the secret pornographies of republicans

 by Barbara Mor

another century, Albuquerque BagNSave parkinglot a man bent over newspaperbox fixt on a headline, little man balding paunchy sweaty exactly what you think headline bold letters Women Learn Self-Abortion Techniques, the story describes detaild method Menstrual Extraction 5-6000 people line Central Ave Rte 66 3 miles away simultaneously men women white shirts,blouses dark blue pants,skirts Gods uniform, all hold identical signs preprinted Abortion is Murder Abortar es Matar and every fetus in the womb is Jesus if a boy and Mary Mother of Jesus if a girl and the woman on Albq Journals frontpage poses naked & obscene, 29 years old he imagines thick legs open facing the world of course she wears lipstick, tongue pusht thru bloody mouth long scarlet purple fingernails insert vacuum into wet vagina squeeze bulb whirr blender suck out yr brains the little man stares, sweaty, dizzy into lurid Hole, his whole life flashes before his eyes like a newsstrip, not much but his so it is HisLife getting suckt out because Women can do it, story that made illegal again they will do it anyway, learn criminal techniques, hide in cars apartments YWCA locker rooms subvert the Law abort fetuses again and again which is always Him and theyd better stop before Women destroy the World as Bible sd if not controlld they will because That's What They Are: Evil, out to kill men, suck him in then suck him out, how he always knew God warned about the daughters of Earth & Eden, he stares into the Pit imagines what he never saw, hidden & evil organ the Cervix of Life given power to say Yes No You Not You a Satanic Power the Whore writes one name Book of Life another name suckt out, his, this is Gods arbitrary power not Hers why nobody ever gives an inch they'll take a mile spread the Cunt 3 miles wide suction out every man on the planet, w/sweat dripping rancid drops from his forehead cheeks palms it hits the asphalt sizzles & burns

ome are religious wounds some Cervixes of war, some scream ecstatic labor some shrapnel annihilation the music is the same always some machine penetrates flesh w/Glory one-way street of martyrs you have no choice but to fuck Inflicted Pain. the Inquisition is Alive & loves you, O fix yr body for the fire.the Pear steel heatd in fire insertd mouth anus vagina opend like scissors wide w/screaming yr words will be recorded against you.fire placed on chosen flesh spots, breast belly loins pretty face the molten portion turnd gangrenous scoopt out w/silver spoon blessd by Our priest, or you may undergo disjoint of every bone. torture is a concept, torture is a song, our Lord Christ on Cross sang these lyrics for yr destroyd mouth they are too good for you crouchd in cell dissolvd into wall the bulldozer takes yr body like a lover, you may be crushd, burst as rubble, between a toilet & a bed yr lifespan yr crime being born of a toilet & a bed thus Motherhood condemns its spawn, placenta of urine feces & blood wraps yr head, a penitents hood & electric wires fuse mortal nerve & shame to our God, this is the birth of Orgasm as our finger enters yr virgin brain & explodes  he stuffd frogs w/firecrackers as a kid he liked to explode things from the inside our boy at Yale he’d brand fraternity pledges w/hot clotheshangers w/a cigarette burn chuckle dreamd to do abortions w/hot clotheshangers in his alcohol dreams some men inherit powers of life or death, godlike, pull levers release the gas then laugh, the woman pleaded dont kill me please dont kill me please dont and he laughd people are poor because theyre lazy & frogs explode because theyre frogs the difference between criminal & rich is me, you got a problem w/this? a cruel mean boy our george & his daddys war & his grandpas war all the family friends & bankers unloading historys most lethal arsenal on nations of dust, wretches crawling in dust, radiant dust a planet crawling in its own rubble thats tradition no problem if you worship Creator above Creation, our boy blows up frogs for God, explodes anything he wants for Jesus they plead dont destroy us please dont please stop & he laughs, like God, if you work for the Creator not Creation the humiliation of Nature is a Church & all yr friends attend, & none in this crowd suffers consequences of Armageddon because God so loves the rich & all rich people live beyond, in heaven  surely this is what it looks like w/Christ on our side surely this is what we get in Our Man he talks to God his Daddy who is bigger than yr daddy & says Bring it on, boomboom this is My Boy George give him a world to fuck over raw Texas bluff & venal character, rancid barbecue brains w/donator ants carrying off the good parts all the pious sadists all the brothel lobbies all singing whore choirs of offshore guns & oil & tax shelters a planet torturd by sour vengeances & flaccid wet dreams of middleaged men & their incorporeal wives Good Old Boys w/their mooing Cows, smoking cigars in the Cowboy Church this is America shut up

