Blind Spots

Norma Marder

An annular eclipse is safely focused through leafy pinholes. The pavement is dappled with light–crescents. They flicker in unison, arching as the moon bites deeper into the sun. A cold gray dusk descends and wind agitates the leaves, making the arches vault and quiver. Exactly at noon the moon lies on the sun—its rim blazing—and millions of radiant, wind–tossed rings leap and dance.

In the winter of 1955, I was a college junior living with a roommate in a small apartment in a grubby rooming house. A long love affair had ended; my roommate’s boyfriend persuaded me to accept a blind date with his old friend, a black journalist.
    The man arrived early, chunky and muscular. Quiet, compressed. In his late twenties. We were going to the movies. My room was earth–colored: brown walls, fabrics, and furniture. One lime green rocking chair. An overhead light, a lamp. The curtains were drawn. The blind date sat in the rocking chair, and I sat on my bed, which doubled as a couch. A bit of a chat before catching the movie. His name was Tom Lena. He worked for a small town newspaper.
    “What do you write?” I asked.
    “Courthouse and traffic,” Tom Lena said dryly. “They never let me write news or features.”
    We locked eyes for a moment. “How do you feel about that?” I asked.
    He leaped up and threw himself on me. I remember an instant’s shock, as if I had banged into a glass door.
    His mouth smothered me. I struggled. He grew extra limbs. A hand rooted under my skirt, and I felt cloth tear, my pants ripping like flesh. My legs were pried open. A stone jammed itself inside me and weighed me down. Struggling gave him energy, so I stopped moving. My body lay still and heavy, while my mind drifted out the window, singing Schubert songs with piano accompaniment. The rape went on forever—it seemed like hours—his pumping in and out, his breathing, his moaning, my silent singing: “Litanie,” “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” “Nacht und Träume.” I passed out, woke, begged him to stop, silently sang, passed out—always waking to his frowning face, that interminable pumping, and soreness.
    Periodically he said, “I can’t come,” and I felt a weary triumph. As far as I know, he never came.
    When I woke for the last time, a hunched figure was sitting on the edge of my bed, scribbling and erasing a piece of paper on his thigh. Concentrated, oblivious, using a pencil stub. He put the pencil in his shirt pocket and presented—yes, quite formally—presented the paper to me.
    “Do you always write poems to women after you rape them?” I asked.
    Growling, he raised his arm and shook his fist over my face.
    He left; the scene blurs. i’m a shadow. The shadow throws the bedspread in a corner. The shadow crumples a paper and jams it in the wastebasket.
    I didn’t call the police. I didn’t even scream—I don’t remember screaming—I was too embarrassed. Prairie women, after all, endured drought and solitary childbirth. Millions of people had just died in World War II.

I grew up on harmony poems: children of all colors skipped down the road of life, hand in hand against oppression. Brothers, we were called, regardless of sex—brothers under the skin. I imagined the skin peeling off, our bodies equalized into bloody muscles and organs like anatomies in the encyclopedia.
    I should have been a diplomat. Always seeing at least two sides to everything. My father mixed trust with secrecy; my mother undermined love with disapproval. Instructed to keep my eyes open and my feet on the ground, I kept my head in the clouds.
    The rapist’s race complicated my feelings and my behavior. Six months earlier Emmett Till, a black teenager murdered for wolf–whistling a white woman, had been fished from the Tallahatchie River. Eldridge Cleaver, lustfully enraged by that woman’s photo, was engaged in raping white women, calling his rampage a political act. The House Un–American Activities Committee was hounding subversives. I felt the political edge. Perhaps that is why I didn’t get angry, didn’t feel the rape was directed at me personally—though you could argue I had a creative relationship with denial. Anyway, daughters of leftists were afraid to be investigated and would never get a black man in trouble.

