Finding the Words

In many ways language is inadequate as a means of expressing the meaning and qualities of the experience of the feminine.  And it feels important to me to try.  To find the words, in a way that feels whole and true, for this rich experience.  We live in a world of language and words, it’s one of our primary ways of communicating with each other as human beings.  

There’s a way that language and naming can sometimes distance from experience, split from feeling and objectify.  Or lead to debates about meaning, right and wrong, actualities and realities.  I see this as a symptom of the devaluing of feminine qualities in our culture.

I want to find a way to find words that includes feeling, depth and ambiguity, and that conveys something of an experience without having to be ‘right’ or accurate in any objective sense.  As I said in my last post, I want to find ways to write about the truths I experience.  

I feel vulnerable doing this, there are no empirical research findings to back up what I wish to share.  ‘Just’ my experience, borne from a deep journey into realms other than logic, thinking, explanations and everything a fairly ordinary upbringing and life experience in consumer capitalist culture tells us is how it is and how to live.

Julia Kristeva (1981), a French Bulgarian psychoanalyst and literary theorist describes language as being composed of two domains.  The  semiotic and symbolic. Semiotic being of the voice and body and related to desire, rhythm, tone, feeling, the primary realm of the infant mother/caregiver relationship: feminine.  Symbolic being grammar, syntax, aboutness, definition, the place when language and child development becomes more differentiated:masculine.

She was interested in how language is put in the service of patriarchy with an emphasis on the latter, with the former, the more feminine qualities being limited to the world of mothers and babies.  Leading to a diminishing, devaluing and sentimentalisation of this aspect of communication, as if its not relevant or appropriate to communicating in the adult world.  

This undermines the needs in all of us for heartfelt expression and devalues the realms of women’s styles of communicating as only belonging in the home and the realm of mothering.

I think this impoverishes communication for all.  

When we try to talk about things that matter, the things that are important to us, people we care about and the world around us but do this only with abstractions, arguments, and well structured thoughts our hearts are not included.  And we are unlikely to reach the hearts of others.  When we listen only to the words and their definitions, and from a paradigm of debate about rightness or wrongness we miss the person, the individual meaning and the heart and soul of what is being expressed.

And from the other side, remaining in the world of feminine qualities only, without the integration of the masculine qualities of structure and form can leave us swimming in soup, alone in our experience without the words to speak it.  We need both.  The masculine and the feminine.  

Growing up in this western consumer capitalist culture, however, has certainly left me wanting to nurture the feminine in me given its degrading and devaluing.  So, in this writing I’m doing, I’m trying to bring out something about the experience of the feminine to help redress a balance in myself, and our society where this is so in the shadows for so many.  This is one of the reasons I feel so determined to be write about this feminine realm, find the words, with feeling that bring a potential for wholeness in myself and my communication.  

I

t's what I'm in this long journey to do, recover this deeper felt knowing, world of desire and longing, and respond to the world around me from there.  

Finding ways to communicate that’s something other than talking about, not speaking from a detached objectifying and objectified distance but more present, engaged, wholehearted and alive.

That’s what nurturing the feminine qualities within has given me really, more present, engaged, wholehearted aliveness.  So precious.

Next time I will try to say more about what these feminine qualities are, for me, and how I have come to contact this in myself.  Somehow, today, talking about talking felt important.

References

Julia Kristeva, ‘Women's Time’ Translated by Alice Jardine and Harry Blake in Signs Vol. 7, No. 1 (Autumn, 1981), pp. 13-35 (23 pages) Published By: The University of Chicago Press.  Cited in Daphne De Marneffe, ‘Maternal Desire: On children, love and the inner life,’ 2006 Virago.