4 year old boy Fallujah UK newsphoto left hand gone left leg at thigh "a horrible groin wound" in a hospital bed naked inside bandages his left arm gangrenous, w/out surgery ("what remains of groin") he will die his name is Ali gone inside his body exploded from inside his country so many war wounds like sex organs kept from human eyes we see not only women bleed men bleed everywhere day&night, & animals & children, those w/faces gone eyes nose mouth ears hair laughter future but still alive as a country 10,000 years old is shattered like God wants to destroy yr memory palaces museums mosques palm trees & crescent moon on burnt horizon, heads float w/out bodies in the river, bodies w/out heads the annihilation of a culture is what precision thinking is all about

a dear small girl sleeps, perfect face, top of skull exploded & emptied out, as if her black hair grows from plaster shards where her dreams blew out, 6 year old spasmed on dirtfloor naked torso from nipple to crotch exploded, jagged stitches close her like a childs stitching, she is crying, a young boy w/2 charred arms, bones & tendons exposed like frayed wires & pipes in some unfinished house, a torso of lurid colors, a young woman w/no arms, bandaged stubs extend from her chest, entire nude torso a wild tattoo of burnt flesh, no breasts no navel no pubic sex, napalm exploding time a kind of bridal skin, metal rods overarching for sheets to cover her modesty w/out touching. or recall 1991 El Amariya 2 misfired Bunker Busters the 2-story public shelter boiling water 1000 degrees pourd in fetuses boiled alive inside their mothers 403 people burned boiled exploded from inside buried alive inside dead mother earth buried alive inside a war, as reported this was not hell but the residue of hell, 1 inch boiled human fat floated as cream on top of the waters as boiling water rose fingernail marks on walls crazed & visible as people tried to escape, their screams linger 13 years, the outline of mother & child scorched into a plaster wall, one of many, this is not a video game by god weve kickd th'Vietnam syndrome once & for all by god weve revengd BabylonianCaptivityChristsCrucifixionWW2 9/11 the expulsion from Eden thanks to evil women there is something Divine about certain wounds we demonstrate mortality Gods wrath & grace you are nothing to Him but this greasy smear on an ancient wall, bits of mother&child skull, yr pitiful wail, a little girl curled up as if awaiting birth, head back mouth open gasping her last breath in a huge placenta of inpoured sand

some men too religious for abortion strangely aroused by war & its wounds their scrotums & wattles vibrate together in an obscene harmonics beyond the hearing of dogs this mutilation they call God this sacred horror they call War now now these people know how vulnerable they are imagine iraq like a human body what happens if you sever their spinal cord they cant walk, right? said the military man & the mice the rabbits the old men soldiers women all crawl whimpering piteously in their 10,000 years of sand 
Inanna wails we cannot answer there can be no answer
to her desolate calling grass will grow from
this dead land waters rise I cannot come to her
calling I am not shoots of grass in a dead land
we are not water to come for her wailing
nothing we are as it was meant pornographies of simple flesh become our country so many wounds like sex organs we are not meant to see

Notes on sources

• Fisk, Robert. “A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words” March 2003 – present. http://www.commondreams.org
  Pictures of destruction & civilian victims of the Anglo-American aggression in Iraq (note especially pages 1,11,12,15,17,18).
• “The Son’s Reply,” “Inanna’s Journey  to the Underworld,” in Poems of Heaven and Hell from Ancient Mesopotamia .
  Trans. N. K. Sandars. London: Penguin Books Ltd.,1971. Italic lines refigured from page 164.
• Wakefield , Grant, narr., ed. The Fire This Time: Deconstructing the Gulf War – A Permanent Record of the Fate of Iraq and a Guide to the Language of Mass Media Propaganda. CD Adasam Ltd., UK, 2002. http://www.firethistime.org
  A sound montage of American, British, Middle East voices (historic narrative, news reports, statements of participants and opponents) surrounding Gulf War 1. “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all”  are the words of then-president George H.W. Bush. “Imagine Iraq like a human body, what happens if you sever their spinal  cord, they can’t walk, right?” is from an unattributed montage of  field recordings.  Description of  the El Amariya shelter bombing is taken from media sources and Iraqi field recordings included on this CD.