I told my husband the rape story. We were lying in bed, in the dark. He is my dearest friend and lover, but on that one occasion his timing was brutal. “Why didn’t you scream?” he shouted. “There were people in the house—in the next room! Haven’t you got any reflexes for self–defense?”
    Shocked, I pressed the rape story into a vein of silence, where it slept for twenty years. Maybe I shouldn’t call it rape, I thought; it didn’t happen at knifepoint, so maybe it doesn’t qualify.
    Then one of my voice students was raped by an acquaintance, and we confided in each other. An article about date rape appeared in our local newspaper, with comforting statistics. Susan Brownmiller published Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, and the title alone released me from shame. I read how young, left–wing white women of my generation, living their political ideals in shabby apartments, were raped by black men and silenced by those very ideals, our buried memories split and dispersed.
    My buried memories attached to music. I was a singer of lieder and avant–garde music, but I never got lost in music while listening for pleasure. I made sense of this one Sunday afternoon when an old friend and colleague, a horn player, put on his favorite recording of Beethoven’s Second Symphony, and I lay on his shag rug attending to it. I remembered lying on the grass at a Tanglewood concert in 1955, floating on the ethereal harmonies, then sinking, midway, into dry notes. The rape memory flickered. I confessed to the horn player, in shame, that music didn’t enter me. “I was raped when I was nineteen,” I said. “It didn’t damage my sexual life, but it seems to have tangled itself in music, my means of escape.” He insisted I write up the rape and give him a copy. A catharsis for me and a fuller understanding for my husband.
    Eventually I talked easily about rape, mainly with women. “What mark did it leave?” they asked. “I don’t feel music unless I’m performing it myself,” I said, “and sometimes while making love my mind takes over and sings songs I don’t want to hear.”

My study closet is an archeological site, mainly of papers and reel–to–reel tapes—the recorded past and its artifacts. I am a writer now, about to be on TV, digging for a miniature cedar chest of theatrical makeup. On a shelf with Bach cantatas, practice tapes, and house receipts, I find a deerskin folder, a souvenir from Florida my aunt Dma gave me forty years ago. Soft leather is stitched over blood red, pebbled cardboard. A hand–painted flamingo stands against a blue moon. On the back my aunt Dma’s name and mine are heat– engraved in fancy script.
    I take it to my desk. The folder, which surfaces periodically, has a madeleine effect. Its snap flap and padded leather preserve end–of–college letters, my first singing contract, wedding letters. The last time I found it, about fifteen years ago, it was buried in the woolens trunk in the attic.
    I read the best bits. My roommate is here, and old friends, but not my parents, which seems odd in a folder dedicated to history. As I turn the last paper, about to close the folder, a slit appears across the top of the lining—a slit in what has always been solid, stiff cardboard. A compartment. I must have tucked my parents’ letters in there.
    I reach in and pull out two flattened wads of paper. The first is relics of my first college love affair—a drawing of my lover’s sleeping face, a drawing of myself looking sad, my poems neatly written on index cards. I see the desk in the brown room where I tried to turn misery into art—drawing my hair, finding images for lost love: a stopped clock, a rose growing in sand.
    I unfold the second wad. A faded poem begins, “I guess this was the worst I could have done.” It is dedicated to me and signed in a florid scrawl: Tom Lena.
    I gasp for air, cling to externals. Torn notebook paper and scraps of stationery. Wobbly script in faded ink and pencil. Titles and dedications. Five poems I have never seen before, have no memory of ever seeing before, yet at the bottom of one page, the rapist’s name and the date are neatly recorded in my own hand: Tom Lena. Feb. II, 1955.
    I ref old the papers, unread, along their original creases and fold my hands over them. Forty years ago these interlaced fingers tucked these papers away and mentally sealed the compartment, like a Pharonic tomb. I stopped seeing the entrance; the seer “forgot” to see. Was I keeping the poems secret? Safe? A mystery of selective blindness, as if the compartment itself had a will, as if it willed its own invisibility and discovery.
    The lover whose sleeping face I drew used to say the essence of the good life is the proper timing of proper events. The singer couldn’t use this material; the writer can.
    Next morning I devour the poems, then read critically, taking notes. Having expected letters, I call them letters from the dead.
    “There was not enough / Of Ecstasy to make the death–knife keen.”
    “Cruelty is life / and kindness death.”
    So this is amnesia, this thud in my mind, a padded mallet beating on a stone wall. Why do I remember the rape but not the poems?
    I scribble in my journal. Indexing, I write. A traumatic experience shatters into emotional fragments, each filing itself in a different folder deep in the system. If I knew which menu hides the poems and which emotional or linguistic keys to press, I could open a neural path and remember.
    Shame, I write. Shame conspires with forgetfulness. We who’ve suffered at the hands of sexual criminals execute ourselves in the dark. Silently, we hang ourselves. A child raped in the park doesn’t tell her mother. A woman, raped years ago by her father, won’t tell her sister. Raped women who file charges make headlines. Most of us can’t bear exposure. We displace, we distort, we create. We hang from our imaginings.
    But this is theory and I want emotion. As a child I did eye exercises at the optometrist’s every Saturday morning, staring into a 3–D viewer at cartoons of objects that needed to be joined. Week after week I strained to slide a suspended vase of daisies over to a blue table. Sometimes the vase came close. Sometimes it landed for an instant, then sprang away.
    I must attach the poems to the man. I must attach the poems to myself. My mother believed if you sit on a needle it will enter your body and travel and eventually strike your heart.

