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Rexroth’s San Francisco
1970-1972
Women’s Liberation
Architecture and Religion
Since everybody else is writing about it, I might as well speak my piece too.
Women’s Liberation is almost as fashionable as ecology.
The clitoral orgasm
ranks with offshore oil as a topic of polite conversation. Being the direct
descendant of a long line of suffragettes, including a great grandmother who
wore masculine clothes, it all strikes me as a little unreal, and for a time
puzzled me by its emotional violence and vindictiveness. The reason of course is
that I have always avoided women who aren’t liberated. So much of the action in
the black movement, the gay movement, the women’s movement, the students’
movement, and every other little movement that has a meaning of its own, puzzled
me until suddenly I realized one day that I had spent my life in the radical and
revolutionary bohemia with traditions and social and even family continuity back
to the 18th century, in which the freedom and integrity of the individual was
completely taken for granted; sex, color, condition of servitude was ignored.
What we are seeing today is a series of revolutions of people and classes who
have never been revolutionary and are not used to being revolting. When I read
Kate Millet and Shulamith Firestone I am constantly being brought up short in
amazement. What kind of men have they known? Or what kind of women, for that
matter? The answer is The Great American Male who double-parks in front of his
favorite whorehouse and The Great American Female whose motto is “No minkee, no
sackee.” In this region I am sure I would be a stranger and afraid in a world I
never made, ignorant and impotent. I don’t really give a damn if these people
straighten out their interpersonal relations or not. I’m afraid of what will
happen when and if they are liberated. Except, every year they get more
fouled up and when they get fouled up they get nasty and when they get nasty
they get deadly, and when they get deadly I don’t want to dance with them.
Miss Millet and Miss Firestone are so right, righter than they know. Women
run America, from U.S. Steel to the Frances E. Willard Grammar School. The
female administrative assistant does the work, makes the decisions, books the
planes, and portions out to the bosses t.i.d. valium while the male president or
school principal attends business luncheons and even business breakfasts where
the principal activity is consuming too much low grade alcohol. The women are
anonymous, invisible and powerless, although if each one flipped one lever of
the nearest business machine the entire economy would come crashing down.
America is the most expensive country in the world to get sick in and dying
is practically prohibitive. The AMA, like the building trades, keeps the number of doctors in America down to the level necessary
to ensure our rank in the 12th place in world public health, while women,
entering medicine, are subjected to relentless, not discrimination, but
persecution from pre-med to retirement. Since they usually go into GYN and OB
they usually don’t retire. These two specialties have a life expectancy
comparable to that of trapeze performers. On the other hand, a highly trained
PhD public health nurse executive with three or four years more education than
the doctors “over” her, makes about one-tenth her masters’ income. Go into a
big architect’s office. What do you see? Women. They aren’t, as you think,
draftswomen; they are architects. They do the work. The bosses take the clients
to business lunches, make fetching sketches and consume low trade alcohol. How
many buildings have you ever seen in a magazine or anywhere else signed by a
woman? There are but two mildly famous women architects in America, and they are
famous only among architects. The public has never heard of them. In the big New
York publishing houses the second echelon editorial work is done almost entirely
by women. The bosses take authors and agents to business lunches and consume low
grade alcohol. Women have all the responsibility but they have none of the
power. The only power they can exert is by the exploitation of their sex as a
commodity, and, as America gradually turns gay from top to bottom, they are
losing that.
The principal trouble with the propagandists for Women’s Liberation,
especially the ones that get in the picture magazines, is their unbridled
emotionalism, the result not of being women but of being systematically
frustrated and exploited. Like all the other movements in the contemporary
turmoil they show a singular concentration on the essentials — complete
equality — socially, economically, domestically, and in opportunity. It’s
pointless at this stage of the game to engage in violent battles over the
question of “natural differences.” If every opportunity is guaranteed open,
the biological variations will sort themselves out. I for one am not impressed
by the Russian woman’s “freedom” to be a coal miner, although, à chacun son
goût, or à chacune sa goûte.
Will juridical equality bring about a ceasefire in the bitter war of
attrition waged in the bedroom? I doubt it. Today in America blacks have
juridical equality and the laws so guaranteeing are simply restatements of
identical laws passed after the Civil War. Much good it’s done. Well, some. Ten
years ago an old Negro militant friend of mine said, “I never thought I’d live
to see light at the end of the tunnel.” There’s a light there alright, but for
10 years it’s been turning redder and redder.
The brutal fact is that the real problems — ecological, economic, social,
moral, ethical, religious, sexual, intersexual — cannot be solved within the
context of this society or any society at present known. And every year the
problems get more insoluble, more lethal, the whole kit and kaboodle errs from
the prime foundation, and before noble men and women can live together as
perfect equals we’ll have to start all over. The chances are the beautiful lives
will be led in a million years by the descendants of the squids, the octopuses,
the cockroaches, and the shriveled descendants of homo sapiens will be a kind
of lice in their pseudopodia.
[December 1970]
I planned to do it and kept putting it off. Finally I got around to visiting
San Francisco’s new Roman Catholic cathedral. Maybe I had been afraid to go
inside. Sticking up there like a hypertrophied desk cigarette lighter, it didn’t
bode well as an architectural experience.
