After her first book 'Things That Make One's Heart Beat Faster' on Sei Shonagon, a writer and court lady who lived a thousand yers ago in Kyoto, Japan; Mia writes again, about women, she thought about on sleepless nights when her life, her love or her attitude is skewed and it seems there is no end to the dark night of her soul. On those nights, she has gathered her invisible honor guard of historica women, guardian angels to lead the way.
What can a forty-something childless woman do? Bored with her life and feeling stuck, Mia Kankimäki leaves her job, sells her apartment, and decides to travel the world, following the paths of the female explorers and artists from history who have long inspired her. She flies to Tanzania and then to Kenya to see where Karen Blixen—of Out of Africa fame—lived in the 1920s. In Japan, Mia attempts to cure her depression while researching Yayoi Kusama, the contemporary artist who has voluntarily lived in a psychiatric hospital for decades. In Italy, Mia spends her days looking for the works of forgotten Renaissance women painters of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and finally finds her heroines in the portraits of Sofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana, and Atremisia Gentileschi. If these women could make it in the world hundreds of years ago, why can’t Mia? "(Missing In Action?) as Tony who had written his autobiography 'Born Wild' called her.
The Women I Think About at Night is “an astute, entertaining…and insightful” exploration of the lost women adventurers of history who defied expectations in order to see—and change—the world.
In this “thought-provoking blend of history, biography, women’s studies, and travelogue” (Library Journal) Mia Kankimäki recounts her enchanting travels in Japan, Kenya, and Italy while retracing the steps of ten remarkable female pioneers from history.
Karen Blixen - famous for 'Out of Africa', the book and the subsequent movie of the same name starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, occupies one third of the book. After her divorce in January 1922 she wrote "These are difficult times for me, far, far, more difficult than, for instance, when I was ill," It is difficult to leave even a bad relationship. Even a difficult person becomes so close, your lives are so intimately and intricately woven together like the root systems of trees, that it feels as if you are tearing your own self out of your life.
January 1923 she writes to her mother "I should like to give all young women two pieces of advice: to have her hair cut short and to learn to drive a car. These two things completely transform one's life. .....can be tidied....you can really move as a man's equal. "
In August 1923 she wrote "I thing that there is a really fine time ahead for women and that the next hundred years will bring many glorious revelations to them -- I think it will be truly glorious when women become real people and have the whole world open before them."
On the death of her "Love of parallels" Denys Finch Hatton at the age of 46, she returns home to Denmark after the coffee plantation that she had built up facing much difficulty goes under. Flying with him, she had seen the entire vastness of the East African plane. She then starts her writing life and becomes so successful, that she was even shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in 1962.
There are beautiful letter exchanges through out the book. Karen saw her own life as an exhausting attempt to climb a steep mountain, as if she were constantly striving to attain some potential greatness in herself something that could be - and she envied her siblings their contentment with ordinary everyday life.
Do we really have to be constantly striving for something difficult and scary? Why can't we just lie in bed in our parent's attic and watch the nature channel?
Writing of the books mean, actually writing, and you don't always need lawyers protecting against publishers.
To be forced to silence....feels as if one is buried alive, lying in the darkness with the weight of the earth on breast, screaming....
"Ordinary "happiness" was clearly not for her. "
Writing, traveling, reflecting on how we want to live the few remaining moments in our lives.
"Go and risk the entirely worthless life". You had to choose, those planning to marry had to be very clear on whether they are choosing lions or married life. Why a woman's childlessness is always considered a tragedy, and why her actions are so often interpreted as compensation for a lack of children. It's not necessarily a tragedy. It's just that if you take one road, you don't take another. If childlessness closes some doors, it also opens others. And why aren't men's action interpreted along the same line?
Snowcapped Kilimanjaro, framed in clouds; in black, Mount Meru, bathing in the sunset; down below, the Momella lakes - breathtaking view. The refreshing thought that I am just a minuscule detail in the landscape.