In a hilltop house on an island off the Maine coast, I sit at a cardtable desk in front of a window, papers spread beside my typewriter. No electricity, no phone. A gray day. Waves break against gull–spattered rocky islets; the ocean is striped with silver. I look at photocopies of the poems I brought from home. Copies are sanitized objects; they have no stains, no fingerprints, no ragged edges. I felt terrible when I made them, reducing pain to technical data, to issues of contrast and placement on the glass, sterilizing a living record with that brilliant sliding light.
    About to cut into the poems, I feel jittery and purposeful like a first year medical student about to cut open a cadaver. I am going to dissect the metaphors of an articulate rapist. I want to do it for women who have been raped and who fear being raped, and for men of all persuasions. I want to bring the vase onto the table. I want to meet evil, to know the assailant I escaped by mentally floating out the window, singing songs. To know what contaminated me while I slept. To take revenge.
    Rape attacks deep in our bodies, in a place designed for intimacy. Rape perverts our impulse for sexual connection, forcing us to recoil, to be dissociated. Rape is torture. What will the poems reveal about a sex criminal?
    The clothesline hanging out back between the birch and the spruce snapped over the winter. Yesterday I lifted the weathered ends, damp and heavy from lying frozen in the grass. I tugged them together and knotted them. It took all my strength.
    The rapist’s handwriting is creepy. His letters are crooked and separated, like a skull’s teeth.
    I take a deep breath. A fishing boat leaves a boomerang–shaped silvery wake. Wind rustles the poplars. Gray sea blurs into gray sky at the horizon.

        Sophisticated Lady

        I burned up when I watched your cool indifference,
        While red–tipped fingers tapped a cigarette.
        Your smile, the unborn yawn, were almost insolence,
        And I swore that love would hurt you yet.
        I thought, at first, no line could breach your indifference—
        You parried speeches with one frosty word.
        And then you fell—of course with poised magnificence
        Your cooing now is quite the worst I’ve heard.
        And I could laugh—but by some strange coincidence
        I think I loved your goddam cool indifference!

    You made me do it. You asked for it. A staple of pop and rock lyrics.
    A sadistic tone leaks through paradoxes of hot and cold—cold generating heat, indifference generating violence—the sadist’s twisted consolation, that his victim is the aggressor. The object of his fantasy is a world–weary Marlene Dietrich—sitting on the edge of a couch perhaps, like me—aloof, arrogant, a stock picture of allure. Is the poem actually about me? Did I seem frostily seductive? It was a blind date; I was a stranger. Did my question (“How do you feel about that?”) trigger his rage against white oppression?
    “And then you fell—. . . .” No agent, no cause. In the phrase with its dash, he knocks the lady off her pedestal and rapes her. She falls for him; he’s contemptuous. With the words “cool indifference,” he circles around to the first line and starts again, wheeling in soft and hard rhymes through a cycle of idealization, fury, and disgust. If sex is life’s most intensely intimate act, then the rapist enacts his rage against women—whatever they personify–from the site of his greatest weakness. “And I swore that love would hurt you yet,” he says.
    Love as sex, sex as pain, pain as power. The prostitute/goddess cliché. If there’s a racial subtext, it is irrelevant.
    I take a break from meaning. Write down facts. Three poems are in ink, two are in pencil, and one is badly smudged. “Sophisticated Lady” is in pencil as are the dedications and signatures. They rise diagonally, fussily ornamented with baroque curliques. One signature wavers as if written with his left hand. Were the penciled poems written while I was unconscious? Were the others in his pocket? He writes in disconnected cursive except for in and th.

