akaDARKNESS: on Kathy Acker
Barbara Mor
On Kathy Acker
On Nov 29, 1997 I walked 8 blocks through pounding coastal rain to the
American Red Cross Center in Eureka, Northern California. It was a Saturday.
Weekdays I worked as activities aid for Humboldt County Adult Day Care/
Alzheimers, and I had to renew my CPR & Standard First Aid certification for
the job. Cold thick rain set the mood, I arrived wet and pissed. The Red Cross
Center was in the basement of an old school building that also housed Ink People,
Eureka’s friendly place for writers, plus an auditorium that was a venue for all
kinds of local activities, including Christian fundamentalist Hell-raising. In the
basement with 5 MedEmergency professionals and the ARC tester, plus two
medical dummies, I was the least qualified CPR performer – I barely passed.
I can’t remember directions, was obviously the amateur among skilled people,
and spent a long time pumping my dummy’s chest until I got the routine right.
Doing so, I knew I’d never save someone’s life – pump pump pump – and pitied
anyone who might ever need me to do so. It was a very gray negative day. Still
pouring rain outside, I returned to my duplex apartment and switched on the radio,
my best friend in town. A British woman, with her American radio-engineer
husband, had rigged a satellite dish in their pasture; they pulled down the BBC
24/7 and transmitted it to the Arcata/Eureka region. My culture fix. I slept on
the floor with the radio beside my head, always on. Next a.m. (whatever the time
difference was, who knows) I woke during the weekend Art/Culture hour, and
heard a BBC interviewer discussing Acker’s life & work with her London friend,
Leslie Dick. And that’s how I learned of Kathy Acker’s death. Apparently, all
the time I was pumping a medical dummy’s chest in Eureka, one of America’s
great writers was dying, down the coast in Mexico. I’d had no idea she was so
sick, her death shocked me, and still shocked a week later I wrote “akaDarkness”
for the Brit journal Ecorche, edited by Ian Taylor. It was later reprinted in John
Noto’s Orpheus Grid, published in San Francisco.
Acker wasn’t respected here as anything major, except by APR & avant-punk lit journals. Certainly her death was not announced on any American flatworld broadcast the day it occurred. But there, on the Queen’s English BBC, radioed to the big round globe, a respectful 10-15 minute discussion of Acker’s life & work, “as-if” she was a significant world writer. How about that. Acker’s death hit me very hard, out of Brit radio like a kick in the head; compounding the stun was the absence of mention or awareness anywhere else in my vicinity: Arcata/Eureka bookstores, etc., Kathy Acker, who? A disorientation that reoriented me once again to the emptiness of American culture. Considering how much worse it’s gotten since 1997, maybe she just got out in time, smart girl.
I first heard of Acker from Paul Buck, British writer, editor & translator, a friend & correspondent of Acker’s; he described her frustration with “the American scene,” in particular the flak she got from feminists hostile to her use of pornography. Censorship, the desire to defend ourselves within misogyny’s brutal context, will always, within that context, be used against us. Women used it against women. Full Circle in 70s-80s Albuquerque, the only women’s bookstore within 150 miles in all directions (it no longer exists) had a floor- to-ceiling section of gay male books, but not one copy of K. Acker. The women running the store seemed proud of this; perhaps not coincidentally, their own writing unoriginally sucked. A PC provincialism that defined Acker’s language as “violent” or “hetero male dominant” too easily joined hands with Christian Fundamentalist erasure of our female right to explore the genital cosmos. And this smug piety, fullblown, whether exerted by patriarchy or its PC handmaidens, always crushes the young female proto-writer’s brain inward, into morbid self- suppression, before she has a chance to know her indigenous volcanic powers. I saw Acker in person once, at the Bisbee (AZ) Poetry Festival 1985, where she read with Jayne Cortez, Juan Felipe Herrera, & John Ashbery. Acker read from Don Quixote (published in 1986). Back in my beatnik teen years, backseat Mercury sex & rebel Levi intellectual aspirations, that’s how a girl wanted to write. Not “pornography” but True Romance: the bitter earnest heart of female Lust which is innocent despite the world. That’s how it was, that was how it felt, how a girl writer would say it, the sound of inside our mind inside this body, but we couldn’t, or didn’t. She did.
Acker was not a “woman,” i.e. a grownup. She was American, we are all children. The eternal American girlchild resists the phony constraints of “the adult role.” No marriage, motherhood, careersuits, consumption of cant and coffins. She defied capitulation to the social roles that want to absorb us all into machinefriendly clichés and death. Because she was forever “pre-capitulation” (and that would mean in eternal war against having her smart head (caput) colonized by capitalism (heads of cattle as value), she would not be a herd animal, or “a woman” meaning a moo cow in America, or wherever Biblically reproducing money goes. Her voice was pure. Her handwriting so childish, or “earnest young girl” calligraphy, scrawling enormous monster things. Insight and outsight one thing: what hurts (everything) shouldn’t hurt (in a just world), but it does (the world is fucked), so feel it linguistically, that’s yr Job. She wrote it over and over like picking at a scab over some existence’s total wound.
