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
maybe I was eighteen. It showed a bunch o f people carrying
picket signs that said “ Peace. ” And it showed one buxom