        Alchemy

        But this fragile stuff,
        This gossamer of mood that ties between.
        The years are young, and there was not enough
        Of Ecstasy to make the death–knife keen.
        I guard the dying spark
        but now the wind’s a lazy
        thing—and, oh, so kind—
        Where cruelty is life
        and kindness death, How soon I’ll learn the pain
        Will not abate—and I must seize the knife,
        give April back again to sun and rain.

    I should yank the real death–knife out of the metaphor and attach it to myself, but it is so painful, it feels like rape all over again. All I can do for now is think about Western culture’s idealization of suffering and notice the rapist shares common ground with D. H. Lawrence, whose placid woman finds enlightenment when her heart is cut from her living body.
    The poem is post–coital, and his mood is petulant. His lust rises from spark to flame and back to dying spark because the woman—a sleeping wind, a lazy wind—has made him impotent. The implication is horrendous. I don’t know about the sexual behavior of some great Romantic poets, but these awful lines were acted out on me: “there was not enough / Of Ecstasy to make the death–knife keen,” “cruelty is life / and kindness death.” The title and the psychotic cruelty/kindness inversion create the sado–masochist’s Golden Rule, a reverse “alchemy” in which gold turns into base metal. He ends with a return to April, the month of Easter, the season of rebirth. Sexual feelings die, but pain, like sap, rises eternally. He resolves to “seize the knife” again, his phallic drive murderous and flowering, a Wagnerian fusion of death and transfiguration.
    I close my eyes. A penis thrusts itself into my body against my will. I am the object of a stranger’s long, violent, physical monologue. In the realm of touch, with its density and emotional meaning, I know the difference between sexual passion and rage. Rape is rage, a man’s frenzied territorial impulse, his violent branding of property. Tom Lena’s rage and impotence erupt in me. His hatred spews into me. I feel dirty and bloated—a poisoned feeling, akin to what my friend describes after a chemo treatment.
    I force myself up for air. Walk to the cliffs, talk with friends. For years I have spoken against misogyny in literature and popular culture, infuriated by the attitude, but detached from the act. Denying that violence had ever touched me.
    And what about betrayal? What about my roommate’s boyfriend? A warm, easy–going guy, thick–jawed and curly–headed. All I remember from what must have been a confrontation is his defense. With a little laugh—I’m quite sure there was a laugh—an accusing little, embarrassed little laugh—he said blandly, “Tommy has a habit of raping white women who make him angry.” Was he gambling in a sick way? Pimping?
    I slog through the next two poems, through images of aggression and allure. The poet is a knight penetrating an armored lady. She entices him with silken hair and hands like ivory moths. He longs for neutrality, for a relationship of glances, connection without contact. His romantic fantasies absolve him. Violent acts are the woman’s fault; he is such a gentle person, such a victim.
    The last poem, dedicated and signed, is penciled on a scrap of notebook paper and smudged with erasures and revisions. This is the one I marked for posterity with his name and the date. I assume it is the poem he was writing when I woke, the one he handed me.

        Autumn

        Master of moods, of subtlety,
        Moving about with words unsaid;
        Blend of gloom and gaiety,
        Laughter of leaves that are already dead.
        And is the blue of your infinite sky,
        Deep as the love they have smiled upon here?
        Or have the flames that blinded your eyes,
        Been quenched by the splash of a tear?
        Indian summer, murmuring low,
        Of dusty dreams and a withered sod;
        Tendering warmth while the swallows go,
        Masking decay with goldenrod.
        And is the tang of your burning leaves,
        Bidding you leave your vain regrets?
        Or are the harvesters tender sheaves
        Murmuring softly, “Treasure them yet?”