What's Left?*

What's Left, literally, is The Sinister: the Body's Left Side (Dark Side of the Mother, the Flesh & the Heart): the nagual. This realm which hyperrational males, positioned along all points of the ideological spectrum, have Dextrously (righteously) marked off as profane, errant, forbidden; or have worked to subordinate to some auxiliary category (Index under Politics: & Women). The patriarchal mind, from Bible to Bacon, Marx to Freud, Bookchin to – yes, sorry – Nader, does not escape its Inquisitional fascination with strict daylight dogmatism, which quickly collapses into anal-obsessiveness over correct practice and procedure, ritual observance, the absolute length of beard-hair or number of whip-strokes per minute per breath of Crime: the exact size shape & weight of stones collected fervidly to be used to stone the radical body to its Deserved Death.

Man's Law, that is, which is always Right, i.e. in definitive control of Pain Distribution. The failure of the Left has always been its Fear of its own Dark Side. The "inchoate" Energies, described as Freudian Id, Jungian Unconscious, just general Funk & Fate, are the miasmic orgasms of the Female historically misnamed, misdiagnosed & bungled by the Good Doctors of social design. Western Patriarchy enters the Dark always in a missionary spirit, to "help" or "manage" or "cure" those parts of town assigned to crime, sex, poverty, intoxication, all the Transgressive Neighborhoods defined as problematic to the achievement of Paradise.

Artists & Poets know, or have known, that this DarkTurf exists primally, and exists Necessarily as urgent Medicine for a Sick Paradisial Ideal. It is not "the Dark" that needs help or cure, that is; rather: Doctor, Fix Yrself.

Think of a Tapestry: perfect clarity on the daylight side, as disciplined threads appear to compose the picture. Turn it over, however, and you see what MAKES the picture: the strings of creation as crazy Technicolor snakes squirming, twisting, intercoursing around the terrain of the darkside. The power of Biology grows from Inside Darkness; the Seed and the Brain express their Interior Dark; 6 billion years of Earth manifested gorgeously before the Human Eye. This is the Mad Method which performs the Illusion of the Composition, and it Performs on & of the Dark Side.

The Side of Light functions righteously to Control and Commodify this primal reality. The historic "Left" has always used Female Energy to fuel its "Revolutions": against the Father, the Church, the State. French women started the bread riots, stormed the Bastille, killed and were killed; victorious, however, their brothers-in-arms wrote laws to return French women to their skirts and their kitchens, and legally took away their guns, lest "feminine & domestic charms" be threatened by "empowerment." It's an old story. E.g., today's Left disdains a politics of "population control," arguing correctly that it is the Industrialized West, of low population growth, which consumes a huge majority of earth's resources, and exudes a huge percentage of earth's pollution. Ignoring, or dismissing, the fact that "population control" is a major factor and function of Female Liberation from our traditional abuse as cultural breed cows. Without female sexual autonomy, fascism is inevitable: the control of the female reproductive body by the male state is the Origin of Fascism.  But "women's issues" define, for Leftist males, subordinate issues.  Ralph Nader tells us once again: "There is no difference between Democrats and Republicans." No woman in desperate need of an abortion would say that; Nader will never of course be in this or any other desperate need; and the next time he mouths this priestly drivel I hope a flock of grrrl crows and vultures attacks him and aborts his fetal words. I hope some tough & fertile bitch jumps up on stage and Punches Out His Lights.

Bar sinister: sons of the Lawless Side
Bat sinister: feral, crazy bat daughters.

