War Is Not A Luxury1
The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realize. This is war as illumination, for it is through war that we give name to those ideas which are – until the war – nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true war springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.
As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us.
For each of us as women, there is a dark place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, “beautiful/and tough as chestnut/stanchions against (y)our nightmare of weakness/2” and of impotence.
These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through that darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.
When we view living in the european mode only as a problem to be solved, we [won’t]3 rely solely upon our ideas to make us free, for these were what the white fathers told us were precious.
But as we come more into touch without own ancient, non-european consciousness of living as a situation to be experience and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge and, therefore, lasting action comes.
At this point in time, I believe that women carry within ourselves the possibility for fusion of these two approaches so necessary for survival, and we come closest to this combination in our wars. I speak here of war as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word war to mean – in order to cover a desperate wish for might without insight.
For women, then, war is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into nuts and bolts, and then into tanks and missiles, then into more tangible reduction of enemies. War is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our wars, carved from the rock experience of our daily lives.
As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning ground for the most radical and daring of ideas. They become a safe-house for that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and war. This is not idle fantasy, but a disciplined attention to the true meaning of “it feels right to me.” We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into armaments so they can be ensured. And where those armaments do not yet exist, it is our wars which helps to fashion them. War is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.
Possibility is neither forever nor instant. It is not easy to sustain belief in its efficacy. We can sometimes work long and hard to establish one beachhead of real resistance to the deaths we are expected to live, only to have that beachhead assaulted or threatened by those canards we have been socialized to fear, or by the withdrawal of those approvals that we have been warned to seek for safety. Women see ourselves diminished or softened by the falsely benign accusations of childishness, of non-universality, of changeability, of sensuality. And who asks the question: Am I altering your aura, your ideas, your dreams, or am I merely moving you to temporary and reactive action? And even though the latter is no mean task, it is one that must be seen within the context of a need for true alteration of the very foundations of our lives.
The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us – the warrior – whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free. War coins the actions to express and charter this revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom.
However, experience has taught us that action in the now is also necessary, always. Our children cannot dream unless they live, they cannot live unless they are nourished, and who else will feed them the real food without which their dreams will be no different from ours? “If you want us to change the world someday, we at least have to live long enough to grow up!” shouts the child.
Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas. The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves – along with the renewed courage to try them out. And we must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions that our dreams imply, and so many of our old ideas disparage. In the forefront of our move toward change, there is only war to hint at possibility made real. Our wars formulate the implications of ourselves, what we feel within and dare make real (or bring action into accordance with), our fears, our hopes, our most cherished terrors.
For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutionalized dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to power as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As warriors. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. Those dreams are made realizable through our wars that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, so speak, and to dare.
If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core – the fountain – of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds.
For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt – of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7 A.M., after brunch, during wild love, making peace, giving birth, mourning our dead – while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths.
1This is a revisionary re-write of Audre Lorde’s essay, “Poetry Is Not A Luxury” (1977), and was created for the sake of a separate identically-titled essay that prompted me to do this, for the sake of examples discussed within that essay. It was on cross-referencing Lorde’s piece against Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935) that lead to a combination of their beliefs here in this re-write. The two are intended to be read together, but each should stand alone just as well. The original source material for these two essays is cited at the end of this re-write along side Lorde’s original citations that she placed at the end of her essay.
First published in Chrysalis: A Magazine of Female Culture, no. 3 (1977).
From “Black Mother Woman,” first published in From a Land Where Other People Live (Broadside Press, Detroid, 1973), and collected in Chosen Poems: Old and New (W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 1982) p. 53.
3I wasn’t sure if this word should have been in the original or not, because Lorde was referring to both ideas and actions in the original. Either way, I think it belongs in the revision and because of this I put it in brackets. It was actually the perception of this potentially missing word that spurred the full revision, otherwise it would have been left as the few examples in the essay.