Desolate with Sunken Eyes

Posted on June 20, 2005 in Compassion Ettiquette

I keep a copy of the Selected Poems of Carl Sandburg next to my bed. Tonight I picked it up and found two poems that particularly moved me, both being on the subject of women being depicted as shrewish by their men. One of these was the famous Xantippe who abused Socrates or so his students insist. Once she lifted her dress and peed on Socrates’ head. The philosopher is said to have endured it quietly. Sandburg says

We know only what they say.
          
We have not heard from Xantippe herself.

It reminds me of the frustration that I used to feel — as single young man — when a guy would go to great lengths to “own” a woman I felt was particularly nice and deserving of compassion. Then he would talk her down or tell us the grimy details of their sex life — how she moaned, how she smelled. These men were the lying husbands of the future, the ones who used a woman as an accessory and a producer of babies.

I meet older versions of these women all the time. They live alone except for the children, struggling to make a living. Did they know how their men spoke of them in the early days?

Many times I wanted to tell the women that the guy was trashing them. I didn’t. I feared that they would have disbelieved me. I think now “Why not? We’re not friends anyways. I would have lost nothing that I didn’t lose.” And I see them in these other women, desolate and with sunken eyes.