More about Barbara’s evolving style near the end of this collection. Here below comes her next letter (June 4th, 1993)—including reference to her then-latest work in Trivia (Issue #20 1992, Part 1 of “the mirrors of her ice/eyes: After Reading Vagabonding: Feminist Thinking Cut Loose, by Christina Thurmer-Rohr”: Part 2 in Trivia Issue #21, 1993, and Part 3 in #22/Part 2, 1995). If you read Vagabonding yourself—first published in Germany in 1987 and likely then reaching Barbara via Monica Sjoo—you find a blistering critique of both the males who “guide” ecological destruction and nuclear weapons races, and of feminism’s “various New Age and ‘transformational’ theorists, whose embrace of ‘feminine’ values appears as yet another condescending, [self-enslaving] and exclusionary tactic” (quote from Kirkus Reviews). All of which, given Barbara’s 3-part and 3-year engagement with the work, has clear echoes in her letters.
Barbara kept a conscientious eye on me through my years of privilege at Brown, and notes at the letter’s end below my clerking for Brown’s Copper Beech Press. I’d sent her a copy of the book I’d found most remarkable there, Kay Ryan’s Strangely Marked Metal (1985). To Ryan, another California poet then surviving by teaching English in its prisons, I’d written a note soliciting new work, and her reply asked why she should bother. Yet, she sent some, and her next book Flamingo Watching (1994) won multiple awards, leading to appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate (2008). I don’t know why since then, after letters so grateful for this turnaround, Ryan ceased our exuberant contact altogether: another measure of Barbara’s persistent friendship.
Dear Jack, Thank you, and Bianca [Nebab, a brilliant fellow grad-student] for reading and sending your generous responses to [her latest work in] Trivia. You must read Vagabonding itself, for me it is the antidote to American feminism, New Age Airheads or PostModernist Prose Butts (i.e., the only thing worse than having prose in your head and air in your butt….)
As I’ve said a few times, I wish you were writing all my reviews. In fact, yours is the only response I’ve had so far. I believe this is because you know how to READ. Feminists, even the best, don’t. So my genre as I’m inventing it going along (FemPolemoPoeticks: it is not SUPPOSED to be a Pretty Thought) just stops them cold, they can’t get through the first page. It is “indigestible”….Well this is my intention of course, not to be plagiarized cannibalized by the Hungry Ghosts. Did you watch Oliver Stone’s Wild Palms? Bad reviews, I thought it beat Rosanne…in fact it was full of fun quotes, e.g., Rebel Without A Cause and Blade Runner and Brazil, all my favorite flicks. Well, mental food is very thin gruel nowadays. Stone’s second episode was called “Hungry Ghosts” quoting Tibetan Buddhist ideas of afterlife…probably the world did end a few decades ago and we are all in the Bardo State but only a weird few of us Know It. Everyone else thinks this is still Life.
“As if patriarchy’s over because the intellectuals are bored with it.” Great summation, Jack. The Troubadour and Trouvere elite in southern France were bored with Christianity, the Catholic Church and its moral restrictions on the flesh and spirit in the TWELFTH CENTURY. Their boredom followed by 500 years of Inquisition: on that flesh, on that spirit. So much for the Bardo State of the American Intelligentsia.
The other side [of this letter] gives info on [the Detroit-based journal] Fifth Estate: I really recommend it as a news source of choice, they try to come out 3-4 times a year, just $6 a year. This is the group of people collected around Fredy Perlman, starting Black & Red Press and Fifth Estate: going 25 years [now, 50]. Excellent writing. The enclosed by Kathleen Rashid is one sample, it is all quality. Anarchist, eco-feminist, hip: they are NOT aware of the Thomas Morton Alliance, at least Loraine Perlman, Fredy’s widow, has not heard of it. I told her of it and sent copies made from Glory Here you sent, reminding her I had B&R Press send you a copy of Against His-Story. You should link up with them, subscribe to FE. As Situationists, Fredy was there live and reported from the student rebellion in France in 1967, they are from the actual French linguistic-anarchist mood, what American academics seem to be obsessively mouthing without a genuine experiential claim to. Faux French!
I don’t know if all the puns matter to anyone but the writer, but there was one great one that Trivia missed in typography. Next to last page it is “slavealleyes” not “slavealleys.”
