(Tribute 1) Barbara Mor, “Relentless Love”: Letters 1988-2002 from a Writer’s Best Friend by Jack Dempsey

 

…& who is jesus what else

does he do    can he sing

can he plant corn    i saw

a picture of him once on

the dome of the sky looking

down dark & fierce at the

green earth   & who is jesus

what else can he do   can

he scrub floors can he make

the bread      they say  he

suffered 9 hours of pain

for the world   tell that

to any mother    what man

son of what father   king of

what desert    saver of what

flesh   can he mold pots

can he make the rain come

can he find  his way home

naked after being raped

can he wail like janus can

he burn in fire   after

2000 years of dying can he

laugh & hand Death a beer

can he smash the last

mirror  can he know me  who

is this jesus   what is

he: next to any woman’s

blood-red truth   no wound

in a man  is big enough

to birth a world   to

return an earth

so now here is our old mama   in the junkyard…

(from “A Song A Song For Tralala,” 1975-1997)

 

Through a grapevine of serious and hence little-known writers, I have only just heard of the passing (January 24, 2015) of the best friend we ever had—Barbara Mor.

Before the barest bones of Barbara’s life, how we became close, and some of the soul-sustaining things she wrote to me over many years, I want to emphasize that Barbara Mor taught us with her life and work that what we do matters, in the midst of a civilization-gone-mad whose overwhelming mission has been the suicidal turning of living things into controlled and commodified corpses. Between the lines of all she wrote I find a warning and a hope. If we do not work at the root of the problem we only make it worse. If we don’t look full-bore into the hatred of life at that root of “traditional tradition,” we can’t see, or feel, or think, or remember what we’ve truly been and really are (that is what it intends), and so find a way to change our course—which is still possible. What dooms us now is certainly not nature and our human share of its evolution, but our artificially-instilled sadomasochistic addiction to the stupid, corrupt and vengeful ideas of nature and human being that history itself (His-Story: that lie of the text-obsessed charlatans) has foisted on us.

On that basis, I’m sure that Barbara—in all her volcanic anger, born of her loving will to help us heal ourselves and the Earth—would agree with another kinsman of ours, Terence McKenna, who observed that the prehistoric tribal shaman had become the modern artist, taking us back to recover the way forward, combining scientist and seer, explorer and healer, activist and artist; and, that “if the artist cannot find the way [to our healthy further evolution], then the way cannot be found.”

While some facts here about Barbara’s life come from published sources and from her letters, these are vetted directly by her only son. Born October 3rd, 1936 in a southern Californian San Diego that she called “once beautiful,” Barbara described her grandparents’ heritage as Black Irish/Welsh with touches of French and German. According to her 1995 interview with Charles Cantalupo, her mother “was a jazz pianist before she got married”: “My mother sat me down and taught me how to play the piano when I was four.” In the 1940s, they also shared “going to the movies—the great musicals, right?—and getting the sheet music and coming back and playing it….Sitting on the bench, playing the music, I met the first poetry to come into my life.” They also shared many trips to the San Diego Zoo, where “very young” Barbara felt so close to the animals that she “sensed…the feeling of being tattooed with pictures of the beasts,” and they began to fill “all the critical dreams throughout my life…a leakage between the beast, the image of the beast, and something that becomes my body….[My] luck, my destiny, this feeling of mysticism.” But, when Barbara was seven, her parents divorced:  when she turned 12, her mother died, and she lived with her father and step-mother through her teens, until she finished high school.

After a marriage that lasted only about one year (with no children), Barbara struck out for new horizons. She was writing seriously already, because in September 1955 (just before she turned 19) she met film star James Dean, who saw enough promise to tell her “It’s important to me that you keep writing.” After some time in the Santa Cruz mountains and L.A., Barbara was living in “Beatnik” Baja by 1960 “with a Beat artist.”

Here—courtesy of Cantalupo’s interview (Poetry, Mysticism, and Feminism from the Nave to the Chops: Harlow-Essex, Spectacular Diseases print ed., 1995)—we can listen to Barbara talk about the growth of her young-life spirit and imagination. Their roots we saw in the presence of powerful wild animals, whose beings wrote themselves into her, dreams and body, though she knew them only through a rail of theatrical iron bars. The other great felt presence and guide had been her mother’s jazz and all the sensory richness of learning to make a piano sing out, increasing her range for managing multiple rhythms and wedding them to consummate language. As in “Gershwin, Hart, Cole Porter: gorgeous stuff.”

