Radical: A Tribute to Barbara Mor by Lise Weil

“It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never ‘radical,’ that it is only extreme, and it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension… (T)hought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its ‘banality. Only the good has depth and can be radical.” Hannah Arendt, in a letter to Gershom Scholem

“We could call Trivia a journal of radical feminism if ‘radical’ were taken to refer, not necessarily to a particular political line, but to a habit of thought, as described in the O.E.D.: ‘going to the root origin; touching or acting upon what is essential and fundamental; thorough.’” Editorial, Trivia: A Journal of Ideas #1, Fall 1982

Recently I received a thank-you e-mail from a woman in Texas who had ordered a full set of Trivia: A Journal of Ideas, the print journal I founded in 1982 and from which this online journal originally sprang. The e-mail read, in part, as follows: “I have never been very comfortable with women. The radical feminist has given me the opportunity to become close with them. Something I had wanted all my life. I was raised with more males and gave birth to more males. I loved them, and wanted to know what had destroyed them. Radical feminists taught me who destroyed them…I owe much to the Radical feminists, those women in the past and present. My sons owe them.”

I loved these lapidary, lucid sentences. They reminded me of why that word—“radical”–which I notice I’ve been avoiding lately in association with feminism—was one I insisted on, used proudly, back in the 80s. I never wanted to bother with any other kind of feminism. “Liberal”? “Socialist”?  “Pacifist”?  “Post-structuralist?” Un-unh. I wanted the real kind. The kind that brooked no compromise. That drilled down deep enough to root out all the lies and crippling beliefs we were heir to as women living in patriarchy. Later on, I became aware that “Radical Feminism” had gotten weighed down with ideological baggage, but at the get-go what it was to me was simply this: stripping everything down to barest truth. Daring to see what is and then speak it out. Those feminists of the 60s and 70s who were dedicated to uncovering what had been kept under wraps for centuries, for millennia, who lived and worked amidst the foul odor of what had been festering there, often at great personal cost, those were radicals, and they were my heroes. Their work took toughness and stamina and great HEART. I was forever indebted to them.

Barbara Mor was this kind of radical, this kind of feminist. For me in fact she was perhaps the truest exemplar. (And through her writing continues to be.) Implicit if not urgently explicit in almost all of her work was a call for women to recognize our historical roots. “The First God” was her own title for her landmark ecofeminist book The Great Cosmic Mother (HarperCollins wouldn’t use it); “Hypatia,” written some twenty-five years later and as Barbara saw it “a condensation of The First God was about the first witch publicly murdered by the Inquisition. Barbara began a project on the 19th century suffragists when she discovered that they were about radically reinventing the world, her true lineage:

“In my limited historic knowledge, the 19th century suffragists were blurred together with the infamous curmudgeon Carrie Nation & her Christian Temperance squadrons of saloon wreckers, wielding their humorless axes with the pious goal of shutting down all the fun in town. A few years later, on the SDSC campus, amidst anti-war, civil rights & women’s liberation protests, I got my Feminist awakening: I learned who those 19th c. women were, the history of their struggles to radically change the political, social, economic & religious worlds I’d thought would never change much, for women or anyone else. And aha! I learned that Elizabeth Cady Stanton was in fact a theoretical rebel, who, along with Matilda Joslyn Gage, worked & thought far beyond single-issue & reformist politics into a profoundly different vision of human life & interaction on this planet. I became a feminist historian of sorts, inspired by their vision–as many of us were; & as many of us lived to see, in the Reagan 80s, those feminist visions hit the wall & shatter into relatively lame adjustments to the intact patriarchal system, &women’s consequent switch from demanding change with a Fist to petitioning nicely for ‘the right to belong to’ the Man’s World that remained fundamentally unchanged.”[1]

Dedicated as she was to exposing our radical roots, to shining light on what has been shrouded in darkness, forgotten or distorted, the past three decades of backlash, cooptation, and erasure were for Barbara a constant irritant. “..the burning vision I retain from the 60s-70s,” she wrote in a letter, “was our need to retrieve women’s work/history & embed it so weldedly into our art & culture & scholarship, these women’s contributions to human evolution would never get buried alive. And then for 2 decades or more I’ve been watching that burial happen again, richly in the name of Gender Studies….” [2] (Though the response of young, present-day readers of The Great Cosmic Mother must have been some consolation to her:  “We were Cassandras in our time, & now younger people are realizing what a lot of the smartest politicos (&feminists among them) didn’t really take seriously; I’ve been told & read online that GCM that dumb NewAge book! Is more real & relevant now than when it was written, a young person’s response: they’re right!”[3])

