Did I know who she was? Well, obviously. I had contacted her, hadn’t I, about one of the books she had published, We Too Are Drifting by Gale Wilhelm? I was itching to adapt the book for a screenplay, and I was needing the contact information for the author. (This was still about a decade before the Internet.)

It was a tough conversation, as I remember. Starting with that memorably abrasive opening line, right through to the end, where Barbara would contact the author on my behalf, but not entrust me with the information. She wanted to make sure I understood copyright law. She wanted to make sure I understood the long history of the novel, which had been brought back into print twice, decades after original publication. She wanted me to know that, unable to locate Wilhelm, she had still published it, hoping that Wilhelm would contact her. Most of all, she wanted to make sure that I understood the weight and the freight of lesbian literature and of those few who were called to work in what I was rapidly coming to understand was some kind of sacred field.  

_Fast-forward two and a half decades. The screenplay for We Too Are Drifting is written, but still unoptioned. I never did meet Wilhelm, but I did eventually correspond with her partner and literary executor. Following in Barbara’s formidable footsteps, I publish my own books. Naiad never did take to the idea of publishing drama, and I was always a little squirrelly about my plays being listed with romance novels and mysteries.

Today I have just read of Barbara’s passing. I hear that voice again, “Do you know who I am?”

No, I don’t. I can’t. I came out in the 1980’s, not the 1950’s. I came out at a time when there was an openly identified, lesbian press—Barbara’s. I came out in the wake of the momentous Women’s Liberation Movement. I have read about the Daughters of Bilitis, but when I came out there were lesbian hiking clubs, and lesbian books clubs, and lesbian chess clubs, and lesbian festivals.  I can’t know what it was like to meet in secret, in private homes, knowing that DOB was the only lesbian organization in the country, the only meeting place outside of the bars. I’ve read about The Ladder, the first openly lesbian magazine. I’ve even read archival copies of it, including the articles by “Gene Damon,” which was Barbara’s nom de plume. But I can’t understand the courage it took to write for The Ladder, even under an assumed name. I can’t know what that publication meant to lesbians unable to locate any sisters in their hometowns. And I can’t imagine what she went through to establish Naiad Books. I came out amid a flowering of women’s presses.

I may not know who Barbara Grier was, but I would catch glimpses of her through the lesbian authors she published. Grier had rediscovered Wilhelm. She also dug up Renée Vivien and published translations of her work. I read the Naiad edition of Lifting Belly by Gertrude Stein.

_Decades later, I called Grier again. I don’t remember the occasion, but both of us were considerably more mellow. The conversation drifted away from business and onto the subject of our mutual passion: lesbian literature. Suddenly, she told me she wanted to read me something. She asked me to wait while she found it. And in those few minutes while I held the silent telephone, I understood that I was about to have An Experience.

I want to share it today, because it stands as tribute to a woman who did not define herself as a writer, but who had the genius for discovering, treasuring, and gifting the world with lesbian writing.

What Barbara read out loud to me that day was the ending of The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith, a lesbian novel published in 1952—the year I was born.  Barbara would have been nineteen. It was the story of a middle-class lesbian whose lesbianism cost her the custody of her daughter—a story from an era that I will never know. But I appreciate the history, the struggle, the writing, and the passion of the woman who shared it with me:

Carol raised her hand slowly and brushed her hair back, once on either side, and Therese smiled because the gesture was Carol, and it was Carol she loved and would always love. Oh, in a different way now, because she was a different person, and it was like meeting Carol all over again, but it was still Carol and no one else. It would be Carol, in a thousand cities, a thousand houses, in foreign lands where they would go together, in heaven and in hell. Therese waited. Then as she was about to go to her, Carol saw her, seemed to stare at her incredulously a moment while Therese watched the slow smile growing, before her arm lifted suddenly, her hand waved a quick, eager greeting that Therese had never seen before. Therese walked towards her.