by Tod Davies.
Some years ago, I was a guest at a dinner party given in honor of the gallery opening of an artist friend of mine. There were a number of people there I didn’t know, although I did recognize two older women I had talked to at the show’s opening. They had been sitting, side-by-side, quiet, on a bench, gazing at the art on the wall. It mildly annoyed me that they were being ignored. I sat with them a while. We had a pleasant, unmemorable, desultory chat.
It was only later that I was told one of the women was the other artist showcased on the walls. The beautiful photographs were hers.
At this dinner, she and her friend sat across from me, catty corner. After the meal, and much wine, she held up a book. “I’d like someone to read one of the stories here,” she said. My friend, the artist, tells me I volunteered. I do remember I was delighted to read anything by one of the women who’d been ignored in the art gallery. Anyway, I took the book where it was handed to me over the table, opened it to the bookmark, and began to read.
It was a story written by the photographer’s friend, the one sitting quietly next to her, first in the gallery, then here at dinner. It was titled “The Lady Orangutan.”
It was very short. Very simple. A young woman and her baby are with her husband at the zoo. At the monkey house, an orangutan, seeing the infant, gestures toward it longingly. The young mother immediately understands. The orangutan wants to hold the child, whether because it has lost its own, or because it yearns for one of its own. The mother, in a wave of fellow feeling, wants to hand the baby over, but of course she’s stopped both by her husband and her own fears. Timid, she agrees he knows best. At this the Lady Orangutan, frustrated by her inability to ask for what she needs, gives vent to a physical burst of rage and grief. The narrator is bewildered by the confusion of her own feelings. She seems closer to the animal than to the husband who hustles her and her baby away. There is something unspoken, that there might have been another way, one the narrator hasn’t yet formed for herself. But whatever that way would have been is locked in silence.
Everyone was very quiet when I finished. Inside me, I was very quiet. I remember I was very moved.
When my friend and I left the party, crossing the street to her car, she said, “You know who that was, don’t you? The woman who wrote the story?”
No, I said, rather startled. Of course I don’t know. Should I?
“Well, you’ve talked about her before,” my friend said, a little amused. “That was Jane Wodening.”
That name meant nothing to me. But my friend went on.
“Who used to be Jane Brakhage.”
Oh, I said. Oh. And the story about the Lady Orangutan went click in my mind into a slot that was there labeled with that name.
Now I have to back up a bit. Jane Brakhage was the first wife of the experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. For those who don’t know that world, I mean the world of experimental film, Stan Brakhage, when he was alive, was one of its most famous stars. The Brakhage Center, at CU Boulder, is named for him. Every year, there is a solemn celebration of his greatness, and a showing of his films.
I really hated that. I hated the valorization of him. I disliked his work. My husband was a professor at CU for a time, the only one teaching narrative film. My own background was in narrative film as well. I could not understand, as they say, what the big fucking deal was about someone who made films that had no story. Let alone the reverence paid. That reverence drove me a little mad. Irritably. Like I wanted to scratch at it and make it go away.
But I was courteous. I was silent. The reverent were my husband’s colleagues, after all. I liked them, well, most of them anyway. At least the ones who weren’t blown up in their own esteem like Macy’s Easter Parade balloons. I’ve found, in my life, that the truly great never give the impression of having applied a bicycle pump to their public persona. Stan Brakhage was dead by the time I was made aware of him, though his thoroughly puffed up image was still there for all to admire. Or, in my case, not admire.
The whole concept of Stan Brakhage secretly enraged me. Not so secretly when I raged about it to my friend the artist, which accounted for her amusement at my not recognizing Jane Wodening, she who had been Jane Brakhage. Because one of the things for which Stan Brakhage was famous was a film of her giving birth to one (or two or three, who knows?) of their five children. I was supposed to sit there and watch this film, which I did, politely, silently, having put my glasses atop my head so that everything on the screen was a blur.
I didn’t much like experimental film. But I really hated that one.
He filmed his wife giving birth. I didn’t mind that. People film each other doing things all the time. What enraged me was he used that film to increase his own star power. To make himself the loud center of attention. It was a gimmick. Him, the Hero Artist. And he made her, them, the object of it. His wife and their child.
It infuriated me. I imagined her silent, or almost silent, like a drop of water falling a long way down a dark rock, making an almost soundless splash into the pool hidden below.
After thirty years of marriage and five children, Stan divorced Jane and married a former student. Of course he did. By the time he died, he’d acquired a patina of sainthood among filmmakers. A film buff friend of mine who knew him said he was always the center of every gathering. He was never silent. And every year, on his feast day, the Brakhage Center shows those damn films over and over again. Reverently. Of Jane, giving birth over and over again. The birth unimportant. The new life unimportant. The woman creating new life, also unimportant. What is important is the subject, the eye, the auteur creating not new life, but new legend, and that legend about himself: the Hero Artist.
But what of Jane Wodening? What of her work? There is a lot of it. She changed her name after the divorce, and moved into the mountains, where everything was silent around her. And she wrote. “The Lady Orangutan” is only one of her stories from that time.
She was quiet about those stories, as about so much else.
So where’s the Wodening Center? Maybe Jane Wodening didn’t find that kind of thing important. Maybe just living life was more important to her than dominating it. Writing about it was living, sharing it with those who wanted to read it was living, rather than working up a persona, a display, for others to admire. And maybe that informed her comparative silence.
Did she rage inside, like the Lady Orangutan? I rage inside, so I imagine it was so with her, too.
It’s a rage to open the door of the cage of the outworn world and to walk out into the new. A rage for a new way of ordering the world, of a new way to communicate, humans and Nature.
By this I mean the reality of the human world, not the abstraction at one remove from its constant change, birth and death. The world that any creature that gives birth can know. Only man has defended himself from that knowledge. It is as if he imagines that by dominating the world, by using it only for himself, that will make him immortal.
He will not be immortal. None of us is that. We are all kin to the Lady Orangutan, mortal, trapped in a world not of our making, doing the best we can to tell our story, sometimes failing, sometimes, even unconsciously, heralding something utterly new. A miracle. They’ve happened over and over again in our world before. They will happen again.
Our outworn world was once bright and hopeful, made new through the miracle of the birth of a baby boy. Somewhere now, in our world, there’s another miracle, another new one—a baby girl is born. Somewhere a new way of being, one without heroes, without the fight for celebrity, without the silencing of the natural world, is born. Stories, like that written about the Lady Orangutan by Jane Wodening, herald it. And everywhere, as the miracle is born, Herod reappears, trying to kill it, fighting to retain his own dominance, his hegemony. His violence. Insisting on his right to treat those too weak or frightened, or worse, too loyal, to resist that violence, as objects. Not just women. Not just physical violence either, but emotional, psychological, spiritual violence, too.
The murder of the subject by forcing it to be an object. That’s where our silence about our rage has led.
No more silence. Women—this time, we have to lead. Tell our stories. Support the women who tell theirs. Let them transform ourselves and the world we live in.
That’s our miracle. And it’s happening now.
(excerpted from the Women Writers Anthology, 1455 Books. For more info, click here.)