Eschewing the Dark Side, the Left has no Vision. Left politics are mostly reactive, rarely creative. In Europe , e.g., in opposition to the American-Israeli alliance of holy contempt for the world, the Left moves to embrace the Muslim cause – the Palestinians, yes, but also the French Muslim fundamentalist campaign to retain girls' headscarves in the public schools. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend," sez the Leftie, and even goes so far as to believe this constitutes a chic, radical position. It is not radical but merely reactive. It establishes no principle or position, but merely a formula of alliances. Here is the place to quote that Dissident Voice epigraph from Thoreau: "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." There's really no time left for any act but a strike at the Root, but most hackers on the Left have no clue as to its location.

Last year I saw a frontpage newsphoto showing an Israeli teen and her brother walking behind a Palestinian girl: the Israeli girl is reaching out to yank off the Muslim girl's headscarf. It's an act of religious & political harassment, yes.  I despise Israel 's behavior; I despise the American-Israeli collusion against the world; even so, looking at that photo, I have the same impulse as that Israeli teen. It's not a Jewish vs. Muslim impulse – I'm Irish Pagan – it is the Fist of the New against the Old, the Naked Mind against the Uniform, most of all the ShitKicking Reichian West against the Puritanic Repressive Religions. It is Knowledge versus Fear. Europe worked 500 years to crawl out of the God-Pit of the Inquisition, Europeans and the colonized globally have suffered millennia of religious, bible-based persecution and sectarian warfare, American women are still involved in essential struggle against "God" for autonomy of our bodies & our brains: this is the Root position. We must refuse to be dragged backward into that abyss. If Muslim women want to enjoy the relative "freedoms" of the West, they must know these freedoms are hard won, and always fragile. If you fear being "debauched by modernity," go home to the desert. Women in burqas whose men carry rocketlaunchers is more than a surreal anachronism: it is the utmost in spiritual & intellectual hypocrisy.

(A PoMo thesis that "the Enlightenment led to Auschwitz " by undermining the Western belief in "God" is equally fraudulent; i.e.,what then led to the preEnlightenment "God- ordained"Inquisition, all 500 sadistic years of it?? The Enlightenment was Europe' s attempt to overcome the Inquisition: to the extent it failed we got the 20^th c. Hells-on- Earth; to the extent it succeeded, we got us.)

The Left, long contemptuous of "religion," ineptly confronts the giant psychophysical social surges and erotic convulsions of Jihad & Holy War. Liberals & Leftists are afraid to confront "God"– except with the dry disdain that characterizes believers in secular rather than metaphysical Solutions. Turning chickenshit into formula, PC became a strategy for avoiding Root confrontation: a way to parade as Radical while not "offending" anyone. A generation of earnest young politicos was educated to think you can solve a problem by correctly labeling it: That's racist! That's sexist! That's religiously intolerant! Well yeh, duh, so what else is AT THE ROOT???

Christian America, Zionist Israel and the Muslim Fundamentalist regimes together are The 4^th Reich; these bulldozer bullies for "God" will happily flatten every contradiction into rubble and upon this bloody plot build tacky Theme Parks of Pious Democrazy in the place of indigenous sensual  global variety; these actual snuff games are being played out before our eyes and we do not accurately name them, or holistically denounce them, lest we Hurt Someone's Feelings – i.e., everyone involved is a Victim of Historic Hurt, ergo beyond Critique.  Mel Gibson's sacred S/M flick, The Passion of the Christ, appears right now to remind us that the biblical religions, all 3, are based on the sadistic manipulation of guilt: You disobeyed God, You are Sinful, You killed Jesus, You are Filth & Dust Born of Woman – yaddayaddayadda – the continuous manipulation of ONTOLOGICAL GUILT for the Ontological FACT of Being Alive on Earth. The Left does not usefully exist unless it denies/defies this Bizness of Guilt and embraces the Poetry of this Fact.  But to do so, the Left must become open to the suffusion of  FemaleErotic Darkness (which is The Female Mind) to a degree it has never accepted, insofar as the male-determined Left is in itself a familial disciple of that same Guilt-Trip Bizness. Thus the Left has managed to turn off the world, revealing itself systemically as the DreamKillCopTwin of the tyrant Right. This rabid Right "frames the Big Picture."  E.g., O'Reilly & Savage analogize 1) "The Anarchy on Our Borders, immigrants swamping our culture & sucking off our welfare" with 2) "Anarchy in Our Morality, gay rights, abortion, media hedonism, bastard babies sucking on Janet's exposed tit" – they can do this because, being breathtakingly simple- minded, they construct without compunction simpleminded Pictures.  (I.e., blaming these "anarchies" on Liberalism, when every issue depicted is a function of cutthroat capitalist systems,  re employers seeking low-wage labor and media seeking profits, as mere human beings struggle & drown in the resultant floods of dislocation.)