12 days into Savanna is quite a substantial journey into yourself. At first you'r afraid; then at somepoint you relax; and finally you inevitably come face-to-face with your own deepest essence.
Karen Writes, I think I could be myself without a leg, but it seems to me to be so extraordinarily difficult to be myself without money.----Is it worse to admit that one suffers thorough poverty than that one suffers through loneliness or fear?
There were two sides to her personality, a strong one and not so very strong one. She had mood swings, she wanted to hide her weaknesses in every way she could. But wouldn't we all? This Karen has survived her losses and surveys her life calmly, as if from the air - like Denys from his airplane, from enough of a distance that even suffering looks beautiful. Her exemplary self, was the ideal towards which she strove her whole life, without ever reaching it.
Night Women's Advise 1:
- Visit Africa. You experience all your feelings more powerfully in Africa, for good and bad. Everything is extreme: stunning nature, abject poverty and the insanity of the whites.
- There is nothing to be afraid of.
- Be Brave,
- Play the cards you're dealt.
- Even if you're sick, you can still live full-tilt.
- If you lose everything, start writing.
Part II: Explorers:
After every travel, our head throb with pain, and we are torn up, constantly feel like crying, lie in bed for days on end, wiped out. Everything rubs the wrong way - nights, newspaper headlines, shopping. We no longer know how to live here. Our voyage might be fading like a dream. We wonder, how can something we lived so passionately disappear so quickly?
I thought this was the problem only with me. I have seen this pattern time and again. Tired when home, Energetic and living, when out on a travel. Thanks to Mia for confirming that it is the same with her and her explorer night women too. They are a group pf perfectly ordinary middle-aged women who, having seen their familial duties through to their natural conclusion, decided to defy propriety and follow their dreams by traveling around the world alone, decked out in corsets and long dresses. Their attire was an issue.
Cause most important right for women was Respectability and its key component, concern for one's reputation and the second shouldering ones responsibility - which was plenty.
Isabella Bird - Mia's doppelganger, a fortyish, depressed spinster, born in 1831 in UK, suffered from a spinal complaints, headaches, and insomnia from childhood. Doctors finally suggested open air and a sea voyage and so started her adventures. And her progression to being a world traveller and 10 or so travel books. Her first voyage was to the United States. Her first book, The Englishwoman in America was based on her letters to her family. Her next trip was to Australia, from there to Hawaii and further to the Rocky Mountains in Colorado where she had some adventures with a one-eyed outlaw. Back at home in UK, her illness returned, and the antidote was another round of travel, the cycle kept repeating. In the process, she travels to Japan, China, Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaya, India, Persia, Kurdistan, Turkey, Persia Armenia. She was the first woman to be awarded Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. Two years later, she became the first woman allowed to join the Royal Geographical Society. She died in 1904.
"I feel energy for anything except conventionality and civilization. Her umbilical cord was her sister Hennie. She voted civilization a nuisance, society a humbug and all conventionality a crime. She explored the American West and briefly fell in love with a mountain man named Jim Nugent. Though later she married John Bishop. Though initially she disliked Japan, she later said Koyoto is the best arranged and best managed city in Japan. Apparently she had set up two hospitals in India.
Become hire of may blessed memories making life useful and interesting.
Night women's Advice 2: If you suffer from depression, frustration, or headache, set off on a journey.
- Travel alone, preferably in the roughest conditions possible.
- Travel even if you're sick. Travel especially if you're depressed, frustrated or tired of your life.
- You can take your toughest trips in your sixties, irrespective of your situation
- Don't be afraid. Be tough. Be industrious. Write ten books.
- Learn to take photographs and use scientific instruments if you need to.
- Write about whatever you have to - never mind what: botany say or ethnography - even if you have no training in it
- Be Buoyant as hell.
