(Tribute 6) Barbara Mor, “Relentless Love”: Letters 1988-2002 from a Writer’s Best Friend by Jack Dempsey

And now, in grief approaching the end of my surviving collection of Barbara’s letters, I come to a gap of almost five years between 1997 above and the next below dated January 5^th, 2002. What happened, and why does this collection end (March 2002) long before Barbara’s end? I know she and I were still in contact through that time, and I remember more exchanges after it—right through her last years’ works (copies of which she always shared) including Rad Victorian Radio (2000), Rapture and Sea of Hunger (written in 2001), Suicidal Girls (2002), Text/Context (2004), Oasis 1, 2 and 3 (2005, 2008, 2009), Hypatia (2007), The Blue Rental (first appearing in 2010), The Inquisitor, Theater of Cruelty, the works on her Blogspot web-page, About Writing About (2012), and her final The Victory of Sex and Metal (2014).

This was more than what Barbara had called, above, people’s being something like “bumper cars” colliding and falling out of touch. In a sentence, we’d begun to go our separate but connected/parallel ways as serious writers. I want to show what happened to each and both of us. Most of all, I say first, in plain shame, that I now consider the intolerance, impatience, career-frustration and thoughtless haste by which I must have discarded Barbara’s late letters an inexcusable failure and a genuine crime against Letters and civilization. Period.

Barbara never stopped evolving in the struggle to face, manifest and master what she’d called (above) the utter meltdown of language; striving to fulfill what her favorite editor Clayton Eshleman (in his Intro to the last edition of Sulfur) said what poetry “is really about: the extending of human consciousness, making conscious the unconscious, creating a symbolic consciousness that in its finest moments overcomes the dualities in which the human world is cruelly and eternally, it seems, enmeshed.”

Drawing here upon Barbara’s own phrases above, her “genre” of “FemPolemoPoeticks,” as she kept evolving it, was “not supposed to be pretty.” But it was leading her down a path toward becoming in her own words “indigestible,” “unreadable.” In the face of her daily realities, she had decided that those were the convictions worth her courage, arriving at a place where (March 13^th, 2002 below) “only males, generally Brits, or total anarchists…print me”—yet, half-believing that “one hundred years from now, that will be considered a compliment (?).” “I have the impression there is not much hope in my writing, except that Wit is a gesture of belief in something…whatever that might be.”

And look, in Suicidal Girls (2002), at these hints of Barbara’s conditions through her last 15 years. After all, when artistic dedication consigns you to living hand-to-mouth, you find yourself trying to survive one brain-searing shit-hole after another, in this Wreck-of-the-Hesperus asylum-on-fire called the present American landscape, teeming with self-destructive faux-rebels dying of ignorance:

