Issue 23

The Issue 23 Collective 

Editorial Collective: Priscilla Barton, Helen Duberstein, Jan Evans, Pennelope Goodfriend, Wopo Holup, Avis Lang, Linda Swackhamer, Gerry Pearlberg, Gail Bradney, Kathie Brown, Sabra Moore

Staff: Kay Kenny, Jo Tavener, Gail Bradney

Production: Fabio Alvaro, Eric Ehn, Keith Gunderson, Esther Kaplan, Patricia Seator, Gina Shamus, Jo Tavener, Mark Tuchman, Mary Tyson, Risa Wallber, Leslie Watkins, Andrew A. Webster, Deborah Winterson, Joanna Zlowodzka

Design: Carline Vago, Chris Caron, Finn Winterson

From the Issue 23 Collective

Editorials

PRISCILLA BARTON

It seems to me that coming of age is a coming to consciousness of one’s own history and one’s place in history (the future, as well as the present and the past)—a difficult kind of consciousness to come by in a society that would erase history; in which we, especially women, have to unearth our history before we can go on to understand it.

What our editorial project has been about in this issue is the notion that this coming to consciousness happens in particularly ripe and loaded moments, where the diverse experience of our everyday lives seems capable of being connected—where a larger understanding becomes visible, even imperative.

Art is an additional arena where this kind of connection can be attempted. And the process of making art, it seems to me, is a form of excavation and notation, of bringing to light the rich material of daily life and then reordering it—placing it in a different frame in order to see more clearly what’s really happening there (where it came from and where it may lead), and then going on to realize something new.

In this issue we’ve had the good fortune to be able to gather art that speaks directly to those moments of consciousness that could be called coming of age, and thus we have been doing our own form of archeology, of recording, and for us this issue’s publication might itself be considered one of those ripe moments.

HELEN DUBERSTEIN

It was snowing as I walked up the hill for the first time to hold the first session of the poetry workshop I had contracted to do in a nursing home. I could feel the snowflakes melt on my cheeks. When I came into the large room several pale figures swaying in wheelchairs awaited me. Some dribbled. Many seemed asleep. I began to speak of the snowflakes and of how, in my childhood, it seemed to me that the first snowflakes of the season came on Thanksgiving. I began talking this way out of nervousness. What was I doing in this place, with these people who seemed so alike and unresponsive?

The workshop produced poems such as: WE DON’T HAVE ANY COLD TODAY LIKE WE USED TO HAVE We don’t have any cold today like we used to have We always had a coal stove The diningroom was warm l’ve seen a man spit on the sidewalk and it froze that way

Though they had this “dread disease” of being aged, I realized that these people were me, you, everyone. They had led varied existences, travelled to faraway places, been teachers, fashion designers, parents, lovers, you name it. They wrote of all these experiences, and derived pleasure in the present from attention to their individual pasts. Being so different, how had they ended up lumped into a conglomerate present?

In any nursing home you will find people who, insofar as they could, kept to the social contract. Nevertheless, their lives have come to this bleakness. Are we moved to redeem the aged, or to punish them?

Since we see that we live through so many transitions, have so many rites of passage, can we not learn to rethink each stage so that the successive times in the “lives of women” can be viewed as so many new lives that incorporate but are not necessarily limited by preceding ones? Can we not recall, if we do not necessarily repeat, the joys and learn from the frustrations of our own previous selves?

In this issue on Coming of Age, we see women healing themselves. Women value themselves as they appear both to them selves and in the eyes of the other. Mingled with the excitement for pieces we have gathered in this issue is regret for those we have had to let go of because of space limitations. Those that we held on to we came to see as “bearing witness” to the complexity of the meaning of women’s lives.

JAN EVANS

Everyone’s reaction to aging is unique. I never thought about aging until I realized that this year was going to be my sixtieth birthday. Having always thought of myself as somewhere around forty I wondered how it all sneaked up on me. And if I am sixty then my children are almost forty and... Good God, how did that happen??

Suddenly I felt compelled to look back, review the past, appraise the present and think about the future, which for the first time does not seem to be forever. What were the traps and pitfalls, the successes and failures, the unexpected events both good and bad? What have I learned and where am I now?

It has been revealing and rather like watching an old film. I think that, in my case, the film-like feeling is the result of a wrenching break in my life after thirty years as an artist, wife and mother. I had spent that life with single-minded passion as an artist while grappling with the logistics of holding a career and family obligations together, and suddenly I was plunged into the life of an older single woman living alone in a new environment, New York City, without any preparation for what I discovered was a very particular way of life. I was married at twenty and went from my father’s house to my husband’s house. I didn’t live alone until I was fifty years old. I discovered that superwoman has no clothes. I had to learn to live alone. Now I have some dis tance, more perspective. It has taken time to achieve this.

Changes have taken place within the family in the last few years. I have become a grandmother and my children have become my friends. My parents, in their eighties, still lead a full and active life. But they have, by their own admission, reached an other plateau, become more fragile. While I am coming to grips with the awareness that they will not be here forever, my children are looking toward their own children, their education and upbringing. And I, without the traditional partner that fits into the traditional family pattern, am somewhere in the middle. I may never again be as free as at this moment.

A game of musical chairs is going on. When my parents die, I will move into their place and my children will move into mine. The buffer of denial will have been removed. It is something to think about.

Aging is full of paradoxes. I look out upon the world through young eyes, unaware of the physical changes which I do not see. At the same time, while feeling ageless, I find myself regarding those much younger than myself as from a great distance. I feel surprised that when I go to the bank, to the doctor, to a lawyer, that most of them are the age of my children. It all seems so sudden, although of course it is not.

Life is continuously surprising and I try to be realistic but not cynical, to rely on my inner strengths and sense of purpose and not become distressed with cultural stereotyping and cultural cruelty. I have to keep my eye on the inner design of my being, to know when to hang on and when to let go so that I don’t miss the unexpected and wonderful. I have become a “woman of a certain age, a woman with a little more clarity about life, no conclusions reached as though conclusions are possible. All in all, I like where I am. I had better. It is very much another beginning.

AVIS LANG

To my mind, “coming of age” suggests passage, transformation, emergence ... acquisition and renunciation, arrival and departure ... a process repeatedly undergone by communities anc generations as well as by individuals... birth, puberty, motherhood or no, menopause, death... coming to consciousness, coming into one’s/our own, coming out, coming to terms, coming to the end. Watersheds and landmarks. The escalation of possibilities and limitations. Learning to recognize how liberty is eroded and to exercise whatever portion of it remains.

My own most recent passage into a redefined, more sombre and angry self started first with facing my companion’s cancer; then spending nine months almost constantly caring for him, away from everyone and everything familiar, as he was slowly brought back to life by an innovative physician in Houston; and soon thereafter watching a U.S. government goon squad invade the doctor’s clinic and truck away 200,000 business documents and patient medical records. Why? Because Dr. Burzynski provides patients with a viable alternative to the treatments offered by America’s highly toxic, highly profitable cancer industry. Both doctor and patients took the government to court, where nearly three years later we’re still fighting for the most basic of democratic rights: life, privacy, choice, due process. The experience has produced some very deep tracks in my psyche in the regions of taking responsibility, fighting back, terror, fury, and burnout.

This issue of Heresies, variegated as it is, can nevertheless do with a few more works by children, whose own comings of age are mostly yet to happen. Here, then, are Eugenie Asher Lang's and Stephanie La Motta’s projections of their future selves, twenty-four and sixty-two years hence—Eugenie (my niece) hitting her professional stride and Stephanie becoming superfluous. I’d like to think that by the time Stephanie reaches seventy-one, no one will have to face that fate.