Meanwhile on May 3rd, 1992, Barbara dug into what little she had to send the expensive Tibetan-style card below. She spent the money just to congratulate me on acceptance to Brown Graduate School, she knew I still grieved for my father—and, because I’d told her that my dearest friend, my younger sister, had just survived a harrowing full-scale bone-marrow transplant saving her from cancer, and had come home against all odds to rejoin her one little daughter. I include this because it shows Barbara’s caring and generosity no matter how deep-in she was herself, living on pennies with new works struggling to get done. It also revealed that she too had already battled cancer:
Dear Jack, You and your family have gone through such great upheavals, pain grief anxiety—and now the next turn of the wheel lurches JOY and SUCCESS into your lives and the embrace of your hearts. As our world turns—! and rocks and burns—my daughter as I wrote you was in midst of northern California earthquakes last weekend. I hope the terrible upheavals open our hearts and make us more real.
I was also in the hospital for cancer surgery (twice in one year), with my daughter still an infant. Your description of your sister and her return to her little girl was beautiful, one of the best moments life can know. I’m very happy for them. And for you, accepted at Brown: of course! This just might be our decade. We’ve earned it! Congratulations, Barbara
In October, Barbara sent two pages whose pairing might have exploded the envelope: this “How To Be An Artist” flyer first below, and a merciless gaze of a same-titled poem “for the New Mexico Art Resources Directory.” I don’t know if she formally published the latter. It is a staggering song of empathy, and rage (not excluding her own conditions despite all effort and achievement) at “souled-out mediocrities” and “the murder of all our possibilities by stupid knives and signatures of money.”
Given Barbara’s own next romp of words (below), I do not think she’d have disavowed the first group of playful ideas above. But that poem sent with it was a searing look straight into the eye of a Minotaur, an indictment and a warning: an unblinking measure of what one might well expect should one dare to live to create from an unfettered soul, and a measure of Barbara’s own courage in working ever “onward” full-aware of her teachers’ ghastly ends.
In proof of that, Barbara’s next letter (December 8th, 1992) was long and especially rich with talk of her latest works, connections and practical struggles—plus, as you’ll see, more significant indications of how and why her poetic style was to evolve in the coming years.
She typed its first page on the back of a flyer for a new CD called Oikos (Greek for “household”), Songs for the Living Planet, produced by Lone Wolf Circles and Friends. Barbara took much trouble at a copy-machine to lay out the CD’s cover, contents and quotations from participants on one page: it was inscribed “For Barbara, giving voice to to the muse, embodying the Goddess. Rave on! Rave on! With respect and love, Lone Wolf,” and included many artists from herself and Jenny Bird to Stone Biscuit “and the womyn’s group Joyful Noise,” with “both mystical and danceable music celebrating the traditions of Native America, Africa and the Middle East—a deep ecology soundtrack, a rhythmic pan-tribal prayer to sacred mother Earth.” Barbara included its manifesto, too:
[Oikos] describes the crucial relationship between organisms and their environment. Virtually everyone knows that life on Earth is dying, through personal observation or exposure to even the most superficial media. What’s more, we know who is doing the most to kill it. In spite of our denial, we sense our own culpability, virtual accomplices as a result of consumptive lifestyles and an unwillingness to take a stand. Intellectual understanding, however, is not enough. The radical personal and political changes necessary require below the neck response—emotional, visceral, and spiritual. Instinctively, we know that we are the Earth, dancing cells of a living, breathing planet-body. Instinctively we know that as we do this to the Earth, we do [it] to ourselves, and that the fate of humanity is…[end of clipping]….
And here were the words printed inside from Barbara, “a visionary prophet and volcanic poet”:
A joyous dance of resistance! It is one minute till midnight for the life of the Earth, demanding our relentless love and most vigorous response. Get involved with whatever skills you have, drawing on the power of the wilderness within you. Participate! Do something unplanned! Stay up late! Get dirty! Take chances! Replant the playground! Tear up some concrete! Re-create the wild, as you celebrate it! Perhaps the serpent of life’s flowing energy will begin to rise again, all luminous and of the Earth, and the children of the Great Mother will rise up with it, and the universe will be our home again as before. This flight is not an escape, but a return. Oikos invokes the rhythmic return to our true, wilder selves as sentient extensions of the sacred Earth: Gaia. We return home as both lovers and defenders. From many different dispersed places we all arrive now at one place: between birth and death, what is truly worth living for. The answer is in place. That place is Earth.