Ida Pfeiffer, the Austrian explorerborn in 1797 brought up like a boy by her father, she was forced into being a conventional girl after her father’s death. She was married off to a doctor 24 years her senior and had two sons by him. She secretly studied terrestrial globe. She decides to leave her husband after the kids grew up. Her first travel was at the age of 44 in 1840s, left Vienna, when Isabella was only 10 years old. First to Istanbul. She continued from there to Jerusalem, stopped at various places in between and then to Cairo, Rome and so on. An anonymous account of her travel that was published was an instant success and financed her next journey. She has travelled around the world twice, India being on her itinerary too. Apparently, she travelled in a bullock cart from Delhi to Bombay and ended up writing wildly popular travel books translated into seven languages.
Setting off was easier the second time, as she had "already proved that a determined woman can get along in the world just as well as a man, and that there are good people everywhere." - and she did indeed need to rely on the help of those good people .
Night women's Advice 3: You don't need a reason to travel. Travel on a shoestring budget. Bum lodgings, if you can.
- Avoid African interior, in extremity, if you can't make 'em laugh, run.
- If you want to travel, go. You don't need a reason
- It doesn't matter if you're broke.
- Bum everything: trips, lodging, meals.
- Skimp. (Money. You can skimp on other things as well, if you like.)
- Write books, collect rocks, sleep under a table, if need be - do whatever you must in order to be able to do what you want.
- If you find yourself in a place where the food customs differ from your own - say eating unusual animals, or other humans - don't panic. Eat whatever's offered.
- Don't give a damn what other people think.
- Be buoyant as hell.
Mary Kingsley, the British woman (1862 - 1900) having had a grim and lonely childhood, she first took care of her parents until they died, and in an age where the only women to travel to Africa were the wives - of missionaries, government officials and explorers - Mary decides to travel alone. She then goes on to live with the locals and travels alone to dangerous areas, among cannibals. She has published two books based on her experiences there, both of them were best sellers, she pokes fun at herself in both of them. One was called 'West African Studies'.
Back home, Mary fell quickly into her old routines as her brother's housekeeper and soon it began to seem as if the whole trip had been just a wonderful hallucination.
Night Women's Advice 4: If you're all alone and no one needs you, you might as well go to West Africa to die and laugh all the way.
- Don't blame your childhood or your mother. Just go.
- While travelling in Africa laugh all the time.
- Having no spouse or kids is not a threat but an opportunity. It's no inconvenience to anyone if you die.
- Even if you only have eight years of game time, you can still experience more than many people do in a full lifetime.
- If you have a passion, study it. You don't need formal educaiton.
- Always wear a long black skirt.
- Be Buoyant as hell.
Alexandra David-Neel, born Louise Eugenie Alexandrine Marie David (24 October 1868 – 8 September 1969) a Belgian-French explorer, spiritualist, Buddhist, anarchist, opera singer, and writer, she was the first white woman to have travelled to Lhasa disguised as beggar and completed the 'promenade'. Her first comment was Lhasa is stupid place. She wrote over 30 books about Eastern religion, philosophy, and her travels, including Magic and Mystery in Tibet which was published in 1929. She began as a feminist and anarchist, and apparently, Iin 1891, she visited India for the first time, and met her spiritual preceptor, Swami Bhaskarananda Saraswati of Varanasi
She was an adept of many years study in Tibetan Buddhism, spent time as a disciple to powerful lamas, mastered many of the more esoteric practices of Buddhism, and managed to document many everyday rituals of the various tribes in Tibet whose cultures are rapidly disappearing.
Some claim that David-Neel never made it to Tibet and all of her later writings chronicling her 14 years in the Orient were entirely fictitious.