The workshop/creative writing mantra of our day (60s, 70s, 80s) told writers: Find your voice. Female writers, who were assumed to have no voice, who felt ourselves to have no contemporary literary voice as yet, because everything unsaid, left for us to say, was unspeakable (menstrual blood, cunt stink, desire of fucks no lady could imagine), struggled to utter one’s original voice. Acker confronted this formula with a clear child’s question: Why? Why “one’s voice” as one voice? She heard within herself Many Voices, and didn’t assume this was a signature of “female madness” like all women of all time were encouraged to do. No, for a child, she was very clear about her “female utterance” – it could never be, because it never was, A Voice – it was Voices. And no, we are not crazy: we are Multiple (Various) (Fractal) (Alive in the Dark, breathing language).
Dust to Dust says the funeral over the dead. You can’t say that over Kathy Acker. In her life she wrote close to busy worms & pitch dark. In death her black language pulses feral inside each reader as Death is alive inside every living thing. Dust has nothing to do with it.
For Acker the ceremony can only be Words to Words.
akaDARKNESS
she was an allamericangirl. I know her i never knew her.
her father was god the original Incestor. her mother deranged
and suicidal did bad imitations of Mother Earth. on this
marriagebed, the cunt of a planet(life) stuffed repeatedly
by a stone book(Law), it looks like a freeway accident. the
little ones crawl out nervy as blood scrawls the worms
of history. they become writers. crime is in our hands
already,why not impress huge forests of paper(time) with
smart graffiti of a fuckt heart. wounds of the crotch(indi-
genous). some become a bigname author and sell yr
(see above)redundant script. fame and money we learn from
movies a false security,which crackles when you roll over
stuff inside the mattress provides,sanity,the intellectual
apartment of a nights sleep with only dreams(inside you).
i never knew her. read her books. remember the sullen
invention, in the mirror, of america. as teenage room of
soul, with the long mirror on the door you shut,look, and
strip naked to look into at her: HER,theObject(I neverknew).
the American teenagemale hunched sideways clutching his
famous genitals and a cigarette,fuck you, wants to fuck(you).
this is all we know. he looks back from the mirror,i am
standing here, i am a naked girl. even the mirror is Subject
who gazes at yr raw body with lust of total indifference
(and vice versa). the dark hole in the center of the Female
eye receives images like a blackhole. theSelf so gravitous
with acts of the Unknown a billionbillion(Orgasms)of evolution
per second sucks into itself as Pure Awe,sinks the retina the
Will the schoolgirlBrain,itself asImage,object as Abject
(magazine pages spread open for perusal her lips are saying)i
am boredom w/no self. he wants to Bore you with his Self. only
He was real. She is a girl. may be the Hole our Hero falls into,
this is the Whole of westernliteraure. there is no god taken
seriously who claims her except as the Father his(HandMade)
dirty fuck
so she stops looking at herself. she turns off the light, or
one evening slamming shut the Evil Door(flesh) between us and
Her,the shards of mirror shattering fly around the dark
room as instantaneous stars, realizing these are also Edges,
she grabbed and cut into, that slammed place,that – Her Flesh –
now a total blank or blur hanging as Expression on the night,
present as a wall to touch, she slashed,razored then refined,
to surgicalText sculpt wrote the vision of herEyeless Feel
aka the dark.theFucking of Herself. not HowSheLooks but HowItFeels,the
body blank as a page,one fingerafteranother dipped in cum
moves across this nude piece.she did it also on a Stage. the
fingers stick up inside, sucked further and further upward(lefthand)
while the right hand vibrates the fountainous clit and all this
is ink,compulsion,smeg,piss shit design,the entire existential
discharge. or discourse of ‘whores & abominations’ yrBooks have
silenced. i discover all these biologorhythmic materials
for writing. black X-stasis stationery for theMoving Finger.the
people on the move,a woman on,pelvises and maggots(conscious),the
philosophers (Heidegger)THROWN BODY thrown here,there,out,anon-
ymous the abortiontable,the carhood,Algiers selfthrown,this
is the point open yr legs spread inject yr cunt Epically for
night sailing(piratedeck brothel bad movie love) theSpurt
of mothers milk you never had but a suck ofDeath also works
as,raids on the Night you have no choice but to survive
yr own imagination .for the Universe is
continuous explosion ofDarkness inside Imploding dark.and
there is nothing like it except Her mind
which they have stolen from,InsideHerBody(Dasein)for a
million years.Potentia. poetentia.who felt itself a hole(Zero)
everything gets tossed into(Wesen),trashcan alley,stink of.
tampons,Freud said, are phallic symbols.so are ballpoint pens,
knitting needles,yr finger and a dick.in the girls lavatory,most
females read the mirrors, some read walls,She being wholly
Literature,reads inside(fetal,kickt)of her body.how it cognates
THE POETIC RUSH,being among echoing bones of Girls or swirl at
EventHorizon everything suckt in rim of her cunt(brain),
marriages,literati,war zones .traps of erotic intelligence the
warm black gushes over them who think that Fucking us they
know us,or the weak who ‘love’ simply lacking guts
of defiance.for always she is Alone with her work
always she is the total of what she knows
how it feels the sound of
father incestor visiting
darkness he tells you everything
they believe in God, is a big dick,
the lie of the big Dick
the Law,the lie IN you
worldnews,banks politics doctors,religion booksTextual
structures collapse(like a Dick,you cum you know)
thre is nothing true on earth but fear and knowledge, and yr
body in a dark room. is Both. only females know Evil she
writes (DON QUIXOTE)for females only are entranced,or
hallucinations of desperate trust,it glows from inside like a light
in yr head,you know everything
if she talktSex you wd pay attention,what she is really
saying is:the Female Mind.mass cell of the body,organ bone
skin hair juice aminos nets of blackfibrous INK,GALLEYS
of nerve remember that is the plasma field of (murmurs,stellar
whispers)Language she bends to warp electroMagnetic muscle
(infinite flesh of)word the tongue that she twistsSyntax
around into her ownBlackSpace of solitude,no Sartre noNietzsche
Artaud Sade Bataille no killer no lover no God is a
solitary woman.
the male ishalf female.the female is female.thePERVERT
is one strives to know such knowledge in body the spectacle
Him in the sling,a nude curled over in O Zero tries to fuck his
own mouth,suck his own prick
:being HisOwnWoman,this is a
FemaleDiscipline,to make the hole her own Hero,that is a
great Female Act of Recognition
who is alone with such knowledge (fear).
gods big dick in defaulted dark (politics) historically
convicting in its Power. you cannot answer(the door
open yr bone)without saying yes. but then He (sacrament)
dies between yr legs, as always.the aftermath is
cruel(pity),and for this you must be Punished.
for Pity casts out fear(the birth of Literature)
this is who you are. boys are all Gaze(lies)but
females Hear in the dark, all the flesh of our
body, inside and out, listens. Listens,shines
(like a sweat) the organ ofknowing is the Cunt.
autoAutopsy(from inside)
sleepless in the darkafter He leaves,splits,ceases to be,alive as
some first Universe, the Fuckof god dips her
finger in red cum ( ) andbegins.
Dear Diary
writes her Laundry list and the shopping list
and List of Names (beginning and End) of the glistening
world and Her death wish(teenage rocknroll)
the poetry of Nights Will
‘I will not be nothing’
her Cunt shaped like a fist
her Cunt shaped like a heart.
tattooed over the BleedingHeart of Jezus on the wall
her books the GirlGraffiti wrote on the bathroom sacred
wall,the stall over the toiletpaper the door the ceiling
who was Michelangelo to tell us what happens what she found
here,what is Creation what is fear whatis brave what is
brain what is Guts,girl.upagainst it, alone
a Loser, really. that was her startingposition. expertise,of
female,territory, destination. who can lose it all and still be
Stubborn, in the worlds eclipse,writing.
Writing is one method of dealing with being human or wanting
to suicide cause in order to write you kill yourself at the
same time while remaining alive.
“Girls Who Like to Fuck”
Now in her work she smashed up dolls and remade the
pieces as one must remake oneself, into the most hideous
abstract nonunderstandable conglomerations possible
which certain people saw as beautiful.
“Abortions”
I need anything, anything, that will stop me from living in
the kind of death the bourgeois eat, the death called comfort.
“Girls Who Like to Fuck”
Not emptiness, monsters sit in flesh’s halls. I know monsters
and loneliness and they keep me alive.
“The Last Days of Rimbaud”
I will not be nothing.
“The End of Childhood”
First published in: Ecorche 2, editor Ian Taylor, UK, Nov 1998 Orpheus Grid 3, editor John Noto, San Francisco, Winter 1999
about the author
Barbara Mor, author of The Great Cosmic Mother, has published poetry, essays & experimental fiction in Sulfur, BullHead, Orpheus Grid, Studia Mystica; Brit journals Intimacy & Ecorche; The New MS & Trivia: a Journal of Ideas (1900-94). Online, “24/7 & Yr Dreams,” an essay-interview with Adam Engel, appeared in www.dissidentvoice.org June 14, 2004; “the secret pornographies of Republicans,” “What’s Left,” & “Preferably Knot” appeared in www.triviavoices.net, Feb 2005. Experimental fiction, “Oasis,” “Here,” & “Sea of Hunger” are online at www.ctheory.net, “A Thousand Days of Theory,” Aug 4, 05; Dec 12, 05; & April 12, 06 respectively.
