Snake Talk and other planets that we make among ourselves - Women's Wisdom

COMPARE and contrast: History of People. History of Man. Man Invents the Wheel. People Invent the Wheel. Man's Search for Meaning. People's Search for Meaning. The trouble with Man is not just that he's a man, but that there's only one of him. One tall, cleareyed, well-hung, jut-jawed male striding through the ages toward a goal both logical and grand. The History of People sounds messy and casual and it was.

Maybe inspiration means something that helps you breathe, something that gives you room to breathe in deep.

When Naomi Newman's one-woman show Snake Talk: Urgent Messages from the Mother played in Berkeley last year, I saw it seven times. When Snake Talk plays again near me, I'll probably see it several times more than once. Lots of people have seen Snake Talk four or five times.

That is as nothing compared to the many people who see dozens, or hundreds, of Grateful Dead concerts in a year, but it got me thinking about the again phenomenon. There are some events that people who love them go to about once, and there are other events that some people who love them attend frequently if at all possible. Why is that? It's a reaction not necessarily expected or understood by the people seemingly in charge of the event. When I first saw Snake Talk, I didn't know Naomi Newman. Now we're friends, and I've seen her be grateful and amused by people's recurrent attendance of her play. "Why do you want to see Snake Talk again?" she'll say. "You've seen it."

For Naomi, and for other people flummoxed by friends who repeatedly go to concerts, art exhibits or meetings they've already been to, I've got a guess. It's kind of harsh here on the old planet. People are hard on each other. The latest communication technology trumpets lies and terrors and recommendations of nasty behavior. Our soft hearts flinch inside and wonder if we're crazy for feeling it wouldn't be all that hard for things to be balanced and truthful and kind.

There are some events that for some people create the experience of what it would be like to live on a different, less vicious planet -- what it is like for the length of the event. We go back to learn what it's like to live in our hearts.

The best known frequent attenders around here are Deadheads, people who go to lots of Grateful Dead concerts. I'm pretty calm about the Grateful Dead's music, almost (forgive me, Deadheads) indifferent, but I'm a big fan of Deadheads -- the ones I know I like a lot. I like how happy they are when they're off to a concernt, and I like their approach to life which is sort of the opposite of "You wanna fight about it?" They're more "You wanna work it out and have fun?" I'm glad they can visit another planet and practice that approach and bring it back to our shared general reality, which needs it badly.

General reality, the well-publicized story about the way things are that we're all supposed to act like we believe in, is weirdly inhuman. The alleged humans most publicized aren't human. They think the difference between Coke and Pepsi is very significant. They never admit to what is probably one of the most common problems in our society -- loneliness. They either have no problems at all or they had one problem and they're on TV to say they just solved it foreover. They never say thaa sometimes life seems to them grey and nothing or that life sometimes seems so aglitter with joy that it would scarecely matter what brand of anything you use. They're good at pretending they are like other people who are good at pretending they've really got it together.

When actual human compare themselves to such fantasies, we feel really wrong, like we're too much and too little at the same time -- too much complexity and too little perfection. The actual human quotient of problems, longing for community, spiritual longing, wisdom, contradictory experiences, specific cultural background, joy and pain seems like it's way too much to fit into the general reality pretend game.

At the beginning of the movie All That Jazz, the guy who is leading an impossibly fast and dishonest life starts each day by looking in the mirror and saying, "It's showtime!" I like shows that imply, or show, that we don't have to put on a harsh, pseudo-perfect show for each other to live. I like being in rooms of people where we are safe showing our whole selves, so I can learn that there is more to myself and everybody else than I'd suspect walking down the nervous streets or watching commercials.

"When one has matured surrounded by implicit disparagement, the undiscovered self is an unexpected resource." That's Mary Catherine Bateson in Composing A Life, talking about women learning to understand their lives by comparing notes with women friends. Women have matured surrounded by implicit disparagement of their knowledge and ways of knowing and so have minority people, and so have people of all genders who don't want to let their softness go -- and who don't want to join the ranks of those for whom knowing and being angry and dominating are all the same process.

When I went to see Snake Talk, I felt like I'd regrown an arm that I'd forgotten was amputated. The missing part that came back in that room was my future.