On 4 August 1904, at age 36, she married Philippe Neel de Saint-Sauveur. Their life together was sometimes turbulent but characterized by mutual respect. It was interrupted by her departure, alone, for her third trip to India in 1911(the second one was carried out for a singing tour) on 9 August 1911. She did not want children, aware that motherhood was incompatible with her need of independence and her inclination to education. She promised to return to Philippe in nineteen months, but it was fourteen years later, in May 1925, when they met again, separating after some days. David-Neel had come back with her exploration partner, the young Lama Aphur Yongden, whom she would make her adopted son in 1929. Legend has it that her husband was also her patron, while some say she had, at her marriage, her own personal fortune. Her marriage started to unravel, as her travels kept her apart from her husband.
During the 'promenade' through tough situation, after fasting for three days, ended up boiling and eating leather intended for soles of shoes.
Night Women's Advice 5: Follow the path that opens before you, don't use your return ticket.
- In an emergency eat your shoes.
- If you want to do something, do it.
- Seize the day. Follow your passion, even if it means stretching a one-year project into fourteen. Only the results matter-and the trip.
- If you want to be enlightened, move into a cave.
- Proceed intuitively. Get by on little. Disguise yourself if need be.
- If at times things are a little tough or cold, or you're a little hungry, you'll survive.
- Don't fret: go. "As a rule things appear much more difficult and terrifying in the course of such discussions than when the moment of action has arrived." (Alexandra on the customs bridge leading to Lhasa.)
Nellie Bly: Elizabeth Jane Cochran from America went around the world in 72 days emulating Jules Vernes fictional character Phileas Fogg who travelled around the world in 80 days. Her journalistic career began in 1885 at the age of 21 by writing an anonymous response to a column in the Pittsburg Dispatch titled ‘What Girls Are Good For.’ The editor was so impressed that he asked the author to identify herself and offered her a job. Her writings were considered controversial for those times - not all women would marry, what was needed was better jobs for women, how divorce affected women, the need for better divorce laws etc. She was shunted out to write about fashion, society, gardening, and the like. She moves on to the offices of Joseph Pulitzer from where she did an undercover story on the brutality and neglect at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in New York, which was later published as the book ‘Ten Days in a Mad-House.’ In her later life she became an industrialist and even an inventor in her own right. She was a phenomenal packer.
To date, phenomenal journalist are nick named Nellie Bly. In 1895, Bly married millionaire manufacturer Robert Seaman. Bly was 31 and Seaman was 73 when they married. Due to her husband's failing health, she left journalism and succeeded her husband as head of the Iron Clad Manufacturing Co.
She ran her company as a model of social welfare, replete with health benefits and recreational facilities. But Bly was hopeless at understanding the financial aspects of her business and ultimately lost everything. Unscrupulous employees bilked the firm of hundreds of thousands of dollars, troubles compounded by protracted and costly bankruptcy litigation.[26]
Back in reporting, she covered the Woman Suffrage Procession of 1913 for the New York Evening Journal.
Bly wrote stories on Europe's Eastern Front during World War I.[39] Bly was the first woman and one of the first foreigners to visit the war zone between Serbia and Austria. She was arrested when she was mistaken for a British spy.
On January 27, 1922, Bly died of pneumonia at St. Mark's Hospital, New York City, aged 57.
Night Women's Advice 6: Invest in coming up with good ideas, Travel with the single-handbag gambit.
"If you want to do it, you can do it. The question is, do you want to do it?' - Nellie in 1889, having received the assignment to travel around the world with a day's notice.
Part 3: Artists: Italian female painters
The book covers three of them, who had barely any presence on the walls of the multitude of museums across Europe, yet had made their mark in a predominantly male world of 15th and 16th centuries. Florence, Uffizi Gallery and Pink floyd form an ecstatic holy trinity to Mia. Women then had three options, get married, hie them to nunnery or become prostitutes.
Mia found them from 'Invisible Women: Forgotten Artists of Florence' a 2009 book in English and Italian by Jane Fortune through the Advancing Women Artists Foundation (AWA) and published by The Florentine Press
Before this she was thinking of 17th Century, the Vennetian Arcangela Tarabotti spend time in nunnery but wrote - 'Convent Hell' and 'Paternal Tyranny' which were not published during her liftime. She zealously defended the female sex.
Sofonisba Anguissola (ca 1532 -1625) was daughter of a noble family, born and raised in the city of Cremona in northern Italy. She is the first free woman artist and exemplar for all women artists. Wound up working in the Spanish court. Painted an extraordinary number of self-portraits and signed them "Sophonisba Anguissola, a virgin from Cremona, painted this herself with the aid of a mirror)". Her most famous paining is "The Chess Game", featuring three of her sisters - Minerva, Europa and Lucia.
Night Women's Advice 7: You do whatever you like. I paint.
- If you know what you want to do, do it.
- If no one you know has ever done it before, so much the better.
- Mark everything you do in big proud letter: I d i d t h i s.
- Advertise your skills. Distribute your calling cards.
- In the pictures, look straight at the camera. Be sincere, calm, self-confident and wonderful
Lavinia Fontana Artists daughter, later wife, mother, and career woman. Supported her large family by paining. Branded herself the favorite artist of noblewomen and earned like a man. Born on 24 August 1552 she was a Bolognese Mannerist painter active in Bologna and Rome. She is best known for her successful portraiture, but also worked in the genres of mythology and religious painting. She was trained by her father Prospero Fontana who was a teacher at the School of Bologna. She is regarded as the first female career artist in Western Europe as she relied on commissions for her income. Her family relied on her career as a painter, and her husband served as her agent and raised their 11 children. She was perhaps the first female artist to paint female nudes, but this is a topic of controversy among art historians. Her earliest known work, Child of the Monkey, was painted in 1575 at the age of 23. Though this work is now lost, another early painting, Christ with the Symbols of the Passion, painted in 1576, is now in the El Paso Museum of Art. Fontana married Gian Paolo Zappi in June 1577. The couple moved into Prospero's house in Bologna and Lavinia painted professionally, adding Zappi to her signature.She gave birth to 11 children, though only 3 outlived her: Flaminio, Orazio, and Prospero. In the midst of the hundreds of paintings, the portraits, the altarpieces, the astronomical fees, the success, and the praise, the baptismal record kept by Lavinia's husband was the list of birth of her 11 children and their names. She was constantly pregnant as she was building her remarkable career. She died on 11 August 1614. She was like so many women today: a passionate, supernaturally hardworking and capable career woman who could do it all - work, kid, husband and her own aging parents - just with a few more kids, is all (I would add, without internet). He painting were amazing, No one paints so well, just because her father or husband made her do it. Not like this.
She fulfiled the 21st century self help manual's advice:
"To get what you want, you must act as if you've already gotten it. If you want to be a successful, wealthy career woman, you must dress as if you already were"....., to be rich, carry around check of million-dollar in your wallet. To be a writer-explorer, write on your calling card Literary Exploring and Human Experiments.
Night Women's Advice 8: Do you want to combine family and career? No problem. You can have everything.
- If you want a glorious career, make it.
- If you plan to give birth to elecen kids while doing so, find yourself a man who is up to it.
- Follow your night women. Brand yourself. Paint yourself, the way you would like to be.
- Bond with women but earn like a man
- Be industrious as hell
- Work out of passion
- If you suffer horrific losses, keep going.
Artemisia Gentileschi. Reminded me of Susan Vreeland’s ‘The Passion Of Artemisia’. Artemisia at the age of 18-years was thrust into the local spotlight after she is raped by Agostino Tassi, a painter of some repute. Although Artemisia does not wish to file charges against Tassi, her father Orazio insists—although it is suggested that Orazio, also a painter, is less angry about the rape than he is about a missing painting that he suspects Tassi of stealing. Having already suffered a horrific ordeal, Artemisia steels herself for yet another: the rape trial itself. Because of how Italian society at the time treats rape victims, Artemisia feels as if she is as much on trial as Tassi is.
