Kathy
Acker, arguably the most important postwar pirate-queen of avant-fiction,
returned to her home planