Here below is, to me, the core statement of what Barbara was hoping to help us recover in “GCM” and her poetry, the very center of Human Being which was both our original inheritance and is, hopefully, our evolutionary future—if we can remember our full demonstrable past, and so move beyond the adolescent wishes, limiting mirages, and biophobic delusions imposed by patriarchal power: what Frederick Turner in Beyond Geography called a “suicide note,” namely that prison of blind, dismal ontological assumptions, reductive mechanistic sciences and absurdly-linear political screed called His-Story. Few artists said it as succinctly as Barbara did, defining the essential, liberating (and so, outlawed) experience of ek-stasis or “standing beyond oneself,” beyond the limits of a regressive, isolating, disempowering fiction called the separate ego:
What is ecstasy? It is our original state of being. It is the conscious expansion of the universe into a multitude of interconnected dimensions and forms. It is Her dance of being, from which all of us were born. Ecstasy is passion, self-expressed through form. In the case of Earth, human beings and all other creatures and biological and geological activities are the forms, cosmic energy is the passion….
In and with the whole world is where we are supposed to feel it. In and with and as the whole world is where our human ecstasy is born. It is the celebration of the recognition that our spirit and flesh are One.
Who else, meanwhile, so efficiently summed up how actual human progress—for example, in The West’s first, longest, most relatively peaceful, creative and egalitarian period, in Minoan Crete—had become a nightmare called “progress” which, to this day, never defines the goal against which it might be measured, even as its ontology carries us blindly ever-deeper into outright fascism and ecological suicide?
Because The West was arrogant enough, or insane enough, to believe its anal eye was truly the eye of God, its will to total dominance truly “God’s will”—its perpetual machinery of observation and control in fact “the machinery of God”—it made “progress.” Western leaders, the political, religious and economic elite, officially merged their profits with God’s profits; and the Western peoples were conditioned, consistently and grindingly from the 13th-century beginnings of the Christian Inquisition, to accept submission to this profitable machine as their “moral lot.”
The patriarchal denial of the Mother becomes the political denial of the people; which becomes the total mechanization, via capitalization, of the human body. And as the body moves, so does God move: the Biblical capitalist West has created God as a prison-keeper, as a factory-boss, rather than as a living cosmos. God as an assembly-line rather than a dance….
As you can see from readers’ comments at Amazon.com, the reception of GCM ranged from raves of gratitude to a minority of critics who tried to dismiss it on familiar “utopian,” “angry” and “female-biased” grounds. GCM began to sell and have an impact, such that the U-Arizona Library purchased a copy. This in part led Barbara to apply for various jobs there, as lecturer, assistant to its press or library, or as cleaning lady. But her hopes vanished when she was caught simply trying to wash herself in a library rest-room with the luxuries of hot water and soap. And this (December 1st, 1988) was when Barbara somehow managed reply to a first letter of mine:
…In the meantime, I had no income, no job, nada….I went from subsistence poverty to absolute zip…Was told by the managing editor of the U of A press that “Writers don’t make good editors.” Arizona is a very yahoo state, including the population of academics. Whatever. I’ve been living on the street, sleeping in abandoned houses in the barrios, hanging out over cups of 59-cent endlessly refillable coffee at Burger Kings and Carl Jr.’s, trying to avoid the tracer beams of Tucson’s police helicopter at night. Altogether, not exactly a book-signing party. But great experience of the wild west, public toilets, street trash, the crazies of the homeless night….So, I’ll read your work with what brains I have left….
So had “our old mama” entered “the junkyard,” her eyes and heart torn open wider than ever to the needlessly suffering and constantly terrorized people in the belly of the American Dream. My own turn had come in the spring of 1980 when, becoming a writer in New York City after a youth of nothing but under-appreciated blessings, I fell in love with a 20-year-old Jewish woman named Eve Helene Wilkowitz. Six weeks of new life ended when, in March, Eve was abducted during her late-night trip home to Long Island, held alive for three days, and then brutally murdered and her body dumped in the backyard of a house near her own. The case was never solved.