Before Barbara’s full letter that carried all this, two of her references to clarify. The TMA or Thomas Morton Allliance was a 1970s-90s group of New England pagan activists including Gae Sidhe, Franque Dufner and Flora Green, and published a first-rate journal called The Merrymount Messenger founded long before I knew Morton. In that year of 1992, working in parallel with Oikos and talking back to the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ New World invasion, we put out a merry-men’s sardonic booklet called Glory Here with a piece of mine called “Suffering Fools” (a title used again in later work), and Barbara engaged with all of it.
We all looked up to her, and never stopped laughing to deal with her sheer breadth of mind, spirit and humor. Who else could just drop a line such as, “Every spring, the Nile River ejaculates into the Mediterranean”? Onward now to her December 8th letter:
Excuse again long delay of responding, but we understand each other’s desks piled up with DUTY (doo ti doo bi doo doggie doo doo in my case: my family crest motto: Shit Work Is Forever). Truly I’m glad you are in the academic world, compromising to one’s taste as it might be: cuz you ARE getting some audience, attention, and the mind-wrestling though exhausting can also hone a great mental weapon. Your work is valuable, I mean as times and political atmospheres change around us you are already way ahead, moving in the Great Direction, don’t you feel? Onward.
My excuses are it takes four times longer than I expect to complete any task I set myself. I’ve been working four months on another essay for Trivia: deadline was December 1 and I ended up sending half the work, 15 pages: all boiled down from 75 pages of insane material. Not quite so compacted as the Drums piece [published as aWoman Drums on MEN and Letters in Trivia 19, Spring 1992], but in the same way of working: a ton of material trash compacted into an ounce, a pound. Real heavy work: it’s supposed to sound like it comes out so easy BLECH…I used to write that way. But the new style I’m working out is the opposite of the old ease.
I really appreciate your response to Drums. Only writers can read it or dig it I guess. Part of the message of all my work now is the utter meltdown of Language, of typefont of phonix of sense under the bombardment of news noise reels of unwinding reality…that jammed format is known as MetaLinguistic Comment on the universe of discourse enclosed. I know where the Fem Franco-babblers are coming from, I was on my way to a Linguistics Masters in 1969, fired by Saussure (never said I could spell it) and most of all Benjamin Lee Whorf, changed my life…so much so I just walked out of college to do my work. So I have conflicting responses. Cuz I believe the FrenchLinguistic analysis is much closer and richer and ultimate to the cosmic problem than the typical American sociology crap, or psychobabble and all the rest.
But when all these are layered, decade after decade, in the name of a Feminism that NEVER LEARNED TO THINK FOR ITSELF…what a disaster. I couldn’t stand it in person! So glad I’m buried here in the open pit copper mine. Today also buried in snow. Further, today December 8 is when Jim Morrison was born, and John Lennon died. So, I thought a good day to stop the madness and write to a poet.
Are you familiar with work of Ward Churchill? Injun, teaches in Boulder [CO], I saw him on Las Cruces PBS late night after November election. The McGuires you visited in NYC have met him and developed a friendship. He does great work, defining “multicultural” politics on the cutting edge of his tomahawk. I know the Thomas Morton Allliance is one of the most important concentrations for the future, attracting and defining real issues, energies. I owe you a great deal to make me aware of it, and for Glory Here, all the rest.
Other side of this paper, Oikos a tape and CD by Lone Wolf Circles, has some good tracks, I read a poem. I don’t know if I sent you info on his book Full Circle, I think I did: I wrote Foreword for it. EFer, Deep Ecology, he does a lot of RebelRousing out here in west, but also goes back east, New England. Maybe some day you can connect with each other’s work: he gave me first copy of [Fredy Perlman’s] Against History to read, he worked with The Fifth Estate people, great newspaper in Detroit.
There IS a national global network of US building. I know we are doing important stuff. Weird as it sometimes gets! Petra Kelly’s death I am still in shock about. On November 19, Kate Keely’s trailer burned to the ground, malfunctioning water heater. She lost all her writing, poetry and music, plus all the machinery for doing The Wilderness Outlook, word processor $5000 laser printer, lists…and the Queen of England had her Bridges Burned, and…what’s it all about Alpha….On the funny side I saw Camille Paglia last week on, yes, The Joan Rivers Show. Why not….
