I’m sure Barbara sent me more letters in the 15-month gap from May 1995 to her next (September 1996) below. The loss remains my fault, although that May brought my third-year Oral Exams, a teaching-semester’s wrap, then a move from Providence RI back to my family home in Stoneham MA (as I sank toward bankruptcy and finished grad school with long commutes). Plus completing Ariadne’s Brother/creating a contract for it with Kalendis in Athens, and starting my doctoral dissertation—a two-volume study of Thomas Morton (i.e., a definitive edition of his New English Canaan, and biography), in tandem with a film that drove me from Novia Scotia to Delaware recording interviews on the life and impact of Nanepashemet—or “Nani,” a leading scholar of Native American New England who had suddenly died of diabetes.
New courses to plan, connections to make, research, and a summer 1996 lecture-tour for the novel in Greece; and still no reason why I failed to hold onto what Barbara surely sent through that maelstrom, because her friendship as always was keeping me sane and alive. September 20th, 1996:
I’m very glad you were able to enjoy the fruits of your long devotion to desire and duty, Ariadne’s Brother I mean. That Greece was so receptive and confirming also. Wouldn’t be surprised if your book becomes a film, and there you go. I don’t know much about Greece today except that Islam threatens them as everywhere (Cyprus events) and pushed back into ethnic/cultural/religious walls by such upstart forces, Greeks should welcome books that reanimate their creative past. Would be nice if they embraced pagan energies: Christianity has brought them nothing but fascist suffering, political submission, and Holy Tourism.
Of course everyone survives now by Tourism, regardless of spirit: Indians here want to turn their beautiful land on the Humboldt coast into another gambling casino, etc. I’ve seen, maybe 5 years ago, PBS on (title?) Road to Eleusis now: think it was Michael Woods, think I wrote you of it: he retraced the journey and could barely walk with endless traffic noise and dust and mechanical existence densely overlaid.
I think the Morton work could be the most important thing you could do now, and your brain is free to do it. Plus you are now a veteran, you’ve put your time in learning through the Ariadne process, and it will inform all your work now. I’m sorry about the Nanepashemet death, but [its happening] at a powwow sounds somewhat mystical. And the gestalt puts you in that work too, so you are now magnetized, through all the past decade of work, to work up a storm of works, film, books whatever, which are important to others as well as to you, so they will be done.
Yes, between the DIZNEY version of the world, Global Cute—and the nonexistent and even more rapidly disappearing counter-versions, I mean they are weak and even those now de-funding—the Global Cuts, that is—is a Vacuum there to be filled with other versions, visions, of what has happened, what’s happening, what can happen. I hear that some of the most right-wing militia types, crazy crackers in the South, call themselves “Celtic” in one patriotic rebel name or another, e.g., Celtic Sons of the Undefeated South, whatever. Poor Irish and Scot boobs, robbed of their continuous history from the Stone Age, really WANT deep prehistory identities, but don’t know how to access.
So they throw that barbaric energy into Pentacostal Patriotism and SnakeDancing for Jesus. Books like Gone to Croatan, all the Morton studies etc. including what you can do, would give them a Map Back, to re-connect their crazy energies with sane roots. Really important for beginning 21st-century American politics, which will break into tribes of race, ethnic, religious identities and all be stupid, because no one knows what they’re doing, or who they originally were. As you know, unburying our pagan history can be not only exciting but integrating of all energies.
So, all sounds like you’ve created, through your work, a stream for yourself that will carry you. This is great.
Hard to realize you’ve been five years at Brown, but by now it is a groove that you can no doubt bend to your own interests. If they support your Morton project, that too is great. You wrote that you were editing new book of Morton’s Canaan for “the Diss. Project,” and I read that as a DISS-Project, in the rap sense, then realized it was Dissertation, but the first will be a thread running through also I assume.
