When Women Were Birds: Fifty Four Variations on Voice
BY Terry Temptest Williams
Summary
"Terry Tempest Williams’s mother told her: “I am leaving you all my journals, but you must promise me you won’t look at them until after I’m gone.”
Readers of Williams’s iconic and unconventional memoir, Refuge, well remember that mother. She was one of a large Mormon clan in northern Utah who developed cancer as a result of the nuclear testing in nearby Nevada. It was a shock to Williams to discover that her mother had kept journals. But not as much of a shock as what she found when the time came to read them.
“They were exactly where she said they would be: three shelves of beautiful cloth-bound books . . . I opened the first journal. It was empty. I opened the second journal. It was empty. I opened the third. It too was empty . . . Shelf after shelf after shelf, all of my mother’s journals were blank.” What did Williams’s mother mean by that? In fifty-four chapters that unfold like a series of yoga poses, each with its own logic and beauty, Williams creates a lyrical and caring meditation of the mystery of her mother's journals. When Women Were Birds is a kaleidoscope that keeps turning around the question “What does it mean to have a voice?”
-Goodreads.com
Quotations
“I was aware of the silences within my mother. They were her places of strength, inviolable. Tille Olsen studied such silence. She writes,
Literary history and the present are dark with silences . . . I have had special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having to let writing die over and over again in me. These are not natural silences--what Keates called agonie ennuyeuse (the tedious agony)--that necessary time for renewal , lying fallow, gestations, the natural silence of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being. but cannot. "
“When silence is a choice, it is an unnerving presence. When silence is imposed, it is censorship.”
“Emily Dickinson wrote poems in her bedroom and kept them largely secret. The poet Susan Howe writes, ‘She may have chosen to enter the space of silence, a space where power is no longer an issue, gender is no longer an issue, voice is no longer an issue, where the idea of a printed book appears as a trap.’”
“ ‘To write,’ Marguerite Duras remarked, ‘is also not to speak. It is to keep silent. It is to howl noiselessly.’”
“I return to John Cage. During World War II he sought the softer notes. ‘Half-intellectually and half-sentimentally, when the war came along, I decided to use only quiet sounds. There seemed to be no truth, no good, in anything big in society. But quiet sounds were like loneliness, or love or friendship’…In times of war we can use our voices as a stay against those who are suffering. In times of war, survival depends on listening to that suffering. Cage understood how the unexpected action of deep listening can create a space of transformation capable of shattering complacency and despair. He bravely called for silence as an intentional stillness that could infiltrate our imaginations: ‘Then we should be capable of answering the question, ‘What ought we to do?’”
“I wish someone had told me when I was young that it was not happiness I could count on, but change.”
“What I came to appreciate was how the transgression of Eve was an act of courage that led us out of the garden into the wilderness. Who wants to be a goddess when we can be human? Perfection is a flaw disguised as control. The moment Eve bit into the apple, her eyes opened and she became free. She exposed the truth of what every woman knows: to find our sovereign voice often requires a betrayal. We just have to make certain we do not betray ourselves. For a woman or a man to speak from the truth of their heart is to break taboo. The mask is removed. The snake who tempted Eve to eat forbidden fruit was not the Devil, but her own instinctive nature saying, Honor your hunger and feed yourself.
Devil spelled backward is Lived.”
“Mythmaking is the evolutionary enterprise of translating truths.”
“Creativity is another form of open space, whose very nature is to disturb, disrupt, and ‘bring us to tenderness.’
“‘Most of my injuries come from the stereotype.’ These are not my words. I plagiarize. I will not tell you who wrote them. Instead I will claim them as my own because I have so thoroughly inhabited them; they could be written by no one else but me.”
“Rilke provided us with a map: ‘Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.’”
“‘Roland Barthes says, “That which cannot be names is a disturbance.”
“‘Once you know that you have a voice,’ Louis said, ‘it’s no longer the voice that matters, but what is behind the voice.’”
“If you clap your hands before the Temple of the Sun in Chichén Itzá, the voice of the quetzal calls back to you. It is more than an echo. The Maya built an architecture of belief. The presence of the quetzal, sacred bird of the gods, has never left. It knows to withhold its voice until summoned.”
“‘How is your shadow--your honorable shadow?’ This was a customary greeting between friends in Japan, a recognition that what we reject is as important as what we embrace.”
“ The human mind always makes progress but it is a progress in spirals. -- Madame de Staël “
Literary history and the present are dark with silences . . . I have had special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having to let writing die over and over again in me. These are not natural silences--what Keates called agonie ennuyeuse (the tedious agony)--that necessary time for renewal , lying fallow, gestations, the natural silence of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being. but cannot. "
“When silence is a choice, it is an unnerving presence. When silence is imposed, it is censorship.”
“Emily Dickinson wrote poems in her bedroom and kept them largely secret. The poet Susan Howe writes, ‘She may have chosen to enter the space of silence, a space where power is no longer an issue, gender is no longer an issue, voice is no longer an issue, where the idea of a printed book appears as a trap.’”
“ ‘To write,’ Marguerite Duras remarked, ‘is also not to speak. It is to keep silent. It is to howl noiselessly.’”
“I return to John Cage. During World War II he sought the softer notes. ‘Half-intellectually and half-sentimentally, when the war came along, I decided to use only quiet sounds. There seemed to be no truth, no good, in anything big in society. But quiet sounds were like loneliness, or love or friendship’…In times of war we can use our voices as a stay against those who are suffering. In times of war, survival depends on listening to that suffering. Cage understood how the unexpected action of deep listening can create a space of transformation capable of shattering complacency and despair. He bravely called for silence as an intentional stillness that could infiltrate our imaginations: ‘Then we should be capable of answering the question, ‘What ought we to do?’”
“I wish someone had told me when I was young that it was not happiness I could count on, but change.”
“What I came to appreciate was how the transgression of Eve was an act of courage that led us out of the garden into the wilderness. Who wants to be a goddess when we can be human? Perfection is a flaw disguised as control. The moment Eve bit into the apple, her eyes opened and she became free. She exposed the truth of what every woman knows: to find our sovereign voice often requires a betrayal. We just have to make certain we do not betray ourselves. For a woman or a man to speak from the truth of their heart is to break taboo. The mask is removed. The snake who tempted Eve to eat forbidden fruit was not the Devil, but her own instinctive nature saying, Honor your hunger and feed yourself.
Devil spelled backward is Lived.”
“Mythmaking is the evolutionary enterprise of translating truths.”
“Creativity is another form of open space, whose very nature is to disturb, disrupt, and ‘bring us to tenderness.’
“‘Most of my injuries come from the stereotype.’ These are not my words. I plagiarize. I will not tell you who wrote them. Instead I will claim them as my own because I have so thoroughly inhabited them; they could be written by no one else but me.”
“Rilke provided us with a map: ‘Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.’”
“‘Roland Barthes says, “That which cannot be names is a disturbance.”
“‘Once you know that you have a voice,’ Louis said, ‘it’s no longer the voice that matters, but what is behind the voice.’”
“If you clap your hands before the Temple of the Sun in Chichén Itzá, the voice of the quetzal calls back to you. It is more than an echo. The Maya built an architecture of belief. The presence of the quetzal, sacred bird of the gods, has never left. It knows to withhold its voice until summoned.”
“‘How is your shadow--your honorable shadow?’ This was a customary greeting between friends in Japan, a recognition that what we reject is as important as what we embrace.”
“ The human mind always makes progress but it is a progress in spirals. -- Madame de Staël “