Completely shattered, I vowed to understand and manifest why, as one detective told me, a murder like this was “an everyday event,” and I began to shake my education by the heels at the Public Library. That was where and when I found, like Barbara, that the vast majority of history—most centrally to me, the first, longest, most peaceful and progressive period of The West, in Minoan Crete—had been as buried by history books as it was by its “heroic” Mycenaean Greek conquerors. In a few years after multiple stays in Crete I had a 2,000-page manuscript of the future novel Ariadne’s Brother to show American publishers, and I quote one response as wholly typical: “We don’t even want to look at it, because of what it’s about.” I’d made the mistake of telling them that the actual first major life-loving phase of Western Civ, still going strong when it fell through natural disaster and invasion, had never been told from its own Minoan-Cretan point of view: all we had was a myth from their enemies describing doomed decadence, a nymphomaniacal queen with a naïve treasonous daughter, and a man-eating Minotaur, all of whom got what they deserved at the hands of a hero brought up on the religion of war.
Having found The Great Cosmic Mother, and assuming from annual mountains of published shit that connections were what it’s about, I sent a pile of pages to Barbara—and to this day, her response and further letters from the midst of her own dire conditions were/are the most detailed, articulate and encouraging I ever received. Thus closed her first letter:
I’ve put off to the end your experience, the “everyday” destruction of a young woman named Eve. Yes. That’s all I can say: Yes. Our world is built on it, like a vampire is built on blood….One of my biggest revelations was really focusing on the timing of historical events; realizing that The Inquisition, the “witch”-burning, the pornographic details of the dungeons and the tortures of daily life which we sloppily relegate to “the dark ages” truly occurred, in their maximum ferocity and misogynistic legality, during THE RENAISSANCE, that glorious time of Shakespeare and Rubens and the glorification of Greek nakedness and female flesh and the gorgeous reawakening colors of life.
That’s when most women were burning at the stake. That’s when the stench of their flesh was “a daily event,” the quotidian incense. That’s when horror was so habitual, we are still numb: we, the inheritors of those who survived, we still don’t know what happened to us. That’s how all-pervasive it was. It’s Gestalt Theory: the thing we notice least is the thing that is everywhere, we no longer question it, the daily background. It takes a personal tragedy to hook into that background, like a terrible crochet needle, and pull it forward: we see the threads of life are all bloody. They are made of the torn tendons and screams of tortured beings. It’s explained as “human nature,” and that is what we must question now….
So began our friendship, with Barbara sharing copies of her published and latest poems, constant encouragements, reading and publisher suggestions, manuscript-feedback/ideas, and notes on her ongoing “tremendous education” on the street at age 51, even as GCM went into its 4th edition. Besides a few cursive letters, most she sent in a rickety typescript seen in the samples here: Meridel LeSueur had left her “this Brother typewriter, a pretty blue color, [which worked] after I cleaned out her cookie crumbs and plum pits and dried flower petals and butterfly wings and our mutual gray hairs and house dust.” “Sorry it has no good ribbon: I wind it by hand.” This next letter Barbara dated January 8th, 1989:
I don’t regret it [her fortunes “turning toward the streets”]—if I just survive it, to tell the tale….[H&R] very much wanted me to write a second book, and all I could say was Yeah, when I get my desk back, plus a room to work in….I don’t have great job skills…and in the competition with people younger and more experienced and all the rest, I end up getting motel maid jobs….It’s a very low-wage, shit-job state to begin with. I tried sales clerk in second-hand dress shops, library clerk, proofreading, several motels—I just didn’t get hired. Also, living on the street means no baths, no hair in place…slept outside all summer in the backyard of a barrio shooting gallery with cops coming through once a week rousting us at 3 a.m. looking for somebody else. Another planet, Jack: employers can smell you coming, and they’d rather have a certified American. Porque no?….Best regards [for now] to you, Jack—Your vision, your voyage to reality, our common dream….