scream in my walls 4sex in a 4plex

their boys are crazy nightspliced wires

dance&fightdance&fight bellybutton

pliers glow in the dark

live here numb

in rental skull bang bang bang they move in

redone stucco studio used to be a garage

cars lived there leaked oil on the rug

wall to wall rust atmosphere end of the

world plus heat   theyre not neat decorate

w/fists purplebluegreenpink hair tattoos

noserings amplifers huge ashtrays of

noise on bad days it costs too much to

live here we’re on a one way street wheels

roll west 24/7 nothing stops no rest don’t

mess w/our trucks…

white&black scared persian

kitty hides under porch as party rages at

dawn new strange girl passed out on asphalt…

400 years but nothing changes

a continent

they came to pillage&pray…

how did they cross the ocean how do i

cross the street daily life…

…who cooks

anyway it takes too long i like things in

cans and plastic packets…

…they don’t eat they die in the

street in fever chewing grass delirious

like the Irish history repeats if you let

it or forget   humans not doomed by Nature

but by DumbIdeas   im starting to like

these loud girls  when they scream in the

daytime it must be serious

Barbara had counseled me to “get your valuable material across the river of ebullient words,” for “you are also writing to now, and that too is an obligation.” Hence, I had made one choice about our “obligations” and “writing to now,” and Barbara made another. While Barbara looked unblinking and “estranged” her own language in the face of what Acker called “the HORROR experienced in daily life,” I had angered Barbara in telling her that I’d walked out of a live Acker reading at Brown. For it seemed to me that Acker—too brilliant not to know—was working her pain and, while replicating (for example) the experience of rape for her enthralled Po-Mo-Privileged-hip Brown audience, in the end was inflicting yet more of its benumbed aftermath upon them—while Barbara, at times (for example in Hypatia, quoted below) could still also see and register not a “redeeming,” but at least a balancing, whole and still-enabling sense of life’s surviving and worthwhile—yes—beauty.

This you can see even in those “loud girls” she smiled upon above; but as I saw it (incompletely) years ago, it seemed her style had turned its back on hope of reaching her world’s larger, soul-imprisoned audience of “now.” Disgusted with my own fortunes, I turned away from examples that promised more of same. Today, I think Barbara’s choice was her wisest gesture of hope—the hope that her uncompromising life’s and art’s examples against “DumbIdeas” might invite that audience to spit them out also, to rise back toward true living and true culture.

Look for example into Hypatia (2007). Multi-dimensions of being interweave, speak and generate revelation, as a contemporary woman remembers earlier lives (Barbara’s life-project)—filled with horrors, and then suddenly becoming a vision of Life in the purest sense. I am convinced that this passage draws on one of young Barbara’s most ecstatic life-epiphanies. Too dense, too “difficult”? Just read this slowly out loud, and see where Barbara takes you:

mid20th c. we went surf-fishing below Pt Dume Malibu

not yet Dawn we drank red wine as dark erased,erase

March fog,chill i caught the first fish,another then as

light,warmth came i went to climb rocks,explore the

beach a woman southward running her horse in surf,the

strong ankles of the sea i began climbing up&up,dirt

path,rock to the top of Dume hunched over the ocean

lay down in my jacket,jeans head on arm to sleep,groggy

w/wine. for how long i woke from,a horse push at my

head,woman on his back gazed down “he thought you

were dead” i rose in a full sun,turned to look out,down

to the sea 2 California gray whales coming north from

Baja the larger,lead whale just below as i stood up

it breached heaved over,dived disappeared in a deep

lunge of ocean,then lifted up Rose huge motion slow

Rocket out of the sea straight up,the absolute sun

dazzling him,all the way to the flukes and he hung

there,stopped the world in Wild salute of joy forever

then in another slow time sank down dazzling dazzling

into the sea reappeared far north spouting laughing

rolling as the companion followed,due north home

to breed i turned, woman & horse were gone the

synchronous kiss of the horse,awaking a Dead Woman

the perfect Salute of the whale,the earth & the sea

Look at the rebirth Barbara made manifest with that “difficult” broken-over line fourth from the end here: “the companion [whale] followed, due north home/to breed I turned….” Young Barbara, her soul awakened by this visionary moment, turned “home/to breed” a whole life of works having known, this once perhaps, what it was to be truly alive. It was real: it was “only” nature in its normal ways; and it set for her a standard of feeling, seeing and being that—in collision with the amnesiac shit-hole of her daily America—set alight the caustic volcano out of which she wrote and struggled to keep writing.

While Barbara predicted no problem finding a publisher for Canaan, it was indeed rejected repeatedly. The same cater-to-the-bottom soporific cupidity met all my works before and after. Profit has shut the gates to virtually all but celebrities, criminals and formula-humping hacks from fiction to history: if an even half-literate agent foresees no big quick kill, no publisher: no publisher, no agent. And yet through years of small-time public talks based on one form after another of self-publishing, the main question from audiences (who say they love a book’s gnarly footnotes best) is, “Why aren’t you famous?”

So, here at the end of 2015, I have turned my bodily back after 22 years on the pig-fattening wheel of university adjunct teaching, sold my beloved family home in Stoneham, Massachusetts, left my remaining family and dear friends, and moved back to Crete for good. I can still try to publish in exile. It was a decision beyond rational equations, born of an instinctive urge to simplify my living and focus the more on works I must get done before I die.

