Susan Griffin (born January 26, 1943) is a radical feminist philosopher, essayist and playwright particularly known for her innovative, hybrid-form ecofeminist works.
Each time I write, each time the authentic words break through, I am changed. The older order that I was collapses and dies. I lose control. I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language. I follow the sound of the words, and I am surprised and transformed by what I record.
I know I am made from this earth, as my mother's hands were made from this earth, as her dreams came from this earth and all that I know, I know in this earth, the body of the bird, this pen, this paper, these hands, this tongue speaking, all that I know speaks to me through this earth.
Is it a coincidence that stories from the private life became more popular just as the grand hope for public redemption through revolution was beginning to sour? I witnessed a similar shift in taste in my own time. In the 1960s, while a hopeful vision of a just society arose again, countless poems and plays concerning politics and public life were written, read, and performed. But after the hope diminished and public life seemed less and less trustworthy, this subject was less in style.
Each life reverberates in every other life. Whether or not we acknowledge it, we are connected, woven together in our needs and desires, rich and poor, men and women alike.
Perhaps every moment of time lived in human consciousness remains in the air around us.
Telling a story of illness, one pulls a thread through a narrow opening flanked on one side by shame and the other by trivia.
Before a secret is told, one can often feel the weight of it in the atmosphere.
There is always a time to make right what is wrong.
The mind can forget what the body, defined by each breath, subject to the heart beating, does not.
we are nature. We are nature seeing nature. We are nature with a concept of nature. Nature weeping. Nature speaking of nature to nature.
I am not so different in my history of abandonment from anyone else after all. We have all been split away from the earth, each other, ourselves.
I think artists can go to a level of vision that can often save us from a situation which seems to have no solution whatsoever.
In the system of chivalry, men protect women against men. This is not unlike the protection relationship which [organized crime] established with small businesses in the early part of this century. Indeed, chivalry is an age-old protection racket which depends for its existence on rape.
One can find traces of every life in each life.
It is a grief over the fate of the Earth that contains within it a joyful hope, that we might reclaim this Earth.
Every important social movement reconfigures the world in the imagination. What was obscure comes forward, lies are revealed, memory shaken, new delineations drawn over the old maps: it is from this new way of seeing the present that hope emerges for the future. . . Let us begin to imagine the worlds we would like to inhabit, the long lives we will share, and the many futures in our hands.
Philosophy means nothing unless it is connected to birth, death, and the continuance of life. Anytime you are going to build a society that works, you have to begin from nature and the body.
Yes we are devilish; that is true we cackle. Yes we are dark like the soil and wild like the animals. And we turn to each other and stare into this darkness. We find it beautiful. We find this darkness irresistible. We cease all hiding.
And if the professional rapist is to be separated from the average dominant heterosexual (male), it may be mainly a quantitative difference.
In one sense I feel that my book is a one-woman argument against determinism.