How absurd it is that nothing has changed in four centuries. Money matters, deadlines, working conditions, finding clients, marketing yourself, constant worries about workload, maintaining your ability to work, and how your work is received: all the same today as back then. You'll find the spirit of Caesar in this soul of a woman. - Artemisa
Night Women's Advice 9: Deal with your truma. Slay your Holofenes. it's all grist for the mill.
- If you know what you want to do, do it.
- If you've been humiliated or wronged, if you've suffered, don't get trapped in those experiences. Forge onward. Go to Florence. Or Rome. Or Venice. Or Naples.
- Transform your wounds into your strengths. Paint them on a big fucking canvas for all to see.
- If there's something you don't know how to do, like reading and writing, learn.
- Imbibe the spirit of Caesar and hold it close.
- Demand the same pay that men are getting
- Don't sell yourself cheap.
- Learn to negotiate.
- Don't grovel.
The book concludes with the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama
Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese artist who is sometimes called ‘the princess of polka dots'. Although she makes lots of different types of art – paintings, sculptures, performances and installations – they have one thing in common, DOTS!
Eventually Yayoi Kusama persuaded her parents to let her go to art school and study painting.
In the late 1950s she moved to New York as lots of the most exciting art seemed to be happening there. It must have been a bit frightening arriving in a big city with such a different culture from what she knew. But she was determined to conquer New York.
As well as being an art pioneer, Yayoi Kusama put her creativity into other things including music, design, writing and fashion.
Yayoi Kusama's installation and sculptural works are inspired and informed by her memories of childhood abuse, repression, and trauma, and her ongoing experiences with mental disorder and sexual anxiety.
Night Women's Advice 10: Dive into what you're afraid of. Work like crazy.
- Play the cards you're dealt. Illnesses and weaknesses are grist for the mill.
- Surround yourself with what you fear. Laugh at it.
- Ask the night women for advice. They'll reply, never fear.
- Arrange your living conditions so that they're livable for you - even if that means a psychiatrc hospital
- Keep working.
- Still.
- Live in a hospital
- Live with a relative who cooks for you
- Live in a Tibetan monastery
- Move into a German castle with full room and board.
----
Writing first book is easy. Second; people keep asking - how it is coming along.
The whole point of travelling is here: seeing and writing down what you've seen. For in some strange way the world keeps getting more marvelous and more meaningful as you write about it. Only as you write do you being to understand.
'Msabu, do you believe yourself that you can write a book?' Kamante's words echo in my head. But what you write is some here and some there. When the people forget to close the door it blows about, even down on the floor and you are angry. It will not be a good book. (Out of Africa)
Night Women's advice: Write every evening.
I know, I know. Force Yourself.
I am a mountain,
I'm a pebble in the current,
serene as a stone,
ommmm,
I'm a gust of wind.
Compassion for myself and others
try to see the truth about yourself, even if it's unpleasant
use your energy wisely
don't cling to things either physical or mental
don't attach yourself to your identity, or imagine that it is unchanging, for it changes all the time.
Everybody in this world seems to want to do something other than what they're doing right now, and how for various reasons they can't do what they'd like to do. .....Nobelwomen in the Renaissance would undoubtedly have preferred to do something other than give birth. ....Human cells are renewed so thoroughly that by our forties there is little left in any of us of what we were as children. .....Cell renewal can be used to explain practically everything. It makes everything possible: a new life, a new attitude, literal rebirth.
A renaissance.
It seems as if behind almost every successful night woman there is a father who in one way or another encouraged his daughter to chart an extraordinary path. A heroic father who could be admired above all else(Karen); a strict father who educated his daughter like a son(Ida), an absent father whose approval was sought and whose life's work was continued (Mary).
And, somewhere in the background, the shadowy mothers: conventional, slaving in the kitchen, bedridden, ill, dead.
Night women's advice: Whatever you do, find yourself a magic mountain. (Irresistibly pushing each person's work forward)
Come, Muses,
Leave your golden (house)
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