Is it provincialism? True, the skyscraper is an outward material sign of the
inward reality of an inhumane social order. Nevertheless, they do build rather
pretty and interesting skyscrapers in New York and Chicago, along with a lot of
monstrosities. In San Francisco, our high-rise buildings have been, with very few
exceptions, so hideous as to be comic, or at best, immense expressions of
mediocre provincialism. This wasn’t true once. Maybeck and Willis Polk were
uniquely original architects. The Mills Building may be provincial Burnham,
which is provincial Richardson, but it’s a nice looking building.
Is architecture in some way a direct expression of a kind of social
sensibility, that German bogey, the Folk Soul? It is certainly true that San
Francisco does not have a single architecturally significant church, and
churches are certainly a direct expression of their congregations. The most
satisfactory is probably the extremely modest old Danish Lutheran St. Ansgar’s,
which is modest indeed. Frank Lloyd Wright once remarked that San Francisco was
the world’s outstanding example of what human greed and vulgarity could do to
one of the world’s most beautiful sites. That was before contemporary Hong Kong
had blossomed out into hundreds of hideous 20-story concrete barracks. Do you
suppose there is something in the air or water that makes San Franciscans
aesthetically defective? It’s certainly true that although it swarms with
painters it’s the worst market for pictures of any large city. The Bay Area’s
leading painter has dealers in Berlin, Dusseldorf, Paris, London, New York,
Chicago, and even barbarous Los Angeles. It is not worth his while to have a San
Francisco dealer.
But there is something else wrong with the cathedral. It is a completely
irreligious structure, comparable to the St. Louis or the Lausanne airports —
in which comparison it comes off poorly indeed. If it expresses anything, it
expresses power. Not the power of God. Not the power of the soul. Least of all
the power of the mystery of being. But secular power. The baroque grandeur of
St. Peter’s in Rome does that, too. But, still, amidst all the gilt and twisted
columns and monumental sculpture and painting, religion, God, the soul, mystery
do lurk in the corners, like mice, maybe, but they are there. No holy mice could
ever get into St. Mary’s. This is not some special evil of the Catholic Church.
All the old, organized Christian churches are caught up in a frantic drive for
total secularization. Meanwhile, we are in the midst of the greatest religious
revival since the Reformation — but they don’t know about it in the churches.
The Roman Catholic church abandons Latin, Gregorian chant, incense, gorgeous
ritual, while the children of the parishioners sit in the lotus posture and do
zazen, induce visionary experiences with drugs, strobe lights, hypnotic music,
and incense, or shave their heads, dress up in bedspreads and romp about the
streets chanting “Hare Krishna.” The churches go right on, blindly preaching
the Social Gospel and Muscular Christianity they have resurrected from 1860.
It’s not that people like the Berrigans are social revolutionaries — that’s
fine. It’s that they are Low Churchmen, busy emptying wonder out of religion.
What makes any truly realized religious experience revolutionary is that it is
based upon wonder, on total realization of a transcendent experience which is
incompatible with any materialistic society. Organized religions all perpetuate
themselves by making unholy alliances with worldly power and appetite, and
grounding out the revolutionary potential of any vision of total reality. If all
the Christians, Buddhists and Mohammedans in the world suddenly became good
Christians, Buddhists, and Mohammedans, organized society as we know it would
instantly collapse, just as would happen if all the Communists suddenly became
communists.
Notice that the major Christian churches in America all have well-financed,
active organizations for social action and youth work, with plenty of money to
spend and commissions of scholars busy translating the Bible into Kiwanese —
and all this has had no effect. Membership in the organized churches steadily
declines. Then the Jesus Freaks came along with that old-time religion, old-time
hymns, the King James Bible (which the churches had convinced themselves “youth
couldn’t understand”), a charismatic, ecstatic, pentecostal worship, and they
swept the country.
The idea that youth would be captivated and captured if the most fundamental
experiences of life were exorcised with a philosophy indistinguishable from the
lectures of the late Norman Thomas could occur only to people who have never had
any fundamental experiences in life. Life is miraculous and mysterious.
It is out of its miracle and mystery that true social action that changes the
world is born. Radical young people, hippies, and freaks trot hither and yon
over the world seeking the places where the green grass grows all around, and I
have never known one who has gone through Barcelona and visited Gaudi’s vast
mysterious, miraculous Church of the Sagrada Familia who wasn’t totally thrown
by the experience. It does what the light shows of Fillmore West tried to do.
That’s the kind of church architecture which speaks to the contemporary
religious revival. They’ll come just to experience the architecture and if you
add far-out music, vestments and incense and sermons which stress the miracle of
life, they’ll come in droves. If you build a cathedral that looks like the
underbelly of a freeway, once the older generation who do exactly what the Holy
Father tells them dies off, who is going to come? Then, what are we going to do
with the great big building?
[February 1972]
Rexroth’s
San Francisco (columns from the San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco
Magazine). Copyright 1960-1975
Kenneth Rexroth. Reproduced by permission of the Kenneth Rexroth Trust.
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[REXROTH
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NOTE (February 2010): I have just begun a project of
posting ALL of Rexroth's SF Examiner columns 50
years after their original appearance.
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