In A Dark Time

How ironic and, yet, how strangely fitting that this flying virus arrives at the middle of Women’s History month and just before the April 7 publication of The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

Ironic, and yet fitting because we women as the perpetual caretakers are now called on to staff hospital emergency wards and sick beds at home. We always have been called to perform these unpaid or underpaid duties, and mostly we have responded responsibly if not always gladly.

Fitting, too, because my “Swan“, ten years in the hatching, has had a bumpy ride on the waves of the ocean of indifference that surrounds and threatens to drown all books except those deemed worthy of bestseller lists. (And do remember, those lists are. based on the number of a title the publisher chooses to print, not on the number sold to readers.)

But The Silver Swan won’t drown, although I am now forced to cancel planned promotional events in New York, probably also in Louisville, and even here in Santa Fe where we have six cases of the flu reported. But books sell for mysterious reasons and tend to find their readers, no matter what.

Fitting, too, because Doris Duke was not a caretaker, except in the unfortunate case of a disturbed teenaged nephew she took into her house, Shangri La—now the Islamic Study Center—in Hawaii. He threw tampons stained with ketchup into her swimming pool there, among other breaches of decency, and after a few months, she had to send him home.

She tried, but women who try and do not persevere—she would have had to sacrifice her life—are not given much credit.

I turn to the poets in these weeks of necessary isolation, glorious for me-time to read the magazines I never have time for, time to finish my latest project, my deadline Easter. At the moment, I’ve turned to Maya C. Popa’s American Faith (Sarabande Books).

The title is as intriguing as the poems. For what is American faith—if it exists? In this devoutly secular society, I think the best we can do is to have faith in science, faith in cures—sorely strained at this point when there appears to be no cure for the flu. (Although we must remember that most people recover—a fact not emphasized enough in the endless news coverage.)

I remember life before cures, when we children suffered all the now forgotten childhood diseases—mumps, measles, German measles, whooping cough and, in my case, double pneumonia which nearly killed me. The truth is there is no cure for life and its ills, not all of them physical, but we have the old remedies to rely on: fresh air, healthy food (I’m about to cook up a pot of split pea soup) and rest.

And poetry.

One of Popa’s poems, dedicated to Robert Haas, is called “Meditation Having Felt and Forgotten” and contains these lines:

Think how far you’ve come through afternoons and evenings
When loss seemed to whistle from the manholes…

I’ve heard a great deal of the whistling of loss.

But at this moment, in blissful solitude, I’m reveling in gratitude for the great force of Second Wave Feminism which swept me and many others into a new understanding of life. And although we sometimes believe that force is gone or at least diminished, I feel it continues to shape the tides and coastlines of contemporary life.

I am always so grateful—but particularly now, at this dark time—for the power of that wave. It carried me into some areas of risk and daring I could never have imagined even five years earlier—and this was in the late eighties when the force of the Second Wave was presumed to have died away in harmless ripples.

My gratitude rebounded when I read the recent newsletter from The Kentucky Foundation For Women, in Louisville, which I founded and endowed almost thirty years ago.

Look at what the Foundation’s grants have meant to the women artists in Kentucky who are committed to social change; we used to call it feminism but time has blunted the meaning of that word.

These are not large amounts of money but they come, often, at a crucial time in an artist’s career when the support the donation represents may matter more than the money.

I am so grateful for the dozens of women, and the three successive executive directors, who have kept the Foundation surging forward.

In Women, Kentucky Feminism Poetry Kentucky Foundation for Women