Feminine Genius

Her strength is her weakness.
She challenges by faltering,
she fights by yielding,
and she conquers by falling.

- Author unknown
ll cultures have adored women; studied their physical structure; researched on their thinking process; glorified their beauty; wondered at the subtle splash of wisdom that comes from them; But finally they shut them in to a cascade and present them as show piece not knowing what to do with them. Understandably that is precisely the work of a male who stresses the aspect of doing instead of being.
For a man, a woman is a paradox. She seems to be weak, losing, soft, tender, supple and yet that is her strength, victory, dominance and superiority. She is strong with all her weaknesses; she fights while giving in, and conquers while falling.
There are differences between man and woman. Many have written about it, though not so eloquently. Many cultures, be it western or eastern, have tried to vocalize it in the desire to bring out the essence of women. Though we have greatly succeeded in explaining, we find ourselves at a loss when we try to explain their true essence. We find ourselves incomplete, confused and some times totally missed the point. The individuality of a woman stands before us with ever more richness beyond our normal logical, mathematical and human calculations.
This leads us again to further the discussion on the missing side of male psyche, namely the extra sensory perception, imagination, intuition, lateral thinking etc., of which the female psyche seems to be way ahead of a male psyche. At the same time we know that there is a man in woman and a woman in man lying dormant showing himself or herself occasionally in thought or in action. This leads us to the androgynous nature, the principle of Arthanariswarar, the Yin Yang etc.,
After centuries of domination of male psyche in developmental, historical, mathematical and logical fields, there is an emerging search of the female psyche in ecological, philosophical, metaphysical, anthropological and parascientific fields. This search takes place in the unexplored vicissitudes of human life. This certainly opens us a whole new way of being, thinking and responding to the human problems and challenges existing for centuries for which the male psyche could hardly find a solution and to which the female psyche was forbidden to enter.
The Genius
A genius may be taken as one who is recognised for his/her extraordinary power of invention or origination. In pre-Christian Roman theology a “genius” was a spirit presiding over the destiny of a person or place. By extension we have come to take a genius as one who through domination of his particular field influences a sizable portion of mankind. There is no common acceptance of what is meant by the word. Therefore, there can be no question of claiming any scientific exactitude in the following discussion.
Sorokin’s investigations indicate that only about 100,000 individuals left any notable trace on the memory of history from the forty-five billions who inhabited the earth through the 2,250 years that his study covered. Thus, only one person out of every 4,50,000 had immortalised himself. The chief arenas in which they have attained their pre-eminence are the following nine: government, religion, literature, scholarship, science, philosophy, business, music, and the other fine arts. Of these 100,000 historically towering elite, perhaps 95 per cent are men. More striking is the fact that all our recorded great geniuses have been men. Not one woman has ever risen to the ultimate heights in any field of human thought, action, or cultural creation. When we start to mention such names as Sappho and realise that only scattered fragments of her works remain, while her name is the dubious symbol of an immortal cult, or the name of the little known Benedictine nun Hroswitha whose copious works of the tenth century might be considered as the bridge between ancient and modern drama-when we dig and scrape into the bottom of the barrel labelled “All-Time Geniuses” and come up with specimens of such mediocre size as this, it becomes all too painfully clear that there is not one woman who could be classified as an all-time-great creative genius.
No one has given a satisfactory explanation of this amazing enigma. This brief present sketch will not change the history of the past’s unsatisfactory explanations but it may suggest further investigation.
Feminine Genius
The archetypal relationship between man and woman seems ideal and beautiful on the surface, and we are all taken up by its glamour. We are flabbergasted and are immersed in the subject. But where is the individual in the tragic tale of Tristan and Isolde, of Romeo and Juliet, of Salim and Anarkali, of the prince and princess who live happily ever after? The individual psyche stands far outside the tale, because it is an analogy, a symbol of what goes on within himself. Male and female within the individual must battle with each other in opposition until they achieve union. But the actual man and woman who live in the world and love each other must not lose sight of their true identity in the battle and the union. They must not mistake this one symbol for the whole story of their lives. There must be surrender, surely, in the act of union, in the bliss of love, in the hell of hate, but one’s individuality is more precious than any archetype.
But there are few individuals, few who have emerged from the primordial ooze enough to stand outside these archetypal dramas. Men and women who are asleep, who have no real individuality, find themselves compelled to be like the polar opposites of masculinity and femininity, like stereotypes, regardless of who they are. Men feel they must be dominant, aggressive, and active, and women feel they must be submissive, passive, and receptive. They cultivate the qualities of the archetype rather than their own peculiarities.
Since we live in a patriarchy, masculine values based on masculine qualities are the prescribed modes of thinking. Women take on the dark side of this. If the masculine world would open itself to feminine knowledge there would be a hieros gamos on a large scale, a union of opposites, a marriage between art and science, between poetry and philosophy. This alchemical union takes place on the individual plane in a few people but rarely, and these people attain to something like genius of being. So, though the masculine mind rejects the feminine, on the individual plane this most despised thing, the stone rejected by the builders, is actually the cornerstone of the alchemical work.