The next is People of the Sea: A Novel of the Promised Land, a sequel to Ariadne’s Brother: it traces the post-Minoan survivors of invasion in their journey from Crete to Cyprus to the creation of Palestine, and to their foundational confrontation with the first Israelites known to history. In discussing this with Barbara in letters I no longer have, I described this post-Bronze, Iron Age shift as a violently-imposed change from cultures and spiritualities embedded in the contexts of cyclic nature to a monolithic, biophobic way of life centered round a text (The Old Testament). She liked and acknowledged this text/context meme enough to develop it in multiple ways, from her poem of that name to her 2004 interview expanding on it beautifully with Adam Engel (published as “24/7 and Your Dreams” in dissidentvoice June 14, 2004).

Not a single publishing entity even acknowledges receipt of a People query or manuscript. Those who want to feed safely at the Pig-Trough do not tamper with this planet’s central problem, the psychotic Holy Book of its Masters of War and its Iron Age “exceptionalist” delusions. Ahead—if anyone notices at all—I expect the standard barrage of charges that I’m simply an anti-Semite, like anyone whose documentations breed doubts about the absolutes of Zionism. My reply will ask who among the self-styled “fathers of our ethics” has said or enabled the hearing of one fucking word about the young Jewish woman, Eve, whom I loved more than anyone in the world and followed as a Muse through decades of labor since her 1980 rape and unsolved murder.

All in all, Barbara and I had gone our separate but parallel ways as serious writers. Unbeknownst to me, she fell and broke her femur late in 2014. According to her son, Barbara recovered well, but also developed a serious cough that led to a medical exam in case of pneumonia; and that revealed stage-4 pancreatic cancer, which had metastasized to her lung.

Barbara had been “carrying a huge amount of work with her for decades,” since the 1980s developing “aspects” of a concept planned as a trilogy—and her last published book, The Victory of Sex & Metal (Oliver Arts & Open Press 2015) was/is only the first of it. “I think her intention was [that] once these earlier works were out of the way, she would then begin to prepare her current work,” her son added. Barbara received Victory on ”the day before she passed,” he wrote, “the horrible injustice being that she was just on the verge of publishing the crystallized final versions….I think she left this world feeling pretty shocked, angry, and stunned that she should make it this far and have the rug pulled out from under her just on the brink of actualizing RESULTS.” There is, by implication here, yet more of Mor to come.

Declining chemotherapy and surrounded by her children, Barbara’s end involved more breathing-distress than her cancer’s typically-severe pain. She died at home in Portland, age 78, on January 24^th, 2015. According also to our brilliant mutual Canadian friend Harriet Ann Ellenberger, poet and co-founder of Sinister Wisdom, Barbara was “still her caustic self” to the last. I will always be painfully grateful that her last words to me were “Love, Barbara.”

Below, the last two letters I have. I cannot clarify Barbara’s (or The New York Times’) opening linkage between the appalling 1952 film The Plymouth Adventure and writer Edna O’Brien, who was Irish (not “Austro-Hungarian”) and was not first-published till 1960. Secondly, I add the following clarification of Barbara’s next letter’s reference to NPR reporter Margot Adler (author of Drawing Down the Moon’s 1979 study of American paganism), as quintessence of the treatment both Barbara and I have received because of our works.

This true anecdote is from the final essay in my 2001 Good News from New England and Other Writings on the Killings at Weymouth Colony, about which Barbara’s letter-following speaks. I’d sent Adler, based on her then-bold study of paganism, a review-copy of Ariadne’s Brother:

Send your book-results of 15 years’ research and sacrifice aimed at healing to, among others, National Public Radio and its All Things Considered, care of star reporter Ms. Margot Adler. In a few months, she sends you a postcard inviting you to call her about it, at home. When you do [with millions of listeners at stake], she says her “friend” has read the first page and “wasn’t grabbed” by it. She’s also very busy waiting for the wisdom-packed confessions of mass murderer Timothy McVeigh.