That “voyage” referred to my leaving New York freelance for a full year in Crete to finish Ariadne’s Brother and find a publisher in Europe, if I could, blessed by the astonishing support of my then-fiance Susanna’s brilliant and ebullient father, Thomas Dant, a would-be writer too. Barbara wrote at length that making it first abroad had been the story of most American authors worth a damn—and lo, I found a publisher in Athens, but learned just in time that the contract’s Greek fine print divested me of any rights in my own work: business as usual. And with that same January 8th letter Barbara sent a swatch of new poems, “the long one” focused fearlessly on the gang-rape murder of yet another young woman. We were bonding across the transatlantic treasons of “our civilization”:
The long one called “A Song A Song for Tralala” you will find meaningful. It’s been read over the radio in Berkeley, at least. Was bought by Ms Magazine in 1976, they kept it two years without printing it, two or three editors disliked it, too violent they said, i.e., might offend advertisers or readers. I asked for the first rights back and a friend printed it, but Ms had it through 1976-78, squatting on it as Fundamentalism rose and the controversies about the Rolling Stones’ Black and Blue [album] billboards and other abusive ads was beginning, and the Women Against Violence Against Women groups began counter-fighting. A timely poem, in other words, kept deliberately out of print by Ms Magazine while Gloria Steinem was editor. Whatever. I kept the $150 they paid for it!
Thus, as I came back to America with my book unfinished and without a contract, Barbara returned to Albuquerque (1989) still split off from her children. “They are smart, talented and disciplined kids,” she wrote (February 9th): “I’m very fortunate that they are doing well [sharing a house in Albuquerque] while I crap out [on the streets].” So it went on for both of us through the next two years, struggling hard to keep each other positive and creative: I went back to Crete and lived in a backyard garage to finish the book (for which a new contract came only years later), while Barbara moved from tread-water job to job and “wrangled” with Harper Collins (now owned by Rupert Murdoch) over a new edition Intro to GCM “that they would accept” (January 2nd, 1991). “Truly, editors have a hard job I guess but they drive me crazy.”
No, I’m not OK—but will survive. On November 15th I was burglarized….They left behind street-marketable items, a stereo with five speakers, etc., and took all my typewriters (two broken manuals, one that worked) and a green plastic file box containing my life as a writer: GCM contract, royalty statements, all reviews and letters from Alice Walker, Barbara Walker pertaining to book—all reviews of my poetry, printed and readings, all final manuscripts of my poetry etc. Maybe it was a literate junkie, I live in a high crime area. But who needs a plastic box full of book documents and poetry mss.? Maybe it was a hit by the Fundamentalist crazies very active here….Maybe it’s my time to be erased. If I have anything to say in the future, it will have to be written in Blood and Spit….Be of hope for 1991, a good year for people who walk upside-down….
Our letters through these years had another focus, too, connected with our shared belief in working at the roots: namely, the foundations of our country as shaped by the first transatlantic age between Early Modern Europe and Native America. While Barbara introduced me to works from Frederick Turner’s Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness (1980) to Fredy Perlman’s Against His-Story, Against Leviathan! (1983, which she called “magnificent”), she merrily insisted that I develop early work on the Renaissance English planter Thomas Morton of Merrymount and his many-sided New English Canaan (1637)—whose loving portrait of Native New England, its paean to the continent’s natural endowments and scathing satires against the bumbling savagery of Pilgrims and Puritans had fascinated both of us since youth. This, Barbara thought—a new edition, a Morton biography, maybe even a film—would surely connect me with American audiences as Ariadne’s Brother (she rightly rued) likely could not. May 7th, 1991:
Timing is everything, said Shakespeare looking at his watch. Get hard with yourself, Jack. In the sense of considering that all us writers are in the same shit-filling boat now. I wrote a great 30-page story (“story”) about Mining in U.S. [It was called Here.] It had no characters, no dialogue, and the plot is just history—it is in the genre-family of Kafka’s Penal Colony and Swift’s Modest Proposal—and it’s excruciatingly funny, also thick and hypnotic in language, etc. Every time I send it out, many times in past 5 years, I waste my money it comes back you see. Either I totally rewrite it (and then destroy the story which is in how the language describes it), or I put it away, move on and hope my kids don’t throw it away with the trash when they come to dispose of my dead body. Study the territory we are all living/writing in now….There’s much possibility if you explode your own strictures. That’s what I must tell myself every day, for I am trying to learn how to write also. It ain’t easy. Get serious (-er!). Even more serious than you are, I mean. Get your valuable material across the river of ebullient words, which might echo the writing of Morton’s day, but you are also writing to now, and that too is an obligation….You must decide which convictions are truly worth your courage….