You have read W.C. Williams’ In The American Grain? Along with Crane’s The Bridge I think it is the greatest American poem, a book of prose-poetic essays on historical figures, like Lincoln, and men involved in that French-Dutch-English-Spanish protean playing with aborigynal American continent like PlayDough—with profound feeling, for the feeling sides of these men, the most amazing images of the WOMAN Lincoln, etc. Read it not for the history which you know but the style, which is utterly unique in American male—“male”—writing, which is compulsed to “prove” manhood, I mean, while Williams allows himself to be a whole sensorium with no apologies: ergo, great sentences, magnificent writing.
You wrote a very generous response to Linguistic Duplex, and I responded, I think before you went to Crete, but not sure, everything packed and confused as I moved one more time [to a place on A Street in Eureka on the north-Californian Humboldt Coast], I gave up trying to check data. I remember you questioned the word and concept “evil” and were not comfortable with what I did to Davis in Part 3. In response I said something to effect that I have always been always unwilling to use word “evil” (except in those quotes), because of the Xtian-Bible-Manichean connotations and referents.
Then reading Kathy Acker and experiences I experienced in Tucson etc. gave me another handle on the word. I agree, one must footnote it: if one cares anymore what people think, and I don’t, for I am walking around on the bottom of the ocean while everyone else is boating somewhere in a Florida or Utah pond. Whatever. As to the old woman’s drawing and quartering of Mr. Davis [Duplex], I have no problem with it whatever—whatever! For I am not a Liberal, nor a Christian (Liberals are Secular Xtians), so I don’t care about “redeeming,” i.e.,“rehabilitating” this poor man. Davis IS a spirit, like all of us, and this is how he played his cards. This WAS his life’s work, and I respond to it as such. And the old woman, as I wrote back to you, is the only one in entire scenario who gives him what he Really Wants.
If you live with this type of man long enough (I did) you get to know what they really want. Even more important, what they must learn, or be responded with, by the world which does not exist for them until it becomes suddenly as big, cartoon monstrous, as they are wont to be, in their delusion. Well, it doesn’t matter now. My writing in LD, I mean, doesn’t matter: the problem of the Davis type of being, and future children being used to fuel his Cloud of Funk—this is quite real. It isn’t that I didn’t like your reaction to LD, I think, but that your reaction was just this “Liberal” in my definition (“two wrongs don’t make a right,” “answering violence with violence”)—this kind of Mathematics doesn’t apply in the Twilight Zone, the Nagual, Potentia…or anyplace else that matters, where poets SHOULD be living, I mean, Jack. Yes? Love & Congratulations Again, Barbara
Here, another gap of almost 15 months in my letters from Barbara, till the one scanned/transcribed below—including her cartoon. You’ll note her greeting to “John,” because for awhile in grad school I foolishly thought my more sedate legal name might help me to better fit in: I learned instead that lifelong “Jack” made more room, and Barbara slipped back to it also on page 2 below.
Barbara, now age 61, had just spent a year working day-care for lucky preschoolers. Then, according to her 1997-98 prose-and-poetry piece for Trivia called akaDARKNESS: On Kathy Acker, she landed a “weekdays” job at the other end of living, as an “activities aide for Humboldt County Adult Day Care/Alzheimers” in Eureka. While she lost great inspiring friends that year (Judi Bari and Meridel LaSueur), Acker too had died in November 1997, and as said below, Barbara was feeling “tired most of the time.” Yet, in Acker’s words that Barbara cited, she still had almost 18 years ahead of rising to her most powerful works, pushing “onward” for a style that might “break through the representational or fictional mirror & be equal in force to the HORROR experienced in daily life.” Barbara’s style, early and late, broke through to life’s shattering beauty as well.
December 24th, 1997:
Still on the Planet, etc. I work and fulfill the obligations of all concerned agencies, Medical FoodStamps, WorkSearch, EDD SCSEP AmeriVision JOB Drainage daily stuff, by hand and on foot so it takes time, and when done I listen to the BBC and dream of life on a different Plan[e]t. I don’t write my own stuff, or do much else in the way of Literature, while the correspondence piles up. This is a week vacation so I am trying to attend to bizness.