As you see what is edging this work out of Adler’s attention, and as she insists she has no time for what she invited with her card, try the diplomatically-desperate. “Hold the phone, I’ll go shoot up the local McDonald’s. Will you ‘talk to me’ on-air then?” “Ohh,” Adler laughs, “I’d have to, then.” End of conversation. You miss her eventual report on how much we learned from McVeigh. A few months later NPR runs a filler asking “Where Was The West?” the last time the Hale-Bopp Comet swung by Earth (about 4000 years ago, smack at the height of Minoan Crete). The answer? “Nowhere: utterly primitive.” So was McVeigh, and his hobbies are “news.”

And so to the last letters I have, her first dated January 5^th, 2002:

Dear Jack—Nearby Powell’s [bookstore in Portland] has stacks of old free NYTimes Book Reviews, in one found this interesting connection between The Plymouth Adventure and Edna O’Brien—which you might already know. Why that very strange Austro-Hungarian wrote that book, I don’t know. How it [?] became a Hollywood film, neither. I hope your Irish Link-Luck is well-working with these continuous connections of the story that is Bursting to be Told.

Note a Palindromic Year: in my lifetime this and 1991, not another till 2112. END TIMES! END TIMES! (Circa 1999-2001 definitely Apocalypse dates for Nostradamus, Mayans, some Muslims; and those who believe the Jews’ return to Zion signals the same, although I don’t know if they have a prophetic date.) You know how Godz Crazies love to self-fulfill their Bad Dreamz. So, for intelligent people, more critical post-September 11^th than ever that your Plymouth stories be broadcast—and I know there are some smart ones in Hollywood Biz. I don’t know how much post-September 11^th YahooNoises will drown them out.

Good News from New England is a wonderful book, Jack. The Introduction has that lucid clarity of scholarship with Alive prose-flow that your writing has been improving and evolving all this time. And I am very proud and glad you rooted yourself in this subject and stuck with it: Morton and Plimoth are yours, we should all be grateful you finally unburied this Allegory of America in all its true blood and grit.

I haven’t read Jane Tompkins’ 1992 West of Everything (as one born and raised in the wetdream debris of The West, I should look for it. But the p. xxvii line in which you say she “laid bare America’s favorite self-image as an innocent hero ‘forced’ to righteous bloodshed” sure rings true forever, along with the other acute remarks from deTocqueville et al. Knowing that all our “American history” should begin here—with your work, I mean—and that it doesn’t: well, that’s “American History” ain’t it.

The “Stand-Up Historian” Wanakia [my alter-ego writing the final essay in Good News] is So YOU! It’s a beautiful rant. I’m sorry (i.e., disappointed) about Margot Adler’s response: Adler and Robin Morgan were the two “goddess-knowledgeable” feminists I respected. But the agenda is nailed down for them, copyright NYC.

When I visited back there, a big Goddess Celebration at some lower Manhattan cathedral (where The Learning Alliance is based), there were four Goddess-Speakers: Adler, Starhawk, Judith Plaskow, and someone named Sprague [cannot identify] who was an Episcopalian female minister: three Jewesses and a professional Christian, that is. No “pagan” women like me, or Mary Daly, or Z Budapest (although I’m sure 1-2 such types could be found in the city of NY???). The highly brilliant Jewish women, accompanied by such Christian professionals (e.g., Rosemary Radford Reuther) stand like a line of Ferocious Father-Guarding Amazons across the horizon, forbidding critique of The Bible.

Israeli politics might be earnestly critiqued, and Andrea Dworkin—the only true fighter—went after the misogyny of Her Fathers, and of the Holocaust Museum (and was collectively hissed out of the GirlClub for her guts); but “Deep Structure” analysis of The Bible’s textual propaganda as transferred into Western rationale for murderous expansionism was not allowed. When I did it (because I thought that’s what “Feminism” was about, and because as a Californian I was not shaped by EastCoastCodes), I was called “insane,” “a Liar,” “Dangerous and Awful” and branded a “person with no Heart or Imagination” by Adrienne Rich: all this in print, indeed in Sinister Wisdom (1982) under Rich’s new editorship. And it’s been downhill ever since for me!