Next I knew after Reagan’s “down-sizing” had destroyed most New York freelancers’ livings, and working shit-jobs too back in Massachusetts, I was producing (via local cable studios) 1992’s Thomas Morton and the Maypole of Merrymount: Disorder in the American Wilderness, for which Barbara generously agreed to read from GCM as part of the historical surround. She took considerable trouble to have her musician-son record her on cassette, and that was the first time I heard Barbara’s gentle, richly-honeyed voice—which besides the GCM passages above (and more), brought the whole program together at the end. This was Barbara’s core challenge to her planetary family and fellow artists—to realize that hers was no utopian urge to return to human infancy (“we are too far gone for that”). It was rather an urging to realize that “going back” to retrieve our long-erased memory as a natural and cultural species was the crucial first step forward out of our increasing captivity:
The universe is undergoing ecstatic exponential expansion into 11 or more dimensions. Surely, 3-dimensional religions cannot keep us in touch with such a universe. If we do not want to die, then we must evolve. And that means, we must dance—expand exponentially with the dancing cosmos. We return to the cosmos only by becoming lovers of life, rather than life’s victims, voyeurs, and policemen….We must become beings who do not wish to control life, but only to listen to its music, and dance it. This is not easy to do, it might be impossible. But it is our only alternative to mass death, whether by war, or by total global mechanization.
The patriarchal God has only one commandment: Punish life for being what it is. The Goddess also has only one commandment: Love life, for it is what it is.
That June of 1991, Barbara’s editor at Harper arranged to fund a bus-trip for her to New York City, where she’d participate in an American Booksellers Convention event called Booksellers for Social Responsibility. There, invited authors were to read “and then introduce a homeless author from New York”: this from the flyer that Barbara sent, and she let lie the irony of one homeless writer, now age 55, introducing yet another.
I’m a barefoot Western poet, but here I go to New York City. No comment except I’M SCARED SHITLESS…and after 48 hours on the Greyhound that will probably be to my advantage as I step down into the streets of the alien planet Manhattan for the first time. Wish me LUCK, or whatever it will take to survive the experience!
So landed Barbara in Hell’s Kitchen at the West 46th Street apartment of the “excellent brilliant active women (twins)” Cathleen and Colleen McGuire, co-founders of EVE (Ecofeminist Vision Emerging). “They do study groups, GCM was their first book to explore, Mary Daly et al, put out a newsletter, contribute to Feminists for Animal Rights and other movements, and have done a pamphlet (enclosed).” In the next letter I have (December 27th), this was what Barbara shared:
I’ve been to NYC twice this year: the ABA Convention in June, and to participate in a Learning Alliance Panel on November 9th. Bus trip paid by them. Needless to say, yes, NYC a big experience. I have very generous friends there who spoiled me ROTTEN indeed, so many events and experiences they paid for (I assume NYC is exhilarating the more the less one has to pay the bill). We biked around Manhattan lower east and west sides: they beautifully happened to have three mountain bikes. I am a biker also, so day and night and past midnight I saw the best of Manhattan the best way, through the Village and Chinatown and Little Italy, Battery and Tribeca and up the Brooklyn Bridge—on a bike, in and out of the incredible traffic, over the tops of taxis etc. A GREAT TRIP, in all ways.
This was June. The November trip was briefer, and from Tulsa to NYC and back again there were continuous clouds rainy in NYC so we rode subways and a taxi or two. Of course I was given the best of seasons for the last trip, all the way through Missouri Penn NJ the autumn colors through mist, leaves still on some trees others bare and the ground covered with glorious color, not yet snow (the return trip through ice-storms in Illinois and Indiana: otherwise just rainy but bright and fun).
So I found I liked NYC, not overwhelmed by architecture as I dreaded but charmed and hyped by the crowds and varieties and info flow, I guess you’d say. Everything falling apart, I guess I can like the East when it’s in trouble. My people: my grandmother born in Newark grew up in Brooklyn, my grandfather born in Mt. Savage Maryland went on to settle in Pittsburgh and Uniontown where my mother was born, and although I don’t know any of them they are still there, the bus station phone book in Pittsburgh had two columns of Carneys, some of them must be my cousins and their children, so, though born and always identified with the Southwest, I was forced to feel that my heritage at least half of it is there, the Eastern sad Irish and other European wandering tribes.