    What am I to make, if anything, of this bucolic insanity? What sort of man rapes a woman and writes this to her afterward? I despair. I know nothing about human nature. I look out at the choppy incoming tide. A sailboat bounces, gulls cling to rocks. Blue sky peeks through a snowy cloud layer. I sit, trying to decipher a poem from a man who raped me and then wrote about autumn. A black man engaged in violent sexual politics with white women. Hardly a poem—a ditty, poor lyrics in the grip of meter and rhyme. But here it is, along with the others, and I’m lazy by now or evasive because of the freight it carries.
    Autumn, with its brilliant camouflage of death. Subtle autumn, Indian summer, blending gloom and gaiety. Is autumn the woman? Her laughter expressed as dying leaves? I think so. The man appears briefly, swaddled in romantic sentimentality—blinding flames, tender sheaves, and deep love. Leaflike, he is aflame—blinding the woman, her tears quenching his burning love! rage. She grows sterile and deceitful; her heat dies. Her dreams turn dusty and her ground withers. She tries to hold back migrating birds by offering warmth. She masks decay with phallic, flamelike goldenrod. The woman is one of Poe’s deathly wraiths, enticing while she rots. Her leaves are burning; it is a season of absence. Loss feeds on loss.

Dream. In an old European city, Athens or Rome, I watch men do early morning exercises in an alley. I stand at the far end, wearing a bra and pants, the rest of my clothes heaped on the ground. A stocky man crouches on a shelf, one muscular arm stretched downward. He dives to the ground and bounces back, dives and bounces, as if made of rubber. I pick up my clothes and climb the stairs to a large terrace serving several apartments, including mine. The stocky man emerges from the shadows, a shadow himself in a gray business suit. Grabbing me from behind, he locks his arms across my chest, his embrace hard as iron. In lighted kitchens people are having tea and toast. I scream for help. No one comes. I escape and run across the terrace, shouting, “It’s no different than wearing a bathing suit!”

How do we talk about atrocities and calamities? The current fashion is to embrace them with pronouns and possessive verbs. My abuse. My incest. My cancer. My surgery. A woman friend is both puzzled and pleased when her therapist suggests she might have abuse in her past. “I can’t remember any,” she says, “but he thinks I have it.” To my ear, affirmation sounds greedy, and confession is tinged with a consumer’s pride. Acknowledging one’s terrible history can be useful, but why hug it like a teddy bear? Why collect griefs? What happens when owning up becomes owning? The possessive in suffering is essentially cliquish, denoting club membership. It is part of the peanut butter spread of calamity language, along with the labels victim and survivor.
    I am not a victim. I never felt like a victim. I wasn’t sacrificed or destroyed, and the damage was less than others have suffered under worse conditions. I was young but not a child. The man didn’t threaten to kill me. The rape didn’t open old emotional wounds. So I don’t moan and groan about being raped. I can discuss it as if it were measles. I say this not to absolve any man, nor to criticize any woman, but to discourage pity. Pity keeps people in their places, like noblesse oblige. Pity weakens. Idealizing pain weakens. Bad things have happened to me, and this isn’t the worst. I sustain more injury from misogyny that is scattershot daily.
    So how do we talk about this without using labels? I can’t use the words victim or survivor. Looking for language, I interview therapists on the island; they detest labels but can’t find other words. Labels blur experience, we agree; they are useful only for people who truly need to forget or who need to take comfort from communal language. I believe a battered or sexually abused child is a victim; a person hit by a drunk driver, falsely imprisoned, tortured or murdered is a victim. People in wars of all kinds on all scales are victims. But only temporarily, only at the time. The word that applies when the atrocity ends, if the atrocity ends and the person lives—the word we use later, the afterword—eludes me. Some say survivor. I can’t say rape survivor; it sounds congratulatory. Survivors have outlasted persecutions and massacres, have outlived serious accidents, natural and domestic disasters, and terrible illnesses and abuses. I understand the healer’s impulse to substitute survivor for victim so people will feel courageous, but false positivism, I think, creates its own unhappiness.
    Surviving in itself has no moral weight. The wicked survive too. How we endure is what counts, what we do to others and ourselves along the way. The words victim and survivor have lost their pungency. Along with abuse and vulnerable, they have become diluted and enriched, like orange drink with added vitamins.
    Words speak us. I look for myself in dictionaries.
    Thesaurus synonyms for victim: sufferer, prey, loser, wretch, martyr.
    Thesaurus synonym for survivor: remainer.
    Webster’s entry for victim: Its Latin root, victima, is linked to witch and its Gothic root, weihs, means holy. A victim is a living being sacrificed to a deity; a creature immolated or made an offering of; a person injured, destroyed, or sacrificed. At this late date, I would be ashamed to face the world wearing a word so rich in persecutions, a word connoting injustice and martyrdom. When I try on the word victim, one chosen to die, I feel like the woman in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” whose prize is death by stoning.
    Plain sentences suffice: I was raped. I am a woman who was raped.
    Language that blurs individual pain also blurs cultural misogyny. Sporting euphemistic tags, we mingle in life’s revival meetings, singing hallelujahs to victimization and empowerment. Meanwhile, in the real world nothing changes. Our enemies prosper. The minister of a small–town midwestern church scolds mothers for wickedness and laziness in his Mother’s Day sermon. On TV a man beats his girlfriend with a soap–weighted sock. The recovery movement, linked to Christian ideals of redemption, nourishes the viper of misogyny by placing a value on owning one’s pain. Adherents write phrases such as, “She had her abuse.” Well, the rape is not mine. It belongs to no one. Ownership is irrelevant. I don’t want comfort; I want a change in our belief systems.
    I sink into a stubborn part of myself and say, “I was raped in college.” Reactions, I find, vary by gender.
    Men wince or look horrified. Some sympathize. Some change the subject. A few lean forward, solicitous and kind, barely able to disguise their vicarious pleasure.
    Women share stories. We talk about rape corrupting the basic love instinct, turning pleasure into pain, connection into cancellation. Perverting our basic impulse to participate, to join, to embrace. Forcing us into a state of non– being. Gouging us, emptying us. Turning sex into nothingness.