Congratulations on Copper Beech Press, glad you are there. You apologize for temporary Funk episodes? It’s normal considering the Reality you face, and it probably won’t get better! The world, I mean: economy etc. UNM’s PBS station KUNM won numerous awards last year for series Surviving Columbus, their most acclaimed year of excellence, [and] they just got their budget slashed from $170,000 to $20,000, i.e., the rewards of achievement in Amerika. I am in a Permanent Funk, and don’t feel anything I’ve done holds together, not worth trying. When I die the Dumpster can collect my life’s work and make sense of it. In meantime, onward.
[Added in cursive:] Ryan, I like her. “The Other Silence” is spooky. She is true of ear and mind. Thank you! Barbara
Now comes an almost-two-year gap in my trove of Barbara’s letters, during which time Barbara had moved to Eureka, northern CA on the Humboldt coast (1995), enroute to her final home in Portland, Oregon (as of 1998). I know many letters are missing, but why? By the next one below (March 13th, 1995), I was near a Brown meltdown. While sinking into debt and teaching undergrad writing sections (80 brilliant students a year), the task of your third-year Oral Exams was to defend a list of 200 indispensable books against three gigantic professors—which of course meant you had read the rest of the library, in order to pick them. But truly reading even two books/articles per day per month was shredding my brain and others’ left and right. Such has to be the first layer of the typical Ph.D.’s haunting sense of fraud. On top of it all, I’d never stopped working on/hunting a publisher for Ariadne’s Brother. When I found one (Kalendis in Athens, Greece), the manuscript had to get finished (chopping 2000 pages into 700), and right in the faces of faculty/fellows with ready glib assumptions of a romantic utopian in my critical closet. My brain was turning to rotten cotton without anchor or reference-point—except for Barbara.
My first response is that Ariadne’s Brother is good. I can see why the Greeks want to print it. It gives a precisely, richly detailed but so loving picture of their old ways (or those they conquered, by now I guess all mixed up nationalistically with them in the same historic earth).
My impression is that the writing, the work you’ve done condensing (or whatever else, time) has evolved. Where before I felt some “imitation archaic,” I mean a wistfulness to live vicariously “there” dominating the writer sometimes to the extent of intrusion on the mood of the craft—I’m a jaded person who doesn’t live vicariously anymore, not young, no hope to travel etc.—now as Writer you are matured and there is a much more effortless “being There.” You are driving the writing as StoryEnergy, not your magic carpet to exotic places, which is how writers begin, I think. But “wistfulness” is [now at] a distance, “Believability” is THERE. I’m not a novelist, Jack, I’m just a student of writing.
The ms. is intensely detailed yet flowing, easy to absorb (all that good blurb on the jacket stuff!). I think you are very fair to the forces-in-tension: the women, the men, the Cretans, the gung-ho [mainland Mycenaean] Greeks. So that the huge change that is occurring (the tidal wave is lifting their boats right now) has an inevitability about it. So this is good historic dramatization, I am a Polemicist but I know that fiction and drama must embody polemic with muscle, flesh and subtle human interactions in character, and you’ve done so.
And then came three pages packed with feedback from comments on characters to typos in the text. Barbara’s typically-generous share of her time fell like rain on parched ground, and did more than anything else to feed the final flower. Because these pages are about her, below I share only what she wrote in further revelation of her thinking/feeling. Most critically, she taxed me rightly for mishandling lunar/solar eclipses; which, she wrote, would be “spooky and ominous for these people, [but] their Priestess/Priest class would not be caught by SURPRISE [by them].” Barbara then knew better than I the mounting proofs of “prehistoric” achievements in astronomy. “Please consult Realm of the Great Goddess: Megalith Builders of the the Mediterranean by Sybille von Cles-Reden, and think hard,” she wrote. I did, but by the time I published Calendar House: Clues to Minoan Time from Knossos Labyrinth (2006-2015 at Ancientlights.org), Barbara’s hands were too full, as you’ll see, with her own late works for a response to it in comparable detail.
In that letter of March 13th, 1995, she added:
You are pacing [the novel] well, with these flashes glimpses of the ground opening between the old [Minoan] ways and the looming [Mycenaean] threat, which is not petty but a whole new paradigm of consciousness….Descriptions like this of the Cretan male learning [mainland] Macho are very helpful to all of us to UNDERSTAND process young males are put through. My experience is that Macho men ARE incredibly numb, hungry inside, armored grotesquely outside (all the Reichian descriptions apply), and of course this creates Mr. Anger Machine for the system’s use. But as persons they are so confused, suffused with outrage that they must Punish something but don’t know what or who, so they do it to the easiest target (their InnerChild, as the jargon du jour has it)—and there goes the world.
