Women

Anyone would think, and I am sure you are no exception, Gentle Reader, that the writer of this blog was only interested in men! It certainly appears that most of the people I cite are men. And among living writers, I have long located myself squarely between Gary Snyder and James Salter, two extremely diverse men whose writing enthralls me.

In fact, thought is androgynous. Shirley Chang, a gifted architect [http://changbenedesign.com/], and I once discussed our determination to be androgynous in our thinking, dedicated to great thought whoever might express it. We were even happy that our first names were, very occasionally, used by men! As in everything, there is a yin and yang to thought, the yang aspects those that catch the eye.

My interest, however, is in women. If a book doesn’t have female characters, I’m not going to read it. And when Don picks out a movie said to be good but more of a “guy flick,” I ask plaintively, “Are there any women in it?” I’ve been threatening for some time to start a blog about the women characters I have loved, who have been my teachers over the years. These characters were created by both men and women, running from Aksinia, in Sholokhov’s series Quiet Flows the Don, to Abalone in Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, to Antonia in Will Cather’s book My Antonia, and Komako in Snow Country by Kawabata.

I’ve toyed with the idea of calling it Women and Mountains, because of the associations between mountains and thought, especially aspiration. Also because of the Tibetan Tara’s vow. As Gary Snyder translates it in Mountains and Rivers Without End, Tara says, “Those who wish to attain supreme enlightenment in a man’s body are many … therefore may I, until this world is emptied out, serve the needs of beings with my body of a woman.”

As a thinker, I’m interested in women, and I take Tara’s vow very willingly. The yin position is often in the background, dedicated to service, but in our fractured, corporate, robotic, arbitrary world, what catches the eye is yang energy. Many women have given themselves over to yang pretension. Service is often seen as martyrdom. It is precisely the ageless problem of understanding the less visible yin power which I wish to address in Women and Mountains.

Now, Gentle Reader, I am not promising to begin this blog just yet. I only tell you this because I am afraid you will think I give my attention solely to men. It’s not true.