Unabashed rage was the driving force behind much if not all of Barbara’s visionary writing, especially in The Blue Rental and maybe most of all in “Hypatia”:

                        -this woman gets her ComeUppance
       -thinks shes so damn smart
       -a God who can lower the mighty presume to teach men
         abomination,beat her to her knees & grovel upside cocky head
         w/Gods big cock open her mouth to scream
       -utter philosophy her oral poetry i’ll give her oral
       -jism Up Her Ass w/some silence
       – haw haw haw
       -shut her mouth
       -what

-slice out big pieces of bitch brain stick it on a sharp stick (p. 108)

Alongside the rage, there is grief—for a kind of female consciousness that is in danger of being tamed out of existence:

 …..suburbs of located normality there is a bank there is a
church there is a school there is a life once oracle once
Delphi once pythoness of the world her body busy & lost                 
​                 watching thru glass children in plastic pools wives&husbands
                  joined in squat marriage over toiletbowl&insurancepapers (pp. 109,110)

If Barbara raged and grieved about what has become of women it’s because she was so achingly aware of the power we once wielded. In her working notes for “Hypatia” she says that she had conceived her as “a kind of natural female consciousness that recurs in any of us if we are not programmed otherwise. Hypatia becomes Us – recollecting those original radical days! Like many of us in the 60s, she comes to awareness in a Daly act of re-membering herself: reading& reprinting female history discovered for the first time (over & over): Wow, this is what we were, this is what happened to us.” What Barbara mourned most of all was our “quantum/magic/poetic capacity to re-engineer a world committing suicide (for want of Female intelligence).” For the rage and the grief were not only on behalf of women:

in Africa we are eating primates,gorillas,chimpanzees
logging roads open to men w/light,cheap weapons
semiautomatic slaughter kill the jungle there is a
market for “monkey meat” as one would eat ones
child,mother laughing without shame bullet tears
,or machinegun them to death for Nothing,because
that is life,a river thick with hippos,pigs or human
bodies stink all the same,in Africa as elsewhere,it
is time to eat ourselves,the hour of ouroboros
eating his delicious lunch,fat bulldozers order our
bones like gods, the time of mining whales for
dogfood,the seas all stink w/death,& will soon be
deserts as Men have dreamed in the great religion
of machines&War.breed children for Armies or for
food,or let them die to clear our continents,scrape
Africa etc flat&bare as a newborn planet,build
Industries of disaster that need disaster,disease
that feeds disease,manufacture Death to profit huge
tautologies of Money  (p. 124)

Toughness. Stamina. Heart. Above all, in Barbara’s case, heart. In one letter, she referred to herself as a “solitary grumbling witch,” and it’s true that neither she nor her writing had anything warm or fuzzy about them. But I’ve never worked with a writer who was more conscious and appreciative of my own labors as an editor. Barbara was this way (I’ve seen evidence) with every editor who ever published her, acknowledging not only the attention we gave to her writing but the ongoing work of sustaining a journal or a press, which she was aware could be both onerous and thankless. 

Barbara noticed work that went on behind the scenes, especially if it was work that made other life/lives possible. Her thirteen months living homeless in Tuscon gave her special sympathy for women who clean motel toilets—she was one of them. “In 1987,” writes Edgar Garcia in his quasi-biographical review of The Blue Rental, “she moved again to Tucson, believing the prestige of recently published Great Cosmic Mother might secure her a lectureship at the University of Arizona (hoping to simultaneously write a comparative study of Celtic and Mesoamerican spiritual systems). Instead, she failed to get even cleaning work in their maintenance department. She was soon on the streets. Mor remembers a particularly telling episode during this period of homelessness when she was caught sponge bathing in a bathroom at the University. She was run out by a maintenance worker even as her book was being taught at the University.”[4]* As cruel as this fate was, being shut out of the academy was, as Garcia points out, a boon to her life’s work of “taking apart the visceral reality beneath our national mythology.” The women she met on the streets–prostitutes, homeless women, women who toiled long hours for crap wages—seem to have inspired much of the writing in The Blue Rental.

