who could go from my father’s living room out into the
world. I got all fucked up with this peace stuff—how you can
make it better, anything better, if you care, if you try. I didn’t
want to kill Nazis, or anyone. In this sense I knew right from
w rong; it was an immutable sense o f right and wrong; that
killing killed the one doing the killing and that killing killed
something precious and good at the center o f life itself. I knew
it was wrong to take an individual life, mine, and turn it into a
weapon o f destruction; I knew I could and I said no I w on’t; I
could have; I was born with the capacity to kill; but m y father
changed m y heart. I said, it’s Nazism you have to kill, not
Nazis. People die pretty easy but cruelty doesn’t. So you got
to find a w ay to go up against the big thing, the menace; you
have to stop it from being necessary— you have to change the
world so no one needs it. Y ou have to start with the love you
have to give, the love that comes from your own heart; and
you can’t accept any terror o f the body, restrictions or
inhibitions or totalitarian limits set by authoritarian types or
institutions; there’s nothing that can’t be love, there’s nothing
that has to be mean; you take the body, the divine body, that
their hate disfigures and destroys, and you let it triumph over
murder and rage and hate through physical love and it is the
purest democracy, there is no exclusion in it. Anything,
everything, is or can be communion, I-Thou. Anything,
everything, can be transformed, transcended, opened up,
turned from opaque to translucent; everything’s luminous,
lambent, poignant, sweet, filled with nuance and grace,
potentially ecstatic. I thought I had the power and the passion
and the will to transform anything, me, now, with the simple
openness o f m y own heart, a heart pretty free o f fear and
without prejudice against life; a heart loving life. I didn’t have
a fascist heart or a bourgeois heart; I just had this heart that
wanted freedom. I wanted to love. I wanted; to love. I never
grasped the passive part where if you were a girl you were
supposed to be loved; he picks you; you sit, wait, hope, pray,
don’t perspire, pluck your eyebrows, be good meaning you
fucking sit still; then the boy comes along and says give me
that one and you respond to being picked with desire, sort o f
like an apple leaping from the tree into the basket. I was me,
however, not her, whomever; some fragile, impotent,
mentally absent person perpetually on hold, then the boy
presses the button and suddenly the line is alive and you get to
say yes and thank you. In Birkenau it didn’t matter what was
in your gorgeous heart, did it; but I didn’t learn, did I? I
wanted to love past couples and individuals and the phoney
baloney o f neurotic affairs. I didn’t want small personalities
doing fetishized carnal acts. I thought adultery was the
stupidest thing alive. John Updike made me want to puke. I
didn’t think adultery could survive one day o f real freedom. I
didn’t think it was bad— I thought it was moronic. I wanted a
grand sensuality that encompassed everyone, didn’t leave
anyone out. I wanted it dense and real and full-blooded and
part o f the fabric o f every day, every single ordinary day, all
the time; I wanted it in all things great and small. I wanted the
world to tremble with sexual feeling, all stirred up, on the
edge o f a thrill, riding a tremor, and I wanted a tender embrace
to dissolve alienation and end war. I wanted the w orld’s colors
to deepen and shine and shimmer and leap out, I didn’t want
limits or boundaries, not on me, not on anyone else either; I
didn’t want life flat and dull, a line drawing done by some
sophomore student at the Art League. I thought w e’d fuck
power to death, because sexual passion was the enemy o f
power, and I thought that every fuck was an act o f passion and
compassion, beauty and faith, empathy and an impersonal
ecstasy; and the cruel ones, the mean ones, were throwbacks,
the old order intransigent and refusing to die, but still, the
fuck, any fuck, brought someone closer to freedom and power
closer to dying. And yes, the edge is harrowing and poverty is
not kind and power ain’t moved around so easy, especially not
by some adolescent girl in heat, and I fell very low over time,
very low, but I had devotion to freedom and I loved life. I
w asn’t brought low in the inner sanctum o f m y belief; until
after being married, when I was destroyed. I remembered
Birkenau. I wished I could find my w ay back to the line, you
wait, you walk, you wait, you walk some more, it’s over. I
know that’s ignorant; I am ignorant. I wanted peace and I had
love in m y heart and being hurt didn’t mean anything except I
wasn't dead yet, still alive, still having to live today and right
now; being hurt didn’t change anything, you can’t let fear
enter in. According to the w ay I saw life, I incarnated peace.
M aybe not so some understand it but in m y heart I was peace;
and I never thought any kind o f making love was war; make
love, not war; and when it was war on me I didn’t see it as such
per se; war was Vietnam. I never thought peace was bland; or I
should be insipid or just wait. Peace has its own drive and its
own sense o f time; you need backbone; and it wants to win—
not to have the last word but to be the last word; it’s fierce,
peace is; not coy, not pure, not simpering or whimpering, and
maybe it’s not always nice either; and I was a real peace girl
who got a lot o f it wrong maybe because staying alive was
hard and I did some bad things and it made me hard and I got
tough and tired, so tired, and nasty, sometimes, mean:
unworthy. W hy’d Gandhi put those young girls in his bed and
make them sleep there so he could prove he wouldn’t touch
them and he could resist? I never got nasty like that, where I
used somebody else up to brag I was someone good. There’s
no purity on this earth from ego or greed and I never set out to
be a saint. I like everything being all mixed up in me; I don’t
have quarrels with life like that; I accept w e’re tangled. In my
heart, I was peace. Once I saw a cartoon in
The New Yorker
,
maybe I was eighteen. It showed a bunch o f people carrying
picket signs that said “ Peace. ” And it showed one buxom
woman carrying a sign that said “ Piece. ” I hated that. I hated
it. But you cither had to be cowed, give in to the pig shit
behind that cartoon, or you had to disown it, disown the
dumb shit behind it. I disowned it all. I disowned it without
exception. I kept none o f it. I pushed it o ff me. I purged m y