Eagerly I lay out the four poems I wrote shortly after being raped. All are neatly printed in green ink on index cards. Deep in those green words I will find an immediate record of my experience, preserved like fresh flowers in the stomachs of frozen mammoths.
    I read like a sponge. I read like a surgeon.
    “Man, finding nothingness around him / creates / nothing.” “I am sitting here / Midway between nowhere and infinity.”
    No tattle–tale disturbances in the text, just bitterness and alienation over the end of a love affair. How can that be? Surely a trauma would leak into poems written a few weeks afterward! Where’s the oblique cry or confession beneath my schoolgirl existentialism? Where’s the metaphorical violence?
    Disgusted, I show a poem to some friends. “Nothing about rape,” I say, “just a lot of nihilism and alienation because my boyfriend left me.”

        Boredom and Loss of Feeling

        Stone is dead.
        Dead lump of stone lying in the desert.
        Rose grows up beside it
        (Would you like to come over for supper?)
        Up through the sand
        To bathe the stone
        With fire,
        Hungrily it kisses
        Then brutally stabs
        And anguished turns away.

        Look at the clock
        It’s the same time it was yesterday at this time.

        Stone still
        Dead.

    “Forget the boyfriend,” my friends say, “stone is a common image for repressed emotions—you buried shame, buried anger, turned to stone.” Well, that feels true. So I sail comfortably in the mainstream of self–pity and write some pages about anger and silence. Then I spend two weeks immersed in the rapist’s fire and knife metaphors, and when I read my poem again, it explodes.
    The rose that burns the stone, kisses and stabs it, and turns away, is the rapist with his thorn, his death–knife. I encoded the rape in the poem, using it as a metaphor for a failed love affair, then buried it with a parenthetical aside. The rape story rose, opened its fiery petals, and then vanished. “Stone still / Dead.” Exceedingly still, apparently, still a stone, still dead. Ironically my recent blindness mimicked the poem—my memory (time) like a stone, waiting to be turned over.
    Art disguises experience. In trying to understand my symbolic language, I tripped over the process that enabled me to write in the first place.
    I study the rest of my poor little poems for clues—not only to suppressed emotion now, but to suppressed experience. The crudest, shortest poem is the most eloquent—two of the three green lines roughly crossed out and revised in pencil. The overwrought language was ridiculous when I thought it referred to lost love.

            My ravaged soul screams in silence
            While convulsively my body gasps
            And my elbows lurch up to clasp my ears.

            Ravaged: ravished. The violent words open a brown room where a man rocks over a woman on a narrow bed. I see them and am there, am the woman under the man, struggling with something intolerable.
    The revised poem is about suppression.

            My ravaged soul screams in silence
            though my body writhes
            elbows covering my ears.

Two confessional narratives. The whole card, with its strike overs and substitutions, is a rough, complete graffiti about being raped and suppressing it.
I read a naïve prose poem written a few years earlier and am oddly moved.