I am very proud and grateful that you have completed the [New English Canaan] book. This is, to me, very impressive work. I don’t have the scholarship necessary to critique “how you handle the material” vis-à-vis all your sources in Morton scholarship. Briefly, it seems to me you have served both worlds very well: excellent scholarship and great readability. This would be a very attractive book, and certainly your university wants to print it? If not, what about Beacon Press? They only do stuff now that works for academic reference, as far as women’s history goes that is. I don’t know what else they do. I don’t know much of anything, in fact (after one year of working at Day Care for preschoolers, I have just completed a second year working at AdultDay Care/Alzheimers, and Disappearance of BrainCells has simply become a part of my JobDescription, sorry).
I believe Thomas Morton is important, and the work you’ve done seems vital to me; following the whole school of Gone to Croatan interest in the subject which is part of the AnarchoSituationistLeft, texts published by Autonomedia etc.: you have an audience, apart from the academic, in the only counterculture game in town, have you read Peter Lamborn Wilson, etc. so all these possibilities.
Re Spielberg and the Amistad film, don’t let Hollywood steal your story.
I think your text moves swiftly, while respecting all the data. It’s a Good Read, John! and from the start you establish Morton in an English life and culture which makes sense of his activity. Of course I am predisposed to see him as healthy, normal while the American Puritans were/are Twisted, but you do the job of letting the material make this point responsibly, as it does.
On page 22, I love the “dragons into church” and other evidences of Monty Python in OldeEngeloony. Through the pages (45 etc.) where you detail the Christmas revels in the Inns, the source of Morton’s “paganism” in a legitimate English culture is clearly established: so the case is made, NOT that Morton was some freaky atavistic throwback to some idea long buried at home, but very confident because he came directly from this English rowdiness—that the Puritans did not, but were the aliens in all this, you establish. Morton was for being who he was by Puritans invested in NOT being who they were but fauxHebrews. Without pushing the point at all you succeed at documenting this political/religious conflict.
It would be as if someone wanting to Colonize the Moon today took a spaceship full of Promise Keepers to do the job. NOT representative, but THEREFORE rigid with defensive zeal. It would be nice if Americans could see this, their “history” just once clearly. You have certainly done your part to make this awareness possible.
Your literary skills, honed with all that work on the Ariadne book, really are at work too. So you move through the research data but with an excellent narrative skill, great pace! I really enjoyed Chapter 3 with descriptions of the Inns of Court; as with the pages descriptive of the buildings of Knossos, I feel I am “there”—you move reader through the architecture and life details with great authorial ease; so this is a book that has a chance to be read and appreciated by much wider than an academic specialist audience.
Sure you know all this, I don’t have to sell the book to you. GOOD JOB, Jack! Really impressive: you haven’t wasted any time or effort spent at Brown, but have been learning, improving your natural writing skills all along, and you’ve earned whatever reward comes from this work. Probably won’t be Money, but you’ve certainly accomplished a Scholar’s Task: to make your subject vital and challenging to the daily dust.
Well, clearly, I don’t have much verbal art left myself. Tired most of the time. From this exhaustion I can appreciate, and envy, your textual energy: it’s really there! I can’t believe you will have trouble getting this one published.
A year of many deaths, the Year of Great Extinctions, beginning November 14, 1996 with Meridel LeSueur’s death, not sad, for she had a full 96 years. But so many others, people I didn’t know but whose work was a big influence and standard, Mary Leakey, Laurens VanDerPost, Ginsberg no influence but I was a Beatnik and it is weird to see them all die. But the sandbags have been Judi Bari (last December) and Kathy Acker, November 29, 1997, two heroines from Hell and Back. I feel numb and utterly useless, vis-à-vis these 2 Amazons, BOTH taken out by breast cancer. I cannot accept the MYTHOS of it—of course, Mythos could care less. It is careless.
(To be continued)
Meet Mago Contributor, Jack Dempsey.
(Originally published in http://ancientlights.org/barbaramor/)
Re: Barbara Mor…. amazing how much this woman lived in the future that is catching up to us now… I can really identify with her remark that she’s been walking on the bottom of the ocean while others are on ponds. Great article.