The Bible is “God’s” RealEstateDeed to the Land of Israel, and if you go after it on this ground, you probably won’t be invited to the Prom. No doubt you could find your name on Head Inquisitioner John Ashcroft’s New List of Terrorists (meaning, with the Bush family’s mangled syntax, you are Asking To Be Terrorized For Eternity).

I assume you’ve read Ward Churchill—hear him now and then on NPR, local KBOO, he’s an Injun, teaches at Boulder, Colorado U: he’s got his feet on his own ground, so has courage to talk back. Rare. Well, your work joins the Company of Honorary Injuns. In GCM I wrote what should be a bumper-sticker: The Whole Earth Is Holy Land. I first wrote that on a construction-wall in Albuquerque, next to some Christian graffiti.

Indians understand, but when the call went up to remove the Zuni “swastika” from New Mexico State U’s yearbook and flag insignia, only the Zuni objected. The Zuni SunWheel, attached to the U since circa 1909, was erased in deference to some (relatively) newly arrived Santa Fean Jews. Supported by all the deplaced gringoes. It seems relentlessly Nasty to continue to harp on this issue, except that it keeps coming around, to fulfill the Prophecy of the Crazy God, Nietzsche’s God of Resentment and Revenge, Who Wants Everything Alive Dead.

My own personal Rant is so tired, redundant, I can’t really bear anything from me now but “fiction”—am very happy you are continuing the Chant in your own very fresh and still healthy voice. You sound like you truly are generous and want Peace, as you say, without losing humor or bull’s-eye direction of discourse. Also a rare achievement nowadays: Liberals are so stale and programmatic, i.e., brainless and gutless.

A whole new circle of communications must, I think, be made: people like Churchill, Michael Parenti, Vandana Shiva, Lori Wallach are saying brave and pertinent things, no taboos. I don’t hear them on NPR, but tapes of their talks in the West, mostly, broadcast on Portland’s independent radio KBOO. The argument that NEA et al.’s money ruins “public broadcasting” is supported by the self-censorship NPR seems to practice.

I DID see something good on Oregon Public Broadcasting last week, and am sorry I didn’t get more details on it: like the date, which I couldn’t see. It might be from any time in the past 5 years, I didn’t start watching TV till I got up here to Portland in 1998. It was a 2-part, 4-hour broadcast called Crucibles of the Millennium (aha, that must date it within a few years). The parties involved, and the speakers/narrators accompanying the broadcast, were preponderantly Hindu, Mexican, Peruvian, Muslim. Don’t remember American Indian, but a lot from the Spanish conquest of South America, with dramatized court case of Las Casas arguing against Sahagun (?) on the treatment of New World peoples.

It began with the lifeways of agricultural India/Middle East/Africa/Asia, then the first interactions from Western Explorers, although the first explorer noted was from China. And then in Part 2, the colonization of this hemisphere. Not radically hard-hitting, but clear: the God-rationalized genocide and theft of land that Built The West. And they did note that the original interactions of Euros (whites) and Africans (darks) was friendly and nothing we would later call “racist”: that is, mutual respect and interested curiosity re new cultures. This was one of the most multicultural views I’ve seen from Public TV, but they made the point that “racism” was not necessarily the original reaction of Euros—rather, the 16^th-century Profit/Prophet motives developed “racism” as the rationale for bad deeds, Serving God and Mammon by demonizing the Used. Worth looking for if you haven’t seen it, but I have no clues re its sources, producers etc. I hope it runs again this summer, I’ll take better notes (they always do reruns).