            In the vast yard
            a little boy stands
            beneath a washline of socks
            his tiny hand covers his mouth
            and he will not speak
            he stands
            and stares
            silent
            and still
            solitary and tiny in the vast yard
            beneath a washline of socks.

    This is a pure image of myself as a child—stoical as a boy, stoical as my father, willing to keep secrets and swallow griefs.

Feminism is a powerful ideology, but no match for Genesis. We punch feathers trying to fight our culture’s idealization of pain. Otto Weininger, a Viennese philosopher, lays out the standard misogynistic view. Woman is a totally sexual being, he says, a mother or a prostitute, lacking mind and soul. Perceiving the world through vaporous unformed thoughts called henids, she cannot aspire to duty or be a genius; as a human being she runs a poor second, expelled from Paradise under orders to suffer and be submissive. Or, as Virginia Woolf says of the angel in the house: if there was chicken, she ate the leg, and if there was a draft, she sat in it.
    In fiction women get credit for suffering. The modern popular heroine, freed from vapors and fainting spells, has breast cancer and PMS. She is beaten up by husbands and lovers. Detectives press her wounds and ask—kindly, sadistically—if they hurt. Patient Griselda is replaced by the battered wife, an object of concern—an object. Writers and filmmakers take an interest—take, cannibalize. Sado–masochistic imaginations create aesthetics of women’s suffering.
    In real life, too, we silently submit sorrow to pressure like keepsake flowers. After my friend’s baby died, her mother said, “I’ll take you to lunch and we’ll forget about it.” An advocate for battered women says, “We like women victims who are beaten up and assaulted . . . and don’t do anything blatant.”
    The sicker we are, the more saintly. For a while I enjoyed being a feminist saint.
    Now I preach awareness. Not censorship, but awareness. No more secrets. No more swallowing. Art is an act and acts grow from attitudes. Art that invites me to cooperate in symbolic abuses injures me directly. Don’t ask me to accept the substance because of the form; don’t ask me to conspire against myself. Don’t ask me to admire literature which embeds evil or weakness in female imagery. I take a crabby view of a poem in which sorrow or death is personified as a hideous crone, or a novel in which a little girl’s rape is a vehicle for exploring evil. I feel violated by movies that project violence onto women and make us symbolic carriers. In medieval Nuremberg prisoners were tortured in a human–shaped device lined with spikes that impaled them as it slowly closed. It was called the iron maiden.
    The iron maiden is the rapist’s heroine, his victim and muse. She is a pastiche of cartoon attributes—bewitching, insolent, manipulative, frigid, suffering, mysterious, and false. The rapist is Don Juan, lusting for power, always on the move. He wheels from impotence to rage, from cruelty to fatigue— aggression feeding oblivion and fantasy feeding denial, compulsively exorcises the woman and flagellates himself. A snake swallowing his own tail. Race is an element in my silence, but the poet’s brutal sentiments are universal. He joins hands with all Don Juans who pathologically degrade women—true brothers under the skin.
    What feelings I have about being raped lie buried under a philosophical surface that has hardened and cracked. Only occasionally does anger rise along those cracks, like blue flames rising out of an earthquake. I lose my temper if I am in any way rerouted or thwarted—I once screamed at an innocent black traffic cop for sending me on a detour. Images of terror or dissociation recur in my writing: a girl sits on a glacier peak, legs wrapped in rags, screaming. A family turns to stone. A woman, submitting to a man in missionary position, feels like a papier–mâché sculpture. A woman paints circles on stones. A floor is punctured with large holes. A woman says she is a sieve.

On the island a group of violinists and singers used to give concerts in the schoolhouse by kerosene light, accompanied by an out–of–tune piano and sometimes by the foghorn. Once, during the second verse of a Schubert song, I forgot the words. An unprecedented lapse. I asked the audience to wait, got a flashlight, and finished the song looking over the pianist’s shoulder. The next day a bare–chested psychologist wearing tight khaki shorts stopped me on the road.
    “You were beautiful last night,” he said.
    “I ruined a song,” I said.
    “Oh, that’s what I loved,” he said. “You were so vulnerable.”

