From there, through the next 42 years of travail—Why is this my culture’s “norm”?—there’s not a day or step or book of mine that isn’t hers. I have curled my strength around her sleep. She led me to the earliest art-history I could find, and there were the stunning “unknown” Minoans of ancient Crete: a woman-centered, joyful, dynamically creative and peaceful people without predatory “kings,” and they revel in life at the root of Western civilization for centuries longer than Rome or any period since. Such is the genesis of every work in these pages of Ancientlights.org today: a life’s work to document that we have other teachers, smarter ancestors, better choices—that The Garden is remembering we’re in it.
For the record (see for yourself with Links below), this Minoan world—a dynamically creative well-being in Nature’s eternal present, bound together by trade and intermarriage (and protected by strict limits on executive power)—was still going strong when natural disaster and war-loving, self-wrecking clowns (the mainland’s Mycenaeans) combined to take them down. This was the historical emergence of patriarchy, the rule of autocratic men, whose rape for profit and rage for power they sell to us with gods and goods as normal: “Homeric glory.”
He cannot control himself, and rather than learning, wallows in degenerate all-controlling fear of anything more powerful. So it is She who must cover herself, numb herself, be invisible, silent, obedient, pure yet alluring, please him in all things and, “ideally,” die.
Books, bricks and walls of “his-story” bear down to bury our original Minoan success in nihilism, desperate to convince us that we’re cursed and trapped, while a toxic edifice from blood-exploiting media to crime-fiction and movies gives the lie—as a blossoming young woman who “must” be repeatedly cruelly killed. After an age when our brilliance sang the sanctity of women (hence, of Life), this is daily eucharist, central sacrament in the ritual murder of the best in us. Try counting how many times per day we fakely face the “tragedy” of her annihilation. The last 42 years of this faded Eve’s murder into one among thousands and thousands of Cold Cases round the world that men wish for and pretend to rule.
Always a fresh “compelling” scenario round the same murder takes us worse than nowhere. Pornographic culture (turning Life into dead commodity) soaks the nervous system in erotic indulgence, but leaves us not with deeper more miraculous perception: instead, dis-spirited, de-moralized, numb and ever-more hungry for true ecstatic consummation. That is, to live and evolve our souls in this living flesh in a living world and universe. Hollow grifters rob us daily of real eternal life.
It seems erotically urgent that we accept this. Publishers and agents “don’t even want to look at it” if you’re going to make people feel something, while farming out millions to any who can “entertain” with the sick aesthetic of an Edgar Allan Poe—who declared “the death of a beautiful woman” as “the most poetical topic in the world.”
Love’s deep disturbance is the sham values of patriarchy built on the profits and rewards of psychotic dysfuntion: ignorance, fear and hatred of Earth, of women and peace. Of Life, in a word. If this seems too polemical, look around: Earth dying faster than ever, rights and human institutions crumbling, and the greatest investments by far in soldiers, weapons, and destruction on a planet still with plenty for everyone. The verdict of 2022 is that we’ve learned nothing, and fake necessity prevents it under the rule of men who lack only the courage to feel, question, control themselves, find another smarter way. Yet, there are ways out.
Consider the “logic” shared between Eve’s murderer and the global gangsters stumbling toward suicide, anatomized by Susan Griffin’s brilliant Pornography and Silence. For all that we refuse to feel, change and evolve, Life (the Erotic) just keeps coming back to demolish adolescent wishes. The psychotic spiral accelerates, for the rituals of fear increase it: “the mind that believes in delusion must still face reality.”
So comes a choice: come to terms with reality, or force the world to resemble the delusion. And where can we look for the quintessential expressions of our choice so far? The daily murder, conquest, exclusionary walls and never-enough-weapons of Zionist apartheid Israel are its failing monuments, maintained by a senile Zero-Sum American Empire, in whose (wishful) world only more death-machines can bring peace, and there can be only one all-controlling power.
What can we positively do? Peace is not the absence of war, nor does a practical problem-solving global family happen by default. Those long-gone Minoans actively fostered both with their heterarchia, a nature-based cyclic round of festivals promoting the sharing of power across differences. (The elements of this in Calendar House.) This was so fundamental to their long success that we find it inscribed 1,000 years after them on the wheels of the world’s first computer, the Antikythera Mechanism. The answers are behind and before us.
Pornographic patriarchy ends when each of us feeds it no more of our daily life-sustaining labor—and learns to share the world again.
***
I cried every day for the first two wretched years of losing Eve (for as Dante said in La Vita Nuova, “how she has been among us, and is not”). It ate me alive that I hadn’t ignored Eve’s wishes and seen her safely home; and that her gentle soft-spoken father let me ride with his shattered family from funeral-home to the grave, while holding me rightly responsible. At last one day I broke open as wide as the morning when we shared that luminous breakfast. This is how much I can love, and now I cannot lose, because this feeling is to win. Another desperate day, Dante’s Comedy cracked open to the very page (Canto V, Inferno) where it seemed Eve was speaking to me still:
Love, that in gentle heart so quickly wakes,
took him with this fair body, which from me
was torn: the way of it still hurts and aches.
Love, that to no beloved remits his fee,
took me with joy of him, so deep in-wrought,
even now it hath not left me, as thou dost see.
And so we come to the March 2022 day when dedicated detectives of Suffolk County Homicide announced a positive DNA-match, proving who had somehow abducted Eve, held her and raped her through four nights, and then strangled her, to dump her half-clothed body in a family’s backyard not half a mile from her uneasy Bay Shore home.
The murderer himself (29 at the time) died of cancer only 11 years after Eve. Truth by way of un-burying. It seems that a person so beyond pathetic had to need help to do what he did. But at least by the news stories closing the case (linked below), likely we will never know more.
Historian Barbara Mor’s 1981 reply when my first letter sent her Eve’s story and pages of the 15-year labor called Ariadne’s Brother:
I’ve put off to the end here your experience, the ‘everyday’ destruction of a young woman named Eve. Yes. That’s all I can say: Yes. Our world is built on it, like a vampire is built on blood….One of my biggest revelations was really focusing on the timing of historical events; realizing that The Inquisition, the ‘witch’-burning, the pornographic details of the dungeons and the tortures of daily life which we sloppily relegate to ‘the dark ages’ truly occurred, in their maximum ferocity and misogynistic legality, during THE RENAISSANCE, that glorious time of Shakespeare and Rubens and the glorification of Greek nakedness and female flesh and the gorgeous reawakening colors of life.
That’s when most women were burning at the stake. That’s when the stench of their flesh was ‘a daily event,’ the quotidian incense. That’s when horror was so habitual, we are still numb: we, the inheritors of those who survived, we still don’t know what happened to us. That’s how all-pervasive it was. It’s Gestalt Theory: the thing we notice least is the thing that is everywhere, we no longer question it, the daily background. It takes a personal tragedy to hook into that background, like a terrible crochet needle, and pull it forward: we see the threads of life are all bloody. They are made of the torn tendons and screams of tortured beings. It’s explained as ‘human nature,’ and that is what we must question now….
The last lines missing from Dante’s verse: “Love led us both to one death. He that sought/and spilt our life—Cain’s Hell awaits him now.”
I wish no one in Hell. No one. Only the lie that such “everyday events” are our inevitable inheritance.
Let us awaken. If not us, who?
Let us correct this. If not now, there won’t be a later.
We can do this.
It won’t be long before another day.
—5 LINKS—
https://longisland.news12.com/suffolk-investigators-crack-42-year-old-homicide-case
(End of the sequel)