Susan Griffin
Susan Griffin
Susan Griffinis an eco-feminist author. She describes her work as "draw connections between the destruction of nature, the diminishment of women and racism, and trac the causes of war to denial in both private and public life." In addition to her many published writings, Griffin co-wrote and narrated the award-winning 1990 documentary, Berkeley in the Sixties. She received a MacArthur grant for Peace and International Cooperation, an NEA Fellowship, and an Emmy Award for the play Voices...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
Ordinary women attempt to change our bodies to resemble a pornographic ideal. Ordinary women construct a false self and come to hate this self.
Telling a story of illness, one pulls a thread through a narrow opening flanked on one side by shame and the other by trivia.
Far more frightening than the thought of dying was the experience of erasure already occurring in my life. My fear of becoming someone who did not count.
Every time I deny myself I commit a kind of suicide.
Perhaps every moment of time lived in human consciousness remains in the air around us.
Yes we are devilish; that is true we cackle. Yes we are dark like the soil and wild like the animals. And we turn to each other and stare into this darkness. We find it beautiful. We find this darkness irresistible. We cease all hiding.
What always seems miraculous is when aesthetic necessities yield an insight which otherwise I would have missed.
To make love is to become like this infant again. We grope with our mouths toward the body of another being, whom we trust, who takes us in her arms. We rock together with this loved one. We move beyond speech. Our bodies move past all the controls we have learned. We cry out in ecstasy, in feeling. We are back in a natural world before culture tried to erase our experience of nature. In this world, to touch another is to express love; there is no idea apart from feeling, and no feeling which does not ring through our bodies and our souls at once.
Even in the grimmest of circumstances, a shift in perspective can create startling change.
Each life reverberates in every other life. Whether or not we acknowledge it, we are connected, woven together in our needs and desires, rich and poor, men and women alike.
In one sense I feel that my book is a one-woman argument against determinism.
The hard surface of the stone is impervious to nothing in the end. The heat of the sun leaves evidence of daylight. Each drop of rain changes the form; even the wind and the air itself, invisible to our eyes, etches its presence. … All history is taken in by stones.
How many small decisions accumulate to form a habit? What a multitude of decisions, made by others, in other times, must shape our lives now.
Is it a coincidence that stories from the private life became more popular just as the grand hope for public redemption through revolution was beginning to sour? I witnessed a similar shift in taste in my own time. In the 1960s, while a hopeful vision of a just society arose again, countless poems and plays concerning politics and public life were written, read, and performed. But after the hope diminished and public life seemed less and less trustworthy, this subject was less in style.