In H.P. Lovecraft, again, in Call of Chthulhu 3, The Madness from the Sea [his 1926 short-story], there’s a passage: “I…was visiting a learned friend in Paterson, NJ, the curator of a local museum and a mineralogist of note….My friend has wide affiliations in all conceivable foreign parts….“ (i.e., weird news from the world). Note 38, the editor says: “An exact description of Lovecraft’s friend James Ferdinand Morton (1870-1941), who became curator of the Paterson NJ Museum in 1925. Lovecraft, who first met Morton in 1922, visited him frequently at the Museum and also assisted him in rock-gathering expeditions in New England.” Did Thomas Morton have any progeny, descendants (Ferdinand?!) who might have continued the Pursuit of What Really Happened/Happens in this region? [Answer, No.] Would be cool, but I guess there’s a lot of Mortons around. On the other hand, your northeast territory is Not Big! Like Ireland, must be a lot of interbreeding….Hmmm.

[Barbara’s handwritten close:]   Three Excellent Books: You Go, Jack!

Below, my last-surviving letter from Barbara, dated March 13^th, 2002. She typed it on the blank back of a sheet onto which she had xeroxed a page from Harper’s Magazine (undated), and Barbara had pink-highlighted the following Letter to the Editor headlined “Chimps and the Clap”:

Robert Gilbert’s studiously intellectual treatise on applause (“Understanding Ovation,” Readings, October 2001) danced all around the phenomenon quite entertainingly. The heart and soul of clapping, however, wasn’t pierced. Zoologist, anthropologist, biologist, and philosopher Desmond Morris wrote a book on intimacy in which he writes of the sociological study of, I believe in this instance, chimpanzees. When they see fellow members of the group arriving, they are inclined to stand and make a gesture of embrace repeatedly, which results in hand-clapping. Now, isn’t that simple and wonderful? Applause is remote embrace, making Gilbert’s first example of crowd applause, a reaction upon viewing a solar eclipse, a fabulous scene of people embracing the very cosmos.

As Barbara wrote below, fighting her way into the Internet Age, she must have had an early version of Mystic Fiasco: How the Indians Won The Pequot War, co-authored with archaeologist and artist David R. Wagner but not published till 2004. For the record, the work’s iconoclasm, based in comparing actual landscape with “historical” records, shows again the rightness of a major Mor argument—that Tradition uses Text to deny, falsify and conceal Context and hence reality (because the English “victors” actually got their holy asses kicked at their wished-for “Mystic Massacre” of 1637, creating a foundational paradigm of Catastrophe Posed As Victory still in operation today). Fiasco’s fortunes show too that this self-serving disgrace to genuine history goes on, since staff of the venerated University of New England Press admitted “sitting on” this work for a year, in hope that its revelations embarrassing to the standing insider-experts “might just go away.” The full text with Wagner’s color art is at Ancientlights.org: the book, self-published as usual. Nobody would or will touch it.

March 13^th, 2002—Dear Jack, I think Mystic Fiasco must be one of the all-time great titles. It looks good, and the Coda’s poem by Little Owl/Ruth Duncan [“We Do Not Know How”] is genuinely moving, as most stuff that tries to be is not, I mean. I can see/hear the hundreds of Native generational years moving wearily through her lines. [It concludes, “They will not even hear/what their own stories teach.”]

So, yes, another ACHIEVEMENT—My take on it now is that some of us (maybe not you, but maybe you) must root deeply into the Irish monk genes, the few who kept scribbling in some manuscripts while all those years of murder conquest havoc whizzed around their cold ears. Surely you have some DNA déjà vu on this: the Irish did not save “civilization,” they saved the conquerors’ texts of course, but their own tweak is so pretty to look at. And, I think your steady work on these texts might be for the future, for those who crawl out of the next rubble and wonder: How? Why?

Earthlink [a defunct Internet Provider] sent a program that had to be inserted into my machine, to totally take over my thought processes with their Brand and their GeekGames. Teleport was so clean and simple, e.g., Delete meant Delete, Connect meant Connect: now I must search among twice as many icons being cryptically cute for “Trash” and “Sign On” and if I turn on my audio (I won’t) I can hear the MailTruck coming, Oooooo!! Am constantly being threatened with Disconnection and warned of illegal Actions bringing programs to a close—and I have no idea what they mean. My son installed this new program, and doing so gave him an attack of shingles!