The Left can't frame "a Big Picture," or finds "a Big Picture" too Scary.  It is unable or not willing to Challenge GOD, the BibleBoys, Yahweh Moses Jesus and Allah with their combined global BankAccounts. Leftist discourse has never addressed Religion as a power equal to Economics in the movement of human beings: the movement of passions as well as massed bodies. Only a witchy few 2^nd wave feminists, a few brave citizens mounting 1^st Amendment law suits, have stood up on their revolutionary hindlegs to refute the tv preachers and radio bigmouths on their own turf, i.e. Faux Holy Ground. These God Salesmen, in the bizness of vampirizing our human energies for 2000 years, can rely on Liberal Fear & Leftist Discomfort to join in avoidance of ontological battle over "sacred things: who defines them?"  Liberals pander, Leftists shrug and run. Meanwhile, next time a state judge installs his customized 10 ton version of the Biblical Ten Commandments in the middle of your downtown courthouse, here's the argument: The First Amendment precludes the government from the establishment of a religion. The First Commandment is: "I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt have no other gods before me." And that is the establishment of a specific religion: an exclusive monotheism. The First Commandment directly contradicts and countermands the First Amendment. So every politician should be publicly challenged to choose between them: your Constitution or your Bible? They can't both rule this country.

Europe, unlike America , has been the arena of historic disembowelment over issues of Holy War, Roman invasion and forced conversion of pagan tribes, Crusades & Inquisitions, the Catholic-Protestant mutual massacres called sectarian war, plus WW1, WW2, Nazi death camps and Stalinist gulags, all "secular" extensions of the original FanaticVision. Europe is tired of it, we hope, and thereby wiser. Americans must look harder to find an authentic political position (the Archimedean leverage point) outside the mechanical Left-Right dualisms which decorate & twist our Tree's dialectic branches but are not The Root. The Root of America is that it was once pagan, wild and various.  Jefferson, Madison and Franklin, Marx & Engels learned from American Indians, not the reverse. Despite the Holy Liars, our Constitution is not "based on the Judeo-Christian Bible" but on the Iroquois Confederacy, with help from pagan European tribal systems, the Magna Carta, John Locke & Voltaire. To be reminded of this, Leftists should reread Thomas Paine, and revisit Thomas Morton & his Maypole. (Plus check out Jim Goad’s The Redneck Manifesto.)

One European friend and intellectual comrade to Paine was Mary Wollstonecraft. Ring any bells? The Leftist dismissal of "women's issues" as secondary forces of change has robbed us of a potent(ial) Holism of Energies vis-à-vis the extant networks of  Oppression: Church, State, Economic systems. Those feminists who attacked Patriarchy were not simply being "women" (i.e., complainants within the system), but expressors of a bloody Outside Position: outside Taliban and AlQaeda, outside Israel and Palestine , outside America and Israel , Outside the Holy War,which by definition is waged by & for the glory of the Hole-Stuffing Male, whose claims of GodHead subordinate all Nature and natural life&death to this WhollyDelusion: MonoText&Gun. Before being brainwashed into HandMaidens, all females are Born Rebels. Females are the Original Left, and it would've been nice to acknowledge this, and  to grow upon this primal ground the alliance of Earth, Women, Children, Animals, Air Water Seed & Imagination  AGAINST the Agony of Abrahamic Alienation.