Often I think since they’re unbeatable I’d like to join them: get Madonna to hustle GCM, invite Paglia to join your TMA. She mouths off so much re “the PAGAN”…in reality she has a pagan reference only the fairly decadent opulence of Mediterranean humanism, Michelangelo as homoerotic and all that Italian rococo….ooops! You too Italiano? I have to watch my references. Wash out my mouth with Mafia Soap. There must be something inspiring about Italian-Irish mixtures, I must say: Cathleen and Colleen McGuire also have Italian mom, Irish dad. Jane Caputi too is Irish Italian.) My son has paternal grandmother from Sicily, Josephine Genovese…pure Italian Catholic widow, she married my son’s grandfather who was a Dutch Pennsylvanian Lenai Lenappe Irish-English mixture, so my son is IrishItalianInjun. A genius naturally.
Nonetheless: Paglia is wrong in her sweeping definitions of Erotic = Pornographic = PAGAN. Apart from that lush Latino Mediterranean really recent Paganismo, the Pagan sensibility of the northern Europeans Celts Gauls Vikings Teutons, as well as the Paganism of American Injuns, is NOT EROTIC, but ENCHANTED. Nonhuman ECSTASY of animals vegetation dreams entangled beasts and fruits and jewels of dreams; but the Human like Sinead or any Irish poet stands very stiff straight eyes staring straight ahead at the shape of its enchantment. Not Erotic, because not HUMANISTIC. Continuous reincarnation parallel incarnation into the nonhuman beasts and rocks and seeds of terrestrial energies: not a worship of the human body as Paglia intends by her sweeping generalizations and dumb UNINFORMED definitions. But, I like her. She’s fun.
Oh yes, I’m corresponding with a great superb Italian poet scholar, prof at Penn State Schuylkill—Charles Cantalupo. Now I know you have the Italian blood I recommend his work, he is editor for Studia Mystica. I will have some stuff in it, plus an interview we did last week via phone: I’ll send to you so you can have info. He is one of the most gorgeous poets around, does performance work; and is brilliant also, works with Spenser, Hobbes the original Leviathan.
Deeper than all this I guess we are trying to retrieve some vision and experience of our European existence. Did you see the recent PBS on the Ice Man? Wholly preserved body from 3300 BC, European Bronze Age, fell into a protected space covered with 5000 years of snow just on border of Austrian-Italian Alps. Our guy: we know about all the world more than these strange ancestors of our flesh and neurons, he died they guess crossing back over Alps from flint fields in Italy, caught in sudden snow…the oldest full body yet found, intact with clothes, medicinal mushrooms on thong, neatly cut hair and great intelligence of being. Waiting for us to find him.
Wow, thanks for reading Drums, I know it is a task of typography in itself: I appreciate your responses to it, I know you can read The Lines and I sure wish you were doing the reviews! “Gritty fearless sweet uncompromising visionary angry weeping MAD laughing….” Yeah yeah yeah! Plus I learned from working on defective sticky keyed typewriters with unwinding ribbons, the text records my true battle with the machinery of my mind, JD. Right now we are in the midst of a total swirling blizzard—really heavy. My fingers stiff the keys stiff just Friggin Frigid everything. So I am going to give up typing wrap in blankets and read: Big Injun in the Cave Day. I treasure Glory Here, by the way: tell John Wildman his “Suffering Fools” is so great, especially to see the W.C. Williams quote and reference. In The American Grain should replace The Bible, such a beautiful work. If you send a copy to Lone Wolf Circles and ask him in my name he should return to you an Oikos tape. Try it, his address on flyer enclosed. At least be aware of each other’s work for our common CUZ what else is worth it? Conflictingly discursive, Brrrrrbara.
(To be continued)
Meet Mago Contributor, Jack Dempsey.
(Originally published in http://ancientlights.org/barbaramor/)
From Sara Wright:
“Jack Dempsey brings Barbara’s world to life like no one else. In this installment we see her total commitment to the Earth, her humor, the poignancy of her knowing that we are a people headed for ecological disaster long before anyone else was talking about it.
Mor has the Voice of a Prophet – and Dempsey brings it to life.”