If MALES don’t look at this, analyze it as it happens to themselves, no one can change them from the outside: the Macho Armor precisely RESISTS self-reflection. That is of course what it’s for: Males Armored to Reflect ONLY the SUN, bounce the Heat and Fire OUTWARD: not to Reflect Inward, to See the Mirror of the Moon.
…The description of [Knossos] Labyrinth House is superb….I like the showing of “The Labyrinth’s good life” and its effects on fierce Feminist/Amazon types. Right! The bit with [Minoan priestess] Cleite on [her fellow] Diamat, interested in pumice-stone over the end of their world, contexted with the Libyan amazons’ power and [their] Itiri apprehended as “cruel-looking,” “dour”—eek! Wild and woolly. These ARE the perceptions of New Age privileged spiritualfems vis-à-vis the earlier fem style Ferox (and whatever feral-stinking residual bag-lady might cross their yuppie path today, i.e., when they run into Me): because they are lolling in Oils, oozing WellBeing (for money: Starhawk’s workshops are obscenely expensive).
They’ve become altogether too “soft” and spoiled for the Reality of Now. And most of all they resent the Raw Warrior Woman staring at them from across the vacant lot: she reminds them that now THEY belong to the Establishment which is under Threat. It’s hard for once political people to admit they’ve let the muscles of their own Fine Rage go soft, flabby. And you’ve written this to allow hip readers, at least, to relate current New Age self-complacency with perhaps one element of the Cretan demise….
Before and after that letter, Barbara was following news of the 1993 abduction, rape and murder of 12-year-old Californian Polly Klaas by one Richard Allen Davis, who was convicted and condemned in 1996 but, at this writing, still lives to complain and appeal on Death Row. Hence one of Barbara’s next works, Linguistic Duplex (published in Sulfur #35, Fall 1994), about which she wrote to me next on May 28th, 1995. While Barbara knew that my 1980 experience of Eve made me share the searing rage in Duplex, she had little patience left (in “the Reality of Now”) for my hesitations at the work’s imaginary vengeance against Davis. Below is a scan and then a transcription (edited only in some punctuation) of Barbara’s two pages.
Thanks for taking time to read and respond with so much generous passion to LD. You probably sense I need some response. As I said, I believe it is a strong, human work, it certainly felt so as I was doing it, beyond me, human. The absolute absence of response from every woman I’ve sent it to, including “my editor” Barbara Moulton [at Harper Collins], has certainly put the last Nasty Nail in my relations-with-feminism coffin.
I didn’t send it to Moulton casually: rather, the GCM contract has an Options clause, requiring me to submit any second ms. to them first, before dealing with other publishers. So I sent it to Moulton in San Francisco as required, as the lead piece in my ms. Moulton was gone on maternity leave, her assistant Lisa Bach responded that they’re not interested in poetry mss. “Good luck elsewhere.” So I wrote again telling them both the genre is NOT poetry (it is Creative Non-Fiction in the NEA grant categories, I call it FemPolemo Poetics)—right there, of course, their bright little New Age Bimbo eyes turn to glass and fracture, oh my. If I’d sent them a ms. titled FUCKING GOD AND MAMMON: The Triple Goddess Does a Threesome for the Fusion of Body, Soul and Profit, then, then, they would not freak out, but be interested. At least, I think, they would answer my letter. As it is, after 6 months, no answer.
[Text of first page side-bar:] Yes, LD 1 and 3 are the Given, poetry. Part 2 deliberately not: Eshleman called it “waxy build-up”—YES! or a Taxform welfare form prison of forms your life trapped in depends on, or the Zen HotBall you may neither swallow nor spit out. Unlike Parts 1 and 3, HARD WORK BECAUSE it could not sound easy, or be easy, for reader, or anyone.
Anyway, I appreciate even more, in this context, your taking time to read LD as if it was serious. HSU ended its semester in mid-May here, but I think eastern universities run later, to end of May? (I just heard a Harvard student went berserk and stabbed several dorm-mates during exams, killing one plus herself. Ergo: must be Freaky Finals in the East.) And so your load as teacher as well as student must be double strong. I know my daughter Joanna exhausted herself with finals plus giving tests in her Zoology lab, plus her job in the Chem dept., I think education has some very sadistic streaks, toward students. Like 6 years of Hazing into some esoteric club.
The CONNECTIONS made in LD, incidentally, I didn’t make. They are There. Two news items above, e.g., Davis upon incarceration in psycho wing of jail complains he can’t sleep, “they scream all night”—this from the man on record as “mystified” the little girl he’d just kidnapped, mouth-taped and bloodily raped “didn’t scream.” And recently, he’s complaining about his DentalCare in prison. I’m sitting here, toothlessly, cackling.