Personal time is circular and capricious. We take deep breaths and say, “Now!” The call, echoing through inner and outer memory banks, sets the past in motion, and spirals of related events gradually uncoil.
    This memoir is finished. My husband takes down an old carton of papers from the closet in my study. Riffling through folders and shoeboxes of his writings, he finds a bundle of letters I received in college—the real letters from the dead. “I have forgotten to remind you of the winter dangers,” my father writes, enclosing a newspaper clipping about a fatal car crash. My mother sends picture postcards from her first trip to Florida.
    A thin envelope slips out of the bundle, addressed in writing like skull’s teeth, my surname misspelled. The postmark is May 2, 1955. Scrawled above the return address of a religious organization is the name Tom Lena.
    I can barely read the single–page letter inside. It begins, “My Norma, my dead lump of stone lying in the desert. Still stone. . . Dead!” The second and last lines of my poem, “Boredom,” insanely, possessively altered.
    Stone still dead—the stone wall of amnesia.
    My husband and I study the evidence, both of us writers and respectful of memory’s mischief–making. I tear my hair. How did Tom Lena get my poem? Did I send itto him via my roommate’s boyfriend? What was I doing? Reproaching him? Appeasing him?
    What sort of a person am I?
    “You’re a performer,” my husband says, “you always need to perform, to communicate at all costs. It’s a wonderful thing about you.”
    A stout hand–rope appears along a cavern wall, and I follow it down, a tourist in a damp slippery cave, descending to the stalactites. Underlying my need to perform is my need to be known. When the rapist slashed my identity, apparently I tried to restore it by sending him a poem telling him what he had done. Perhaps his reply scared me. Perhaps what blinded me to the story in “Boredom” wasn’t the creative process, but buried shame at having sent a message to my enemy. Is that the source of my recurring dream in which an enemy general reads my letters? When I found the poems, I called them letters from the dead.
    In bloated verse Tom Lena’s letter reproaches me for being angry. “Have you bartered your bitterness yet?” he asks. “Why make so much fuss?” He laments my beauty’s devastating effect on him and begs me not to forget him. He refers to the rape throughout, wishing time could be reversed and “the fallen flower again upon its bough.”

            Say you were angry, though you were not so—
            And I’ll believe you as the boy his book,
            Taking your no for yes, your yes for no.
            Christ! Is it possible this shadow weighs
            So grievously upon you? . . . 

    In a disturbing picture of the rape, he reproaches me for resisting him open–eyed like Circe, my spirit filled with tiger–thoughts, wolves, and grotesque apes. “Close your eyes,” he says, “Relent, Relent! Be less wary for once: it is the evening.”
    Then he takes on my persona and puts words in my mouth:

            “But if I close my eyes what howlings greet me!
            Do not persuade. Be tranquil.”
            (Your eternal request of me!)
            “Here is flesh with all its demons.
            Take it, sate yourself.
            But leave my thoughts to me.”

    The stranger rocks over my body. Through his eyes I see, and resent seeing, a young girl begging a rapist to go easy. She abandons her body to him. “Take it, sate yourself, but leave my thoughts to me.” Me, seen accurately by him. Defending myself. Asking him not to hurt me. Going slack and mentally flying out the window, singing songs.
    I hate being understood by the enemy general.
    His letter ends, “I ask myself, ‘Does she still remember, what I would gladly—if I could, forget?’ But only you can answer. . . . Would you?”
    “How do you feel?” I asked, and he answered. “Does she still remember?” he asks down the years, and I answer.
    The stone walls of amnesia thin to an opaque curtain. It rustles, it rustles. I sense a path not taken, a detour. It rustles, it rustles. I would have been different in some way, a better musician perhaps, or more confident about my voice.

I wrap all the poems in sandwich bags, tuck them into the deerskin folder, and snap it shut. A souvenir from Florida. Burn–slashes make a border around the stitching. On the front cover the bright pink flamingo stands in marsh grass against the blue moon rising from the sea. Looking closely at a row of green plumes, I notice they hide a word engraved by mistake. I turn the folder over. “To Norma, love Dma.” My name, in a baroque calligraphic scroll, flows diagonally upward, name and scroll ornamented with curliques like the rapist’s dedications, and darkly burned into the leather.

Norma Marder lives in Illinois and Maine and is the author of the novel An Eye for Dark Places (Little, Brown, 1993). Her stories and personal essays have appeared in the Georgia Review and Literal Latte.

“Blind Spots” appears in our Summer 1999 issue.