clipped from www.questia.com

by Vicki Graham

"We belong to the moon," says Mary Oliver, and "the most/thoughtful among us dreams/of hurrying down...into the body of another" (49-50). We dream, we long, and some of us believe that we can step outside of ourselves and enter the body of another. But Western culture discourages these yearnings and demands individualism and the formation of strong ego boundaries and stable identities. Unlike the traveller of Leslie Marmon Silko's "Story from Bear Country," we do not hear the bear's call; we do not see our "footprints/in the sand" become bear prints, nor do we see fur cover our bodies, "dark shaggy and thick" (204-05). Yet we are conscious, too, of our potential not just to cross the boundaries between ourselves and others, but to be divided within ourselves. We encounter a variety of theories--feminist, psychoanalytic, cultural--that tell us identity is multiple and the boundaries of the self are unstable.