My Dad’s people also from Ireland through Nova Scotia settled in Montana. I mean, I’ve always been a stranger in Spanish and Indian land, so in the East I felt more the stomping ground of my people, weird and ripped up as it might be. I love Pennsylvania, seeing Pittsburgh only at night it is a fantasy of lights reflected in the river waters: maybe not so pretty in the daylight, I don’t know. I’m sure Mass. and NY state are also very fine. So the strange thing is only that a lifelong Westerner finally age 55 “Faced East”—and I liked it. I don’t know how people can afford NYC and the East generally, but it certainly is condensed. I would think this adds to political consciousness and organizing possibilities, but maybe not. Perhaps what I feel most is the mental energies of the people. Cowboy land is very different, now I have something to contrast with it.
Here in the same letter, Barbara encouraged completion of the Morton film; and then, she spoke to my new default-plan, which was graduate school.
I do hope all the celebrations and historical dates now erupted in consciousness will begin a continuous teaching of the early history of New England, the [Salem witch] persecutions and Morton’s drama seem to be absolutely RIPE now for documentation and dramatization. So please keep this project going, very important, especially in relation to all the terminal environmental and economic and church-state issues leaking from the skulls of the facades of Uncle Sam….I think [graduate study] is one very serious mode of attempted survival of the mind in this time of empire break-up. Hard enough to maintain the body, food shelter and warmth: to keep the mind alive is an enormous challenge….Our culture and the world path now is so desperate, insulting to all pursuits but brutal survival of too many brutal addictions (most simple needs have been artificially swollen into addictions now we must deal with them as mass needs). You know as well as I that few care about the survival of the good books and best thought. It is called an elitist concern: I think we are the skull of evolution trying desperately to keep above the flood….
And closing that December’s two crammed pages came this passage, foreshadowed by her Ms Magazine experience:
As for “the Goddess” I totally broke with the spirituality women, and “movement” when it began that commercial/therapeutic process of personalizing “the Goddess”—the “Goddesses in every woman” kind of crap, Greco-Roman flashbacks for the suburbs, etc. Mary Tyler Moore in a toga, whatever. The Goddess is not supposed to be personalized into these PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES except as we study the process backwards to understand how we got so fragmented. My only goddess is THE EARTH, all her processes history back through the first bang and possible evolutionary futures.
The New Age and now Men’s Movement is too human too Jungian in its interpretations and the whole thing is self-indulgent and screwed up. This is my opinion….I fear and foresee this will be, or is now, the experience of too many. The goddess is not a parent except as we all are, and we all disappoint our children! Earth is the goddess, does she disappoint? When you’re wiped out by flood hurricane earthquake fire any of the living elements or forces, of course she bitterly betrays our consciousnesses. But, she has her larger planet to maintain, after all, with or without us, nowadays despite us. If we don’t like Earth’s processes, let us move elsewhere! Or sit in groups bitterly blaming her imperfections and refusal to be/give/create everything we want—you see what I mean?
When we Personalize the goddess, it quickly descends into OprahSoapOpera. When you remember always the only living god is Earth, then you get serious. The Jewish tribes who recorded themselves in The Bible began this process of blaming Earth for their political historical ideological downfalls and setbacks, and then personalized her rival, the better parent, Jehovah. So the soap opera began before the Greeks, or side by side. I don’t know, but it is silly to me. Earth is what we’ve got, and what do we expect? [Go on with mistaken expectations, and we] will be slapped with a Radiating Fish!….
I’ve had some things printed in Sulfur, #28 Spring 1991 and #29 Fall 1991. Most of all the new GCM is out at last in August 1991. And I have some stuff in Signal Fall 1991. Poems. I think I’m getting ready to leap from the creative cliffs, to write or to die. Onward!