“I got that jingle in my head, and I grew up with this lyric pop music as the first paradigm in my mind. And that has given me an inferiority complex.” Barbara now the Baja Beatnik found that she had to outgrow the superficial “light and cute” aspects of her pop culture’s training (told by a first college professor, “Don’t ever try to do anything too serious”). But, by now there was “literate” rock and roll to help her on, “Bob Dylan, The Beatles,” from whom she got “that Dionysian, mystical power.” The poetry of academic journals had begun to pale for her:

That’s the way I am a mystic: the whole world around is a theater, a work of art. I see the wounds of the Earth, but for me they are also poems and mirrors, where we are living within this allegorical theater….My mysticism is the consciousness of matter, that we live within a conscious body. Mystic communion means a communion within this body: of oneself, of the Earth atmosphere and things, of the universe of quarks and fields. Within this mystic body, all things are in symbolic communication with each other. Everything makes symbolic statements to and about everything else….

Tigers, snow tigers, giraffes, leopards: they were so aesthetically overwhelming and satisfying….the sensation of the living, pulsing power of the world…totally within the context of being within a body….[Under a microscope] a stained potato was a gothic window. It was aesthetically pleasing and gorgeous. At every level, if I get an aesthetic hit, I don’t make a distinction at that point between aesthetic and mystical. It’s so gorgeous, meaning: something there is an artist, long before me, in the first cell.

This Barbara summed up as “the media of Earth’s evolving and continuous lust to make art.” “Matter is a superb artist, and that implies something about the conscious body we’re involved in.” If her own one word for this was “animism,” perhaps she was after a poetry giving unruly body to the pulsing conversation between world, body, spirit and world, and the form(s) she found became a constant significant jazz of slippage among domains of consciousness. None of it meant to be limited by time, identity, or trivial convention.

By 1963, developing in these ways, Barbara was studying Humanities and Linguistics at San Diego State, sharing in SDSU’s creation of America’s first Women’s Studies program. When her son was born in 1965, she found herself on welfare, and in 1969 quit school within sight of her degree because she’d begun to see that her education was ignoring too much of the full human past. Immersing herself in books and historical research, and sharing in the communities of penurious artists around her (“all the serious artists I know live like ex-cons,” Henry Miller observed in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare), Barbara helped to publish women’s poetry collections such as Rainbow Snake and Greater Golden Hills Poetry Express.

Barbara’s first of two daughters was born also in San Diego, in 1971. As her son describes this time, Barbara was teaching poetry and giving talks and readings at high schools of underprivileged Black and Hispanic youth, thus earning a “token trickle” of subsistence. Before long, she moved to Taos, New Mexico, and published her first poetry collections, Bitter Root Rituals (1975) and Mother Tongue (1977). As the culture-war on welfare wore on, Barbara moved to Albuquerque in 1979, where her second daughter was born—and by 1982, she’d returned to Taos with both girls. That year Barbara published poems in her Winter Ditch, tried (below) to publish a piece of innovative fiction called Here, and all the while developed her early research. Her co-creation of a feminist-historical pamphlet with European visual artist Monica Sjoo became the still-growing seed of the major historical work to come.

By 1985, that pamphlet was a complete book whose text and visual qualities brought a $5,000 advance from Harper & Row. Thus disqualified from welfare, Barbara moved to Bisbee, Arizona, to share a house and write alongside the indomitable artist and activist Meridel LeSueur. As Barbara awaited the first copies of The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth, she dedicated the work to her mother and to “everyone’s mother” LeSueur. Barbara never liked the title imposed by her editors. Indeed she reviled it increasingly over time (“as if a woman can’t be cosmic unless she’s a mother”), and preferred her phrase for the Earth itself: The First God, or as she put it, “the only God we know.”

Barbara’s hope was for some kind of university position, but she found little if any work and “basically had zero income” as she waited still longer (1987) through publication delays. When the book did appear and began to sell, she waited another six months for royalties, but then learned that the advance and the book’s many permissions had to be paid first. According to Barbara’s son, it seemed best for her to move to Tucson, while her eldest daughter lived with her father and Barbara’s youngest joined her son’s household. But Barbara found nothing but more “shit jobs” and unemployment there. Hence, she found herself at age 51 “broke and living in back-yards and nefarious drug-dens.”

(To be continued)

Meet Mago Contributor, Jack Dempsey.

(Originally published in http://ancientlights.org/barbaramor/)