Knowing Woman by Irene Claremont de Castillejo

Author:Irene Claremont de Castillejo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala

1. The image of ‘The Second Apple’ was given to me by my daughter Jacinta Castillejo de Nadal.

2. Jung and Kerenyi, Essays on a Science of Mythology.

VII

Bridges

FEW DAYS PASS in which I am not concerned in some way or other with the man-woman relationship; and every day I become less sure of the answers. The only certainty I have is that since no two people are alike, relationships between them are bound to be dissimilar.

With the rapid growth of consciousness of today, while women have developed their masculine creative side and entered man’s outer world whether of action or of thought, men have become more receptive and sensitive to a sphere beneath the surface where women had hitherto been apt to dwell alone, albeit silently and only half aware. Only artists have hitherto been in touch with the feminine world.

This penetration by each sex of the other’s realm has progressed so far that to speak of a man-woman relationship as though it were something definite is beyond me. As I once heard it half humourously put, there are no longer two sexes, but six. There are men, women, homosexuals and lesbians, and there are also bi-sexuals and neuters. These physical and psychological anomalies and divergencies must never be forgotten for they are much more common than would appear on the surface. I must needs talk about the norm but I have never met it.

I have called this chapter Bridges because my contention is that a free relationship demands some degree of separation between individuals.

When people fall in love with one another they are so completely entangled that to tear them apart is like tearing a living creature asunder. Together they are a whole, separate they are two bleeding, mutilated halves. This vision of shared wholeness is known to us all but few of us are allowed to keep it for very long. This is not what I mean by a free relationship.

Relationship is a cold word. It has no vibrancy like, for instance, kinship, which immediately stirs something in one’s blood, or like love with its infinity of overtones. It may mean great things or almost nothing. Every encounter with a member of the other sex can become some sort of man-woman relationship, and I am here going to treat the man-woman relationship very broadly to cover, for instance, my own friendly relationship with my gardener, pleasantly and mildly coloured by the fact that he is a man and I a woman, as well as the most intimate relationships between the sexes.

I am not equating relationship with love. I am not going to talk about love. Love is, I believe, something quite different. One can build a bridge of relationship but one cannot build love. In the richest relationships it will certainly be present but even when it vanishes temporarily or permanently, a valuable relationship may still exist. Love is greater than any bridge. I talk about love later in another chapter.

In considering the bridges between two separate people I ask myself how we can prevent ourselves from undermining the bridges we have so painstakingly built.

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