What apparently happens in Snake Talk is that Naomi Newman becomes three women -- a poet, maybe in her fifties; a yenta, maybe in her sixties; and a woman without a home, maybe in her seventies. These women speak to the audience like old friends comparing notes about life and discovering undiscovered selves of light and shadow. It reminds me of long conversations with friends where shields drop and we say things that will help us make it through hard times for a long time, for decades.

I didn't know until older friends told met that women become invisible in public as they age. I didn't know it, but I was practicing it. when people watching, I would look at and wonder about everyone except women I classified as old, who I would skip over without pause or thought. In some part of me I must have thought that I would become a non-entity too when I lost the potential to make little Americans. Seeing women decades older than I (I'm 39) take up space in Snake Talk, take up a whole stage, make up a whole world, changes my world, inside and out. It looks like women who don't totally shut down to avoid pain really know something by the time they're fifty and more and more in the decades after that. It looks like I, as a woman, could have a long, wise future. That idea is so foreign to most places where I hang out that I didn't even know I was missing it.

Another thing Snake Talk made real for me was why my spiritual teachers are. I used to think I was allergic to spiritual teachers who seemed to be straight guys in dresses acting like they don't have a sense of humor -- the Pope, the guru, the Protestant minister in a robe. The wisdom in Snake Talk seemed very familiar and helpful and nothing like what the grumpy guys in drag say. It seemed like what me and my friends say to each other when we're really talking. When we're really talking to each other we're being each other's spiritual teachers. I knew that kind of talk was very valuable but I didn't know it could get much bigger than a kitchen table. I didn't know it could be lit and supported and take up a whole theatre. That impies it could take up even more space, thta it could heal some of the places general reality and grumpy guys in charge are devastating. Does the wisdom of older women have to be invisible and inaudible and the wisdom of friendship small? Snake Talk implies no -- it implies a world where I could live in a livelier way.

I'm a Snake head -- no objectivity about Snake Talk here. If Snake Talk sounds to you like the kind of thing you might like, you might love it. More important to me than Snake Talk specifically is knowing that loving stuff like that happens. Sometimes a group of people are together in such a way that it really is a different, more livable planet. That happens. It happens in different people in different ways, but it is not rare. The grumpy guys in charge would like this to be an asphalt planet and all humans shattered into bits and covered with goo and flattened that the grumpy guys in charge might smoothly continue to zoom, running their power trips on our lives. So when something opens us up to the texture and richness and gentleness in ourselves and in each other and life feels different, the grumpy guys in chage would like to say that it didn't happen, or, as a fallback position, that it's very rare. It's dangerous and inaccurate for us to think it's very rare because then when it happens to you you'll think this is the only garden on an asphalt planet and if the person in charge happens to want you to amputate your leg in thanks for them growing your arm back, you might do it.

There are lots of gardens on the planet. There are lots of planets on the planet, true ones and soft ones and loving ones and ones that fit who you really are. It happens. Sometimes love becomes an area and we see and feel and live how good things can be.

In times before Bible times, women and snakes were considered wise. Snakes gave women good advice, were spiritual advisers to women who were spiritual advisers to the whole community. The Garden of Eden story where a woman listens to a snake and the whole world is messed up is probably a smear campaign against the wisdom of women and sources of women's wisdom. The part of the story where it says women and snakes will always hate and fear each other may have been a way of saying, "Women, never listen to your source."

We say to each other in a lot of ways never listen to your source, and it makes us lonely. If we find a place that reminds us of our source and lets us live with ease in our source for a while, we go back. When I go to Snake Talk again the power of the experience is not so much what Naomi says but that her speaking from her source clears my heart and I can hear what my source has to say -- my own snake talk.

Anne Herbert is an oldtime Whole Earther, a compassionate person, and a wonderful writer. This article was originally funded by a grant from the Foundation for a Compassionate Society; it is a part of Anne's current work-in-progress, a book on women's wisdom.

Video and audio recordings of "Snake Talk: Urgent Messages from the Mother" are available from A Traveling Jewish Theatre, P. O. Box 421985, San Francisco, CA 94142 (415/861-488). Audiocassettes are $11 postpaid, videos $34. Checks should be made out to Naomi Newman. Booking information is available from the same address.

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