Truly, you just need to Mind-Meld with the event. It gives you its Truth, its Poetry, all the Connections you need.
It does help to be, yes, Black Irish. We fall into the hallucinatory pool of words, drown drunk on their levels of darker and darkning meaning, who needs dope, you just spend 800 years choking on rocks.
My grandmother, who described my grandfather and his heritage to me as Black Irish (she was French and German), told me that, e.g., my dark hair and freckles came from the Spanish Armada, all those Spaniards crashed on the Irish coast and crawling up through the surf to impregnate the redhead native women. I grew up believing this (now I believe they came, in fact, from Berber Morocco the Formorians of northwest Africa). She also provided as evidence all the Irish names beginning with Don: Donnelly, Donleavy, Donahue…those Spanish Dons, of course. Those dark Flamenco Freckles, la la.
I have been wholly reluctant to use the word “evil” through most of my writing life, with its Christian connotations and instigations: with any prefabricated moral references at all, it has seemed beyond rehabilitation as a power word, and now it’s all twisted with heavymetal satanica as a fashionable frisson. So yes, I agree with your discomfort at the use of “evil.” The word was opened up for me by Kathy Acker, somewhere in Don Quixote (those Spanish Dons!). She writes, “Only women can know Evil, because only women can enter into trance…” and I was there, in such a tranced experience, for some time, observing the mechanisms.
You’re right, it is NOT naïve. It IS somewhere in that “willing suspension of disbelief” we activate to “enjoy” myth, theater, romance, the inhabitation of an archetype, and the following of leaders…something occurs in the Reptile Brain, the most ancient brainstem (i.e., powerful and resistant to “rational argument”), which is the brain of obeisance, hypnotic submission to authority, the Pope waving the magic crystal before the eyes of the masses from his balcony, Hitler before the Swastika, voodoo, drugs love rock n roll….
And it’s long past time for Us to be responsible for this part of us which/who wants to be manipulated, led, wants to surrender to the trance, but then not be responsible for it (the Devil made me do it, the Pope said, the Fuhrer the Boss my Husband the Boys Penthouse…whatever FacilitatorFlavor of the Hour one uses to rationalize going berserk on life and then not having to deal with the ripped body parts the next morning. What is war, after all? It’s a mechanism which gives young men permission to rape and mutilate en masse and not be criminally liable, but deemed heroes or patriots…which cleverly “channels” this psychotic energy to demolish The Designated Other, i.e., not turn on the Boss, the Pope, whoever is sitting back there profiting from EnergyManagement.
I.e., Davis and other “psycho killers” serve the function of safetyvalving this energy, reinforcing the Law and Order machine, and keeping women controlled via chronic threat and fear it will happen to them (like marrying one man’s abuse “saves” a woman from being at mercy of the male horde: Marriage Theory).
Seeing the devastation of the Earth and Human World, this IS EVIL. What else would you call it? It’s destroyed our planet, it has destroyed probably our species’ chance for further evolution.
Men are responsible for using this energy, women responsible for excusing it, humans responsible for allowing it and following it…the way you look at a serious heroin addict who’s ruined his/her life and everyone around who loves them, and all you can say is, You kick it, or else. And this analogy brings us to our specific culture, Biblical patriarchal capitalism whatever, which refuses to deal intelligently with 1) biology, 2) drugs, 3) psycho energies, 4) the human reality. Because Denial seems Profitable, provides automatic energy for the machinery. Is this evil? Is there anyone on Earth now over age 12 who can look you in the eye and say, Gee whiz! I wasn’t aware of the consequences? I have no trouble with the “revenge,” the thinking behind it? HOW DOES IT FEEL, DUDE???
I’m not a Xtian, Jack. This ain’t therapy. Does a Mirror replicate a Crime? Then Art and Ritual are Crimes. So let artists Be Strong.
[Text of second page side-bar:] You want LD to end with some Deus Ex Machina, Mother Theresa? If so, you’re Hopeless, Jack. You need to do some time with Bosnian Serbs, the SS, R.A. Davis—they are “crazy” BECAUSE no one confronts them on this level, “once and for all,” don’t you understand? The CrazyOldLady is the only being in the story who takes Davis seriously, respects the God in him, and acts accordingly. The utter Failure of Liberals, they’re all SocialWorkers! Aarrgghhh….Barbara.
(To be continued)
Meet Mago Contributor, Jack Dempsey.
(Originally published in http://ancientlights.org/barbaramor/)