WHY AREN'T I GERMAINE GREER?

Why aren’t I Germaine Greer?  We’re the same age, we’re both educated, my hair is often as messy, I say things that are just as outrageous while claiming they are true — and they are.  Maybe I AM Germaine Greer and you just don’t it.  After all, do kids these days even know women who are eighty exist at all?

The real reason, of course, is time and place.  Greer, an Australian, ran with a racy crowd, abandoned her reputation, and told the truth when people wanted the truth.  By contrast, I’ve been pretty self-protective, including my reputation.  Even so, my big mouth has pushed me out at least twice so that I had to go home and mooch off my mother until I could find something else.  “Following my dream” as the hucksters advise, usually got me into trouble, even married and ordained.  Even in those two contexts, I wasn’t enough of a hustler.

Yet I was compliant.  Nothing untoward happened in my family that I can recall — I mean, no abuse, no obvious exclusion.  But I learned at a certain point that having my own bedroom meant locking the door and excluding the world.  We’re accustomed to seeing this in video fiction — it’s a commonplace.  I paid a price.  My father’s belief in rewarding obedience and punishing defiance, which hinged only on his own level of irritation, taught me to not want anything but to be left alone.

In the television shows after the child has had her door forced or persuaded open, the parent comes in and has a talk that explains everything.  That never happened for me.  My mother said in old age, “I fed them, clothed them, and made them come home at night.  I didn’t know I should talk to them.”

But I was told I was smart, I achieved in school, I was meant to be a teacher.  This came from my mother’s side where her father wanted to be Somebody.  He just didn’t know how to do that and neither did she.  They didn’t withhold information — they themselves didn’t know.  But they assumed that if they demanded success, I’d figure it out.

Part of the reason I admire Germaine Greer is that she explains everything instead of papering it all over, denying questions, stifling dissenters.  I think I have two books by her but only one has come out of my sorting piles.  I left it out to read but then wondered what my neighbors would think of it.  I tend to stereotype my neighbors so maybe they wouldn’t even remark on it, but no one comes to visit anyway.  Whew.

The one coffee table book is called  “In Praise of Boys” and is teased by Rizzolli, the publisher who specializes in big luxurious books, with the hint that the book will be salacious.  The cover is a publicity still of “Tadzio” from the film “Death in Venice.”  In fact, it’s a particularly vivid and well-written art criticism book that focuses on boys in European art, often depicted in the nude.  Greer tells us why they are presented that way or maybe in costume and what each portrait means.  Usually not much about sex but a lot about power and hierarchy.  Those last were what my family was missing.

My technique for survival has been to become useful and to research what was unknown.  So when I got to Browning, I did both by attaching to Bob Scriver.  I’m wary of saying I “loved” him, though I was attached very hard, and if he were honest, he’d say he loved someone else, a little blonde who looked like Brigitte Bardot.  But that’s just what he’d honestly believe.  She and I knew he just loved how it looked for a man in his late forties to have such a pretty young girl friend.  She was three years younger than me.  He didn’t love me, but he attached to me because I was useful and found out whatever he needed to know.

It wasn’t until much later that I realized that to become a writer, one had to write.  Of course,I’d been writing all along.  I’ve said many times that composing the captions for the miniature wildlife dioramas was the hardest thing I’d ever done because they had to be packed with information but simple enough for a child to read.  The real reason they were so hard was because of my ego.  I thought I was hot stuff but everyone was writing captions and some were better than the ones I wrote.

I wrote a lot of promotional stuff as well.  Nothing hard about it.  Cute animal stories and 19th century tropes about “Indians” as immortalized in bronze.  It wasn’t until much later that I began to ask the moral questions that REALLY made writing hard.  Every wild baby animal we raised ended up dead at an early age.  By today’s standards, we didn’t take proper care of our horses.  No “Indians” that we knew and that worked with us made more than a skimpy living wage, though the people that bought the bronzes were often very wealthy, often from resources they captured in the West.  The rez itself kept morphing and deteriorating, until it got hold of material capitalism and began to merchandize itself.

Germaine Greer’s indigenous people have been in the Southern Hemisphere, Africa and Australia.  She has written much more about contemporary Western so-called Civilization, at least those are the books that make her reputation.  But she was a writer among writers.  I am not.  I don’t write about “Indians,” just Blackfeet or maybe Cree or Metis.

I do share with her a distrust and sometimes dislike of women, partly because I left being like them and partly because they cling and invade.  My mother and I fought over who ran me until the day we buried her remains.  I didn’t tell her how to be, but I used who she was and didn’t regret it.  We were not a kissy family who said, “I love you" to sign off a telephone call.  I never understood what she thought was so special about my brothers.  Maybe that’s why I bought Greer’s book, for clues.  It was a puzzle that they always fell short in ways not their fault, or so it seemed.  This was fate’s insult to my mother, but maybe — she thought — it was my fault.

Parishioners, who sit gazing at their clergy every Sunday, pick up a lot of information and if they are especially intelligent and trained, as UU’s generally are, they can be pretty insightful.  One woman told me that I’d married my mother, though it looked more like I’d married my father because Scriver was male and twice my age.

It was a matter of withheld love.  Biographers say Greer’s mother was possibly Asperger’s and her father was weak and missing.  She says she only loves her sister who does not love her — maybe — but her brother forgives her.  These puzzles spell out “withheld love.”  Greer and I are both oldest children, daughters in families of three, the lead child.  She must have gotten basic care and engagement, a scaffolding of confident if defiant participation in the world from someone, but not enough to prevent “insecure avoidant attachment” as the shrinks put it.  

Constant questioning.  Always seeking.  The co-dependents, fixers, and dominators love it, thinking it’s a opportunity, but they are never attached.  And I’m not quite attached to Greer, another writer like me.  But I appreciate her example.