Women who run with the wolves

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo

 

I DO not know Marilyn Monroe, whose real name is Norma Jeane Mortenson, as a poet. But she was, and her poetry speaks of “her” truth that may shed light to why she took her own life. Her public persona is a sexy blonde, and this persisted and seemed to have evolved a life of her own, side by side with her other self.

Mortenson read Ulysses, which I never finished reading. However, her personal library included some of the authors I read: Dostoyevsky, Milton and Hemingway. According to records, she was taking literature and history night classes at UCLA, in between her shooting schedules.

The caricature of Marilyn Monroe’s image stands  in stark contrast with her private self, which can be glimpsed in her private poetry described as “fragmentary, poem-like texts scribbled in notebooks and on loose-leaf paper” published for the first time in Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters.”

The notes reveal “a complex, sensitive being who peered deeply into her own psyche and thought intensely about the world and other people”, “a woman who loved deeply and strove to perfect her craft,” and “a woman who was playful, funny, and impossibly charming”. There is a tragic disconnect “between a highly visible public persona and a highly vulnerable private person, misunderstood by the world, longing to be truly seen.”

In her book, Women Who Run With the Wolves, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés said, “Within every woman there lives a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing.” She refers to this powerful force as the Wild Woman, an embodiment of the instinctual nature of women. But she also says that this “wildness” is already an endangered specie.

Ideally, the public persona and the private one should arrive at some unity, a unity that also celebrates and actualizes the woman’s instinctual nature. Mortenson was pressed into living “Marilyn Monroe”, a most unnatural life, to live the self-binding persona created for her by the public particularly by the movie industry and the media, but most of all, by a public that demands her caricature to persist. Although she tried to reconnect with and celebrate the fierce, healthy, visionary attributes of her instinctual nature, society was a formidable force to prevail upon. This part of her was silenced, her thoughts, her own truths were disregarded, she was sleep-walking her existence, and before she was totally drugged into an existence without innovation, she put herself to sleep. She slept knowing this great divide, of glimpsing her life as fertile and life-giving, of knowing her soul, and unable to retrieve her magic and healing. She was unable to recover her own vitality. Mortenson’s poetry reveals her thoughtful, poetic side:

 

“Only parts of us will ever

touch only parts of others —

one’s own truth is just that really — one’s own truth.

We can only share the part that is understood by within another’s knowing acceptable to

the other — therefore so one

is for most part alone.

As it is meant to be in

evidently in nature — at best though perhaps it could make

our understanding seek

another’s loneliness out.”

 

Another woman, symbol of bohemian life and creative Paris, is Alice Ernestine Prin, known as Kiki de Montparnasse, a French artist’s who helped define the liberated culture of Paris in the 1920s. She led a wild, exciting and debauched life, and at the age of twenty-eight she was declared the Queen of Montparnasse. Hemingway, in his preface to Kiki’s 1929 memoirs said that Kiki “dominated the era of Montparnasse more than Queen Victoria ever dominated the Victorian era..”

In the same year that she published her memoirs, Kiki painted Tightrope Walker, “a girl walking on a tightrope, balancing precariously above a street fair” which depicts the disconnect between her public life and her instinctual nature. Despite her influence, she was dependent on alcohol and drugs which caused her death at the age of fifty-one. News reported that “behind the painted mask was a troubled soul.”

Both Mortenson and Prin were icons whose lives were unable to connect fully within the instinctual nature of the Wild Woman, to the “powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing.”

But can we? There is a plethora of formula, but mostly theoretical, like a stairway leading to a museum of endangered species, a beautiful existence we cannot touch, but only marvel at, like a work of art. We can try, we can try our darnest best, by beginning to deal with our own brokenness. A desired reality always begins with a series of determined steps.

(For your comments and reactions, please email to: punch.sunday@gmail.com)

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