Camille Paglia and Emily Dickinson: Uniting Yin and Yang

Camille Paglia is refreshingly original, yet honest about history and culture. Undoubtedly a genius--even if only for her reading Literature in many languages and discovering yin-yang among writers like Emily Dickinson - Paglia takes on feminists who cannot prevent date rape, even via fact-based advice and education. There is no love lost between Paglia and those who reject low culture (and/or minority cultures) and compares East and West in several ways (especially in team-taught classes with art majors

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/55/Pagliaphoto.jpg/200px-Pagliaphoto.jpg

Her truth-telling is best described in her own words: "I would be someone who would look into the latrine of culture..."
^{Many liberals, feminists and Family Values preachers, hated her for this. Paglia has wondered aloud about this unholy allaince of left-leaning feminists and right-leaning religious conservatives!}

^{Paglia has been causes EXPLOSIONS since her youth. She wears her middle class, Italian, Catholic and American credentials simultaneously and proudly. And she did this literally when she poured so much lime in an outhouse she had used (she grew up on a farm & loved her Girl Guide camping), that she caused an explosion!}

^{Her rocking the boat left her in the academic wilderness for more than a decade. Emily Dickinson's life gave Paglia stamina and support, beacuse Emily hated so much that editor's had changed her 7 poems that had been published, that she kept loyal to her true voice and saved 1,775 poems in her own drawer until death!}

^{Paglia worked (taught) part-time at colleges while writing a biography of Amelia Earhart, then changing back her focus on studies of Art, Literature and the Andrgynous Muse. Despite her 1974 publication of her thesis as SEXUAL PERSONAE: THE ANDROGYNE IN LITERATURE AND ART. After five agents and several more publishers rejected her master work, YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS (she did her graduate studies there) came through while Professor Bloom (her mentor) remained a beacon and supporting rod. Without much publicity, Paglia's seminal work earned a second printing within 10 months, now the acclaimed SEXUAL PERSONAE: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990).}

Camille Paglia respected Emily Dickinson's genius and Dickinson's refusal to moderate her language, sexual metaphors and confusing eroticism that emerged in poems about femininity. While Emily remained celibate, Paglia detected the yin-yang or blending of male and female senstivities so neceesary in the production or creation of art and literature. Her work is not entirely original; but she demands to know why there has been a suppression of this Muse in the West in the name of family values, anit-lesbianism and other isms. She is a strong feminist who does not rreject MEN or the male in society, culture and art.

The best way for me to summarize what connects me to these two brilliant women, so essential to our culture and achievements, is my own poem, MITHUNAS (the male and female lovers of ancient India).

The male-female divide and Unity of the Mithunas:

the great ones urge me to write
among contemporaries, camille paglia beckons
we have but met through emily of amherst
misnamed its nun, she knew eroticism and sadomasichism

reading camille, i was forced to make a detour
to grab paper and pencil; the muses were calling
camille the prophet had unloosed pandora
(not just her box) - to tell truths, the good, the bad, the fawning

adam was created first, evolution was under arrest
adam was impotent, lonely... the yang quest
adam needed god to do serious surgery on his body
adam's rib yielded eve, through the bias of dr. god, and lust

were paglia, in culture, catholic, to share such insights
she would be branded an atheist. she is a catholic atheist
anyway, so why suppress her pagan truth. linga-yoni
of india, yin-yang of china? they are not two, but a unity!
(c)Deonils 12/27/2007