Within a month (January 4th, 1992) came Barbara’s next, as I began to hang in fire for Brown University’s answer about their Ph.D. program—for which Barbara put no little time into a recommendation. Having written for two years beside Minoan ruins on the beach of Amnissos, Crete, there was no going back to New York’s unnatural canyons, and no more freelance work there anyway. I still had no publisher for the 15-year labor of Ariadne’s Brother, could interest neither Boston’s PBS nor any other mainstream network in showing the two hours of Thomas Morton: I was a 37-year-old omni-failure with no prospect but academe’s own growing exploitation of adjunct (permanent part-time) faculty. But here came Barbara’s pleasure with my application’s essay—a skewering of Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson—and she articulated more of her quarrel with colleagues left and right:
Zounds! Magnifico! When I was in NYC both visits, Paglia was all the rage, i.e., feminists were enraged with the book…and the whole neo-mold conservative establishment….I call her many things, among them Rip Van Paglia, who has been sleeping since the 1950s and just woke up spouting brainless enthusiasms for the gods of that day, O Freud, O Ayn Rand, O Philip Wylie, with an unabashed arrogance of bringing down tablets from the mountain, which is not in fact a mountain but a place in time 40 years ago. When yahoo America post-WWII was just beginning to attempt to sound “intellectual” with all its dumb capitalist-fundamentalist-infantile misreadings of European thought.
…Only in stupid America could such a dumbo pass for cutting-edge insight, only in post-Reagan America. The corrosion of the brain is complete. If Rush Limbaugh screwed Simone de Beauvoir and got her knocked up, the child would be Paglia….Catholic Bad Girls who grew up longing to jerk the Pope’s nose. Hey, look at me, I’m BAD, Daddy. Never leaving that fawning on the fascist context….
Between this and the Morton work you are moving right on the rim of the world. I went back to college when I was 26, and had a great advantage of much reading and experience way ahead of my classmates who had gone there from high school….I bet most of your peers will be much more conservative, less informed and all the rest.
The “victory” of the Paglias echoes the victory of the political Nazis of past decade: America’s will to become the Fourth Reich (nothing better to do when you’ve blown it on nukes dukes and beernuts). So trendy, it is hard to fight, and puts all of us on the other side Mother side within a defensive corral. You’ve shown how WILLFULLY the Paglia-type brain (Wm. F. Buckley Jr., Wm. Bennett, all the Good Books folks) manipulates and denies material. Yes, the addictive syndrome, which is pure America. She does this for revenge, to get attention previously denied her, to win approval from Big Daddy’s Printing Press Boot. She parades around in capes and boots with whips calling herself a Pagan Dyke. Sounds like the same press agent behind her as the one that works for Poppy Bush, Thomas Hill….Paglia is simply a spoiled little player with other people’s pain. You raise this serious issue and do it well, hoisting her on her own Nietzschean petard, Jack. So I want many people to read this….
Barbara filled the rest of this one with contacts to journal-editors with her gratitude and respect (Clayton Eshleman of Sulfur, Joan Silva of Signal and others). She was the great glowering thundercloud always over me, raining life-waters and brightening the sun. I’d rarely needed it more, but never did send the piece out, because that was also the month when I held my father’s hand through his final illness. (A decorated veteran and consummate family-man, he died in enchanted Joycean style on my birthday, and we waked him on his two days later, at Finnegan’s parlor in my native Stoneham.) After he and I watched the first roll of Morton in his hospital room and he smiled at its dedication to himself, I sent Barbara a copy. She could scarcely manage to buy a new typing-ribbon let alone a VCR, but she wrote back without having seen it yet (February 29th, 1992):
I know it’s good, Jack, because the SUBJECT is great, at the root of American history, our mistake and consequent dilemma, split from the beginning to ever-since….I spent December-January having the Big Flu, and then in 3 weeks grinding out a manic poemessay rap on the Men’s Movement for a collection planned by my publisher: they rejected it, too weird, too radical. So I did not make the promised $250….
You have seen how your parent becomes your child. My Dad died when I was 34, but my parents divorced when I was seven and he didn’t have much shaping influence on me, except that I inherit his looks, his stubbornness, and his Montana farm-boy nose for bullshit. He hated preachers priests politicians everything! Eighth-grade education. He also hated artists (all faggots), intellectuals (all communists), and what else….My Dad was very much like Archie Bunker, pig-headed! But from the distance of years, I love him for being just what he was. I took off from there in more respects than I could realize while he was alive….