What is the feminine part of the psyche? It is a blind spot, so it is difficult to see. Let us say the intellect is masculine; it is ordered, structured, and finite. Objectivity and rationality, we shall also say are masculine. And therefore, what lies outside these masculine realms is feminine territory: intuition, subjectivity, and irrationality. It is not this simple though, because objectivity is very subjective, rationality is very irrational, and the borders between intellect and intuition cannot be found. And here lies the threat of the feminine point of view: it forever beholds the folly of pure rationality, pure intellect, pure objectivity. However, given the strict duality of the male-female myth, men are rational, objective, and intellectual; women are irrational, subjective, and intuitional. We who have lived under the yoke of this myth for thousands of years have become like the creatures of the myth. This is a sad state of affairs because intellect without intuition is a stale rigid trap.
Men need the qualities they project onto women. We believe because of our conditioning that a man is not a man if he has any of the qualities he gets rid of by claiming they are exclusively female. He knows unconsciously that he needs those qualities-that is why he is drawn to certain women, women who display outwardly the qualities he has hidden within himself, in the dark shadows of his psyche. It is no wonder a man wants to possess a woman, he really wants to reclaim that lost part of himself, to be whole again. He must have or imagine he has a woman who is all of those qualities he is missing. She will be an extension of himself, devoid of individuality. This is how she fulfils her role as mate to her man.
The tragedy of this situation strikes at both sides. A man may seem to have individuality and dignity but he is not himself if he has repressed part of himself. The tragedy on the other side is that a woman doesn’t even have this false individuality and dignity. She is only a part of the man, like Adam’s rib. She has individuality and dignity vicariously: She must repress the part other psyche that demands these things and project this part onto her man. He opens all doors for her, he blazes a path through the world for both of them. One wonders what men do with their emotions and what women do with their aggressions. What does a man do inside himself when he would weep? What does a woman do inside herself when she would be forceful and take over a situation? There must be murders and imprisonments inside, amputations and other tortures, punishments and deformities.
What is the feminine view of the world? It is a preoccupation with the relationship between things rather than with the things themselves. Men believe they are objective because they take careful note of individual things but they are coming more to realise that the object is not alone, it is inseparable from all the objects around it. In fact, it is the whole that must be understood before anyone object can be understood. This is a more feminine point of view: In conversation, a woman is more occupied with the way things are said, the tone of voice, gesture, body language, than is a man. A man is more occupied with the content of the words. In modern psychology, body language is studied by intuitive persons because they find that words can lie but the body cannot. This is a field in which women are unconscious adepts.
Because of her peculiar orientation, woman has developed talents to see where men cannot see, to see from angles he cannot see. In this patriarchy, what men see is what mankind sees. Woman is silent about what she sees. She does not see what she sees. Now is the time when we are beginning to look at ourselves and reassess our possibilities.
Why is it there have been no women of genius, only an occasional one who even aspired? Because woman has always had to play a part for man’s sake. She has had to be his missing part, so that he can be whole and survive his own unbalanced state. The danger of woman’s desire for independence, for a life of her own, has always been felt by those who train her for this role. Let us hope we can heal a universal neurosis, that we can effect an alchemy that will give back to man his soul, his emotions, his imagination, all that he now sees in woman, and free woman to enjoy her individuality.
There is a renaissance for woman. Once her creativity is allowed to come forth boldly and with its own peculiar mark of femininity, we will see women of genius. It is the flowering of experience from a particular point of view of an individual who is courageous enough to experience life deeply, to experience all the pangs and joys, the awesome vision of death and infinity: Genius and madness and sainthood are all entwined in the vision of life being greater than oneself, and if one can stand the vision and speak of it, though never really capturing it in words and symbols, that is the work of the genius. One can see the mark of psychic courage in these words. They seem to demand that one have such a vision oneself: They haunt one and lead one on to unimaginable goals, like fairy paths through an enchanted forest.
Women could come out with immortal facts without having any so called scientific research and yet they are true. It is in this background we need to look at the contribution women make to the society: perceiving without seeing, comprehending without listening, understanding without any help from the senses. They are able to prove a logic without logical procedures and conclusions. If asked for the logic behind their facts, we find no tactile experience but intuitive grasp of reality which is hard to comprehend for science.
We derive solutions from the female psyche for the problems. It is not based on mathematics and logic but based on intuition and extra sensory perception; not from outside but from inside. The feminine genius is inviting us to get back to that forgotten traits that used to be and still guides silently the universe, the solar system and the human mind relentlessly. That which guides with no apparent logic of mathematical calculation; that which attracts us incessantly. The question is : how much of it can we comprehend ?