But that was enough CRAP for the month? No. Next day, the  Monitor blew up. Turned on, the screen turned blazing cherry pink, flaming orange, blotches of blueberry purple and bruise blue. My son thought it looked like Sherbet. Flaming faggot tie-die neon sherbet, uh-huh. It did this twice, then just clicked—oops—and died. My son at work (manages Music Millennium East Side here) has dealt with computers that have smoke literally pouring from them, but he’s never seen this apocalyptic display. Well, the warranty is still in effect, gratefully, so they sent a new monitor. It took a week, the new one doesn’t fit the desk, and if I manage to get it open it is just full of the geek monsters described above.

I feel somewhat like giving up on The Electronic Highway—I don’t drive, cars or gameboards. But then when it was gone, I missed it as a great opportunity, which the servers keep fucking up. This is the third time in two years I’ve been sent back to square one, required to learn new programs, new icons and routes and patterns from the beginning. My Brit correspondents are getting into publishing online, there’s a cool world out there, but I keep getting shoved back to starting all over, very depressing.

Glad you like Suicidal Girls, it was fun but hard to do: the condensation, or “believing” in females. I do believe in the Young, but they know they are being lousily educated, so not much hope outside of their music/culture scene, for sure. It is, after all and however, their Future being sacrificed on the Biblical gameboards. I have the impression there is not much hope in my writing, except that Wit is a gesture of belief in something, whatever that might be. Since I’m temporarily giving up the computer thing, here’s some written material. Rapture and Sea of Hunger done last summer, before September 11^th (sent Sea to The Baffler in August, no response yet, it’s really hopeless).

I don’t know what you’ve read: here’s copy of pages from UK’s Intimacy and Ecorche. Did you ever read Here on the Bisbee copper mine? It is 30 pages with no characters no dialogue no sex, a real winner. Excerpted it’s in John Zerzan’s Against Civilization 1997. I think you’ve read it, nor do I know if you’ve read TraLaLa. Suffice it that only males, generally Brits, or total anarchists like Zerzan, print me. One hundred years from now, that will be considered a compliment (?).

Love, Barbara

This, then, is all I can offer of how much Barbara Mor gave of herself. I work meanwhile to create a video presenting her honey-voiced readings from Great Cosmic Mother done for Thomas Morton in 1992, and I hope it contributes to Barbara’s memory. I close with her statement on “Serious Writing in the World of Today” (from BookForum April/May 2009):

Our planet is a theater of sublime cannibalism. Our lives have always been sustained by the deaths of other living things, & vice versa: it’s an organic recycling process that, within the self-regulations & conservations of Nature, works. As a run-amock global factory & marketing system based on a corporate cannibalism that is regulated solely by the sharky appetites of Capital, Earth becomes a Factory of Horror. Writers respond to this by curling inward around personal pain, or reaching backward to connect with the larger agonies of human-made past history. But the Enormous Poem, in such a world, exists now & everywhere. It is inside us & there, performing sleeplessly 24/7: tragic epic, colossally cruelly funny drama, deadpan news items from hell. No extant “literary convention” approaches it. The writer/poet must see it for what it is without euphemistic self-protection; look long & hard without blinking or descent into memoirist babbling—& it will pour molten into yr eyes & brain forever. And then, with yr eyeballs burnt out & yr tongue charbroiled, you proceed to (try to) write. Play yr sacrificial part in this terrible feast. All the repressed gods &/or monsters from all the repressed mythologies ever on Earth are now returning to join you.

Such was my friend Barbara Mor, whose courage, tenacity, vision, “relentless love” and art reached out to show and embrace what we are, where we’ve been, where we can and must go. Onward. It’s up to every one of us to get serious, as if the stakes are Life or Death. They are.

—December 2015, Karteros, Crete

(End of the Tribute.)

Meet Mago Contributor, Jack Dempsey.

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