Preferably Knot*

Streetliving Tucson, 1987-88, I'd search out quiet weekend places to do personal hygiene. Washed-out shirts, underwear etc. qwik-dri in desert air. The usual public buildings were closed, and the usual BurgerKing, Carl's Jr. tiny restrooms – one toilet, one sink – were noisy with weekend families; little boys in womens' bathrooms w/their mothers tend to get down on their hands & knees to peek under the stall, it's a compulsion to view The Strange Other at Her Worst. And if you're washing your shorts in the sink, they freak. I chewed raw garlicbulbs to boost my immune system, this created a vampyre-free-zone aura around me that was strategically useful, but socially offputting in close quarters. So I hung out at the U of A, the student center building had a big 2^nd floor lounge with rows of sinks & stalls, coolly uninhabited on Sunday mornings. The University, I felt, was sort of "home"- because, duh, my book was in the U of A library, it would be used in Women's Studies classes; and hey, I'd applied (unsuccessfully) for work as library clerk, summer press copy editor and, through the Maintenance Dept., as lounge matron & general toiletbowl cleanser. On Sundays, when others were in Church, it felt luxurious to wash undies & armpits in the big unoccupied 2^nd floor lounge, real soap & hot water….a Mental Retreat, where homeless American feminist writers might feel "at home" ("misery hides aloof" sez Melville).

Then, one morning, spongebathing & footwashing, my shirt unbuttoned (no bra, no shoes), the matron suddenly stuck her head around the door, I looked up to see a look of horror on her face, whereupon she turned and ran down the empty hall squealing "She's bathing in there! She's bathing in there!"

I got out quick, nothing happened. Except I never went back. The maid's shock notified me that, of course, UA was not "home" to my body, even though its Library might house my book. The maid didn't see "a writer" but "a public nuisance"– and her perception was, of course, the operative view.

Thirteen months of this, let's call it Bartleby's mix of Pride & Despair. Pride, i.e., "I knew who I was." But who was that, really? A street bum, using taxpayer-funded state intellectual facilities for personal hygiene. If not illegal, shameful. Scum of the earth. Despair, because regardless of what I might have written, or thought, or done, it didn't matter: I was existential Pariah. Books, poetry, radical politics, feminism, a list of self-delusions I carried in my levi pocket. Nothing matters in America but Money, and we all know that. Who You Are Is Yr Bank Account, Not Yr Mind.

This knowledge, this truth, this fact, is Crushing. The literal weight of it on your chest stops the heart, pushes air from the lungs. As if the whole megaquadrillion ton weight of Wall St falls on you: but it doesn't even have to fall on you, it crushes virtually, effectively, by just Being There: the Wall of Money.  Before which all your fellow citizens kneel, trembling, in obeisance.  If this is America , if this is Reality, then this is Home: something you have to pay for. Thus Bartleby: the Soul w/out a Home in America . He is the homeless soul the West has built.

Melville, most American of writers, dreaming Kafka's 20^th c. in his shortstories, in Bartleby creates the Dickensian doppelganger, London 's financial, legal & penal architecture transported from Victorian England into 19^th c. America (supposedly "a new world") – Wall St, The Tombs, the same gaunt gloomy buildings of biophobic power shutting out light & health, mocking human happiness, rendering worklives of multitudes – 12 hour days, 6 days a week – "deficient in what landscape painters call 'life.' " And these were the good jobs.  No way to catch or grow your own food. No place to sleep or shit or piss or die or give birth w/out paying the designated fee. The generation & preservation of absolute Law & Wealth, contingent upon the brutal constriction & infliction of the ephemeral Human Being. The Soul's confrontation w/soulless Machinery: which is America . A New World for you, Mr.Bartleby. 

He'd prefer not.  In the Dead Letter office, his previous employment, he'd heard God's answer to mortal hope: Silence. He'd tossed these little prayers into the fire, this was his job. Over the edge of banal despair, he'd looked: there is Nothing. With or without money, that is, the same vision as The American Dream, in the End. It is all illusion, a flatline trying to escape the cosmic mobius. Maybe he was born a Zero Man. He's kind of a Zen Legal Secretary.