I too have followed the “inner voices” the invisible path through the requirements and the obvious into my own weird that no one needs but it was my Destiny. FOLLOWED in faith and great danger sometimes, gullible and total. Ended in a dank alley up against a mute wall between a drunk oblivious Romeo and trash cans stinking overfilling with my own garbage—Whaaaa? Well Excusez-moi, sez the Goddess, you think coordinating all this destiny shit is easy? She wears a bumper-sticker on her cosmic ass that spells out B-I-T-C-H, you know that.
Bumper-cars, that’s what we are. We attract each other only to bump each other and ourselves away. But the mind that transcends Dualism (heh heh heh) learns as much from NO as from YES. Que no?….Beyond sentiment, what happens: that is the Real Text, which you weave from yourselves from the interaction, and that is what you need to read: the actual text of what happens. Which frees us from conditioned sentiments, don’t it.
We ARE important to “this great beast the Earth.” Read Rilke, some of The Duino Elegies. We are her poetic technologies, her extensions. Through us she makes music poems images from her dreams. I never doubt that. Through us she knows herself as in a mirror. What she sees right now is pretty ugly. That’s the problem. We’ve really hurt Earth’s feelings. She can get Sad. That turns to Mad. Emerging from patriarchally-imposed Depression will come a Rage.
That’s why we must “get serious.” Earth’s anger is not indifferent, She feels BETRAYED. Misunderstood. Misnamed and wrongly defined. I.e., her anger will be HEAVY….The point is, yes Earth needs us at this point! We’re making her sick, to get healthy she’ll have to wipe us out. She doesn’t want to, so the only option is for us to change. And the poets are the active electromagnetic fields trying to make the change. I believe this. I also believe the situation is desperate. So please believe your life and work are NEEDED, our Great Beast is dying….
Through Barbara’s next three letters (April 27th, July 13th and August 9th, 1992), I was reviving thanks to last-minute acceptance at Brown to begin work there in the fall. Barbara caught up with her children dispersed from California to Georgia, kept on writing and publishing in journals from Trivia to Talking Leaves, and managed to move herself to “a cozy cottage,” meaning a “sweatbox prefab one-room trailer eight miles east of Silver City, New Mexico, with centipedes crawling around over the shag beige rug—ahh, the Modern West!”
She’d made it there through three weeks of “hassle and dead time,” “squirming around on other people’s couches in Gila, while pissed-off redneck boyfriends yelled at my presence.” “Well, lots of Irish here all redneck reactionary silly drunk and riding their trucks like wild horses.” Silver City she found “a neat town, up and down hills [with] many of the old buildings intact from boom Victorian days…and I found to my great surprise new GCM in biggest local bookstore and also public library.” She was soon to move to “a rented duplex apartment downtown” and gave what she expected to be a “permanent address” at 409 North Cooper.
6,000 feet here: current abode is beyond city lights, so the stars at night are intensely thick to view. Jackrabbits horses yucca sage-thistle the Southwest high desert and pinon juniper, hills similar to Bisbee AZ: very fine. But I must bike along 6 miles of awful busy highway between here and town, continuous fast mean traffic trucks big rigs between Silver and Santa Rita Open Pit/Chino Copper Mine—not a fun ride. Lots of dead animals. But, here I am!
That summer of 1992 in New York I met the dynamic McGuire sisters via Barbara, and they showed me a tiny photo of her, the first I’d ever seen, with a great gray mantle of tangled locks and a sly Irish smile beneath twinkling blue eyes. “My smile,” she replied, “is maybe not sly or sweet, just can’t show teeth, which are rotten or not there. But yes, I do look wise now, at last. I love the OWLISH sensation I feel here inside my skull, my eye sockets. Younger, I was CUTE: worked 55 years to NOT BE CUTE. Enjoy Brown!”
Barbara also, “having nothing much else to do,” “doodled this cartoon” below, sent with her cursive letter of July. “I imagined a darker less cute more expressionist drawing, but just don’t have the art talent.” “At much of modern culture I am truly speechless, or feel no desire to add to the Neo-Noise, so I wish I could do cartoons, video, other ways than words.” Her caption was a paraphrase from Paglia: If women were running the world, we’d still be living in grass huts. I hear Barbara laughing a reply through this image from her own street-life—“Yeah, if only!”
(To be continued)
Meet Mago Contributor, Jack Dempsey.
(Originally published in http://ancientlights.org/barbaramor/)