The desert sisterhood. Will it embarrass you to talk to a woman about vaginal images?
No way. Once I accompanied a female colleague to a gallery to view Judy Chicago’s marvelous Star Cunt Series.
Really. What did you two talk about?
My companion was a Sybil. She prophesied: In the next century there will arise a second great writer, last name Joyce, who will dramatize these images in an unforgettable fiction. Your turn.
OK, we have three accounts of the sisterhood—the narrator’s, the photo spread in the German magazine Bild, and Magika’s multimedia show. I figure the Bild piece is just prurient sensationalism, but even it catches something of the power of the sister’s sculpted Sheela na gigs, which are way more primitive and scary to men than Judy Chicago’s beautiful versions. As for Magika’s show, just juiced up romanticization except that it creates some marvelous riffs, like “. . . turning the desert sky and stars into a sea of floating mirrors, as much like mouths as eyes, soft warm orifices shaped like the Sheela na gigs, through which swam sleek shining creatures . . .” Get it? As for the narrator’s version, he’s always searching, seeking. Here’s his description of the nuns’ cells: “There was the unmistakable scent of women’s bodies throughout the long shed of the convent, powdery, herbal bloody.”
OK, normally when you triangulate you nail the thing you’re looking for. But have we?
Remember the root of the sisterhood was not vaginal insistence but the search for a primordial silence that would overwhelm the horrible noises of the male world: “. . . the silence of some centered sense of being other than who you were.” So the sisterhood is as much sonic as vaginal, though both speak of prodigious depths.
Amazing conception. What went wrong?
To over simplify, the sisters starting making their own noise, which led them from almost silent chanting to a bacchanalian screed. Magika’s show catches that lamentable transformation. Further, they succumb to expansionism and move outward into new territory.
Why these fatal mistakes?
Great question. Something to do with the unavoidable interpenetration of female and male, which challenges the very meaning of those words and gives special significance to the Amish patriarch and to the transsexual admitted to their group. Also something to do with the irreconcilable purity of silent being and our inescapable being in this noisy world. There’s much more we could cite and admire, but I think we’ve gone about as far as we can. It’s a distinctive mark of high modernism and now even more so in postmodernism that questions of meaning don’t get answered; they multiply.
Next and last, the narrator’s mission.
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