she might be a woman of genius abandoned husband and/or
children to write in a bare room desperate fictions or construct
philosophies of our disappearance her cause is hopeless
on her back inventing God on my knees scrubbing cloister
floors which she entered to study algebra or catalog
poetry of asylums,her ink personal blood stealthily extracted
womans work as daily excrement is womens work
staring into washtubs toilets abattoirs bowels of diapers&
hospital sheets the Void men make a philosophy of
daily female practice scouring foul tenets pretend to heal
 war poverty lust conduct economies of scale i count out
 toothpicks string bouillon cubes she became an old woman
selling old spoons in a doorway with no teeth,or in some
battlefield ditch or brothel she was once beautiful or brave but
nameless nothing survives  (p. 106)

I think it’s fair to say that in Barbara’s writing, both rage and grief are always forms of love and most especially love for women: what we were and might have continued to be and sometimes still are.

So far I have said nothing of Barbara Mor’s word genius, though I hope it’s been obvious in every bit of writing I’ve cited, the letters and working notes no less than the texts themselves. Barbara was as much a master of language and of linguistic innovation as James Joyce (her literary blood lineage); like him, she radically reinvented grammar, syntax and the way words appear on the page. However his genius was in the name of Art, hers in the service of women and the earth, which is the only way I know to explain why a work like The Blue Rental—which presents about the same level of reading difficulty as Ulysses—is not widely recognized as a literary masterpiece.  

Radical reinvention of language and form was in Barbara’s case not separable from her dedication to  conveying the experience of bodies that have been rendered invisible, if not disposable. I know no more eloquent statement of poetics than the following, from her working notes for “The Missing Girls.”
​
Hot & dry, the desert trance is a continuous
sweat of film on yr bare skin, the only interface you carry
around between yr unhoused nakedness & a very hard world.
And of course continuous stories, brutal rumors(facts)of things
happening to street people all around you: prostitutes beaten,
homeless found dead, drug ODs. All of The Blue Rental, &
certainly something like The Missing Girls, was born out of
this immersion in the heat & shimmering convergence of
daily events & ancient dream along our southwest border.  
To convey such experience, I needed every linguistic tool
in my kit: prose, poetry, polemic, newspaper data, historic
reference, nonverbal sensory input barely translatable in
any way but bending, distorting & amputation of the usual
syntax into something more….primal, that can scream, &
bleed. Utter the unutterable (whose sound is always there,
except we make a lot of noise to drown it out. The writer
must turn up its volume, because it stuns & hurts. That’s
the point)……………………………
​
If Barbara pushed tirelessly against the boundaries of language and form, it’s also because her vision embraced so much:

…………………………………………….. I have a
lot of voices in my head (desert delirium?!). No, women are
many voices, & no single genre, like no conventional linear/
narrative sentence can capture the multidimensional context
& pain & possibility of the world today (it never could). We
are poets, we are polemicists, we are prose essayists, news
reporters, theorists, cosmologists, historic witnesses. All
this is what it takes for women writers to rewrite the world.
Each of us has to work out a way to get it All in: including
the kitchen sink, the garbage disposal, the local dumpsters,
the great human trash mounds of the world now become
human habitat for so many.[5]

Barbara Mor confronted a world committing suicide and rewrote it, calling on all the voices and the genres that lived in her and re-engineering language so it said what she meant. Her work is radical in all the ways that radical still resonates for me:  Unflinching. True. Original. Essential.

All citations from Barbara Mor, The Blue Rental (New York: the Oliver Arts & Open Press).
Emphases on radical in Mor’s writing are all mine.

Notes
​
[1] Unpublished working notes

[2] personal correspondence used by permission of Harriet Ann Ellenberger

[3] Ibid
​
[4] Edgar Garcia, “Barbara Mor’s The Blue Rental: Rooms Outside Hollywood, Hell, USA,” Los Angeles Review of Books, April 19th, 2014

[5] Working notes, “The Missing Girls,”Trivia: Voices of Feminism #12, Spring 2012.

[Editor’s Note: This was first published in Trivia: Voices of Feminism.]

(Meet Mago Contributor) Lise Weil