Facing the Wall (which is the word NO) he insisted on his terms. Bartleby knew who he was, unfortunately unbacked by money, but nonetheless. He knew his intrinsic worth, qua human; and he knew he was not wanted unless he rendered this intangible self USABLE - and he preferred not. He took up minimal space or air: let his sheer existence as Life Datum be honored, allow him to simply sit or stand or sleep in that tiny corner behind his screen, facing his wall – in India , perhaps a Holy Man; in America , a problem of Flesh.  A body nonconforming to its designated space. But couldn't the Boss care enough about HIM, in all else impeccable, to allow this? But of course not, No, we all know the Answer: Harrumph harrumph, suppose everyone made such a request? If you allow one, you open the door to everyone. Barbarism! Anarchy! Thus Bartleby threatens the End of Civilization as we know it.

(And no, I don’t want to share my apartment with any of the homeless people who hang out, drinking & bullshitting, on my backporch. I'm tired of cleaning up the cigarette butts & bottles & occasional diarrhea piles they leave behind – I would prefer not! –and when I was homeless I knew such a request was hopeless, also. The "hopelessness of remedying excessive & organic ill.") Only the Usable are Useful. Despair tells us: Be a Gear, or Die. Maybe he was a Poet – like "the mettlesome Byron" - a Romantic w/out Byron's wealth or social rank, or even  talent! Doomed! "Because he will NOT be a vagrant." Ironically noted, Bartleby clung within the walls of Human Culture, a Law Office at any rate; descent into the streets, he "preferred not." Not a genuine Bum, that is, not even the alleycat hole of the outcast was his home. He stood aloof, elite, impassively superior; unlike us multitudes of pliable confusion: He knew who he was. And in The Tombs, end of the line, visited by the Boss, he stood in the small prison yard, stared at the high wall.

•  -- "Look there is the sky, and here is the grass."
•   -- "I know where I am."
  

An American writer, Joe Napora, sent me some Dickens' quotes from G.K. Chesterton's Charles Dickens: The Last of the Great Men. On America , Dickens said: "I do fear that the heaviest blow ever dealt at liberty will be dealt by this country, in the failure of its example on the earth."

On NPR's March 3 Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me quiz show, the host read from a Knight- Ridder news release on that week's reopening of the Statue of Liberty, closed to the Public since 9/11; the monument was described as "a big green woman who invites you to climb to the top of her head," from the earth of her bare feet to her airy brain via a spinal staircase.

Is this not breathtaking? Is this not heartbreaking? What America was supposed to be. What Life on our Planet was supposed to be. What happened? What have We done to Her, what have They done to Us, what went so unbearably WRONG?

Bartleby – Melville, of course, who killed the Whale; or Coleridge, who killed the Albatross – deep inside their eyes, the Vision of the Black Hole behind America ’s commercial optimism, our global Boosterism: the Wall of Wealth is built with the bodies of Earth made usable, but then they die, and then they rot. Power rots, and it really stinks. They tell us that stink is the price of our survival. And some of us will go into the bizness of Perfume.

* This essay originally appeared in The Dissident Voice.

Working Note

Our visual pages – regularized spelling punctuation margins syntax – do not carry the audio burden of our time. Bodies &cultures explode, everything stunned or screaming in horror, the deranged newstrip of our day speeds by at the speed of digital light, or suddenly drops off the screen, disappeared, bulldozed away. All is disconnected, all is lost. Language fractures under extreme conditions – rage terror ecstasy – and I sense all life on earth now is experienced in extremis. We are "shattered…by damage to life" as Lise Weil translated the words of German feminist Christian Thurmer-Rohr in Vagabonding: Feminist Thinking Cut Loose (Beacon 1991). How can our sentences our paragraphs our denotes connotes & referents remain cerebrally abstracted, unshattered by our wounded life? Image a box of type, set in the predictable page. Then drop the box on the floor, and print that. It will say (to paraphrase Heidegger) the awe-ful has just happened.

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 and Ecorche, The New MS and Trivia (1990-94), and online Dissident Voice. Since the demise of the original Trivia she has not appeared in any feminist venue, and longs for the Old Days of feminist political/cultural feral thought, before everyone got afraid to say what was not Certified OK by the various sisterhood clubs. "Women writers must utter the most verboten things, root truths sublime & terrible, and not have them censored as unPC, 'too angry,' 'too violent,' or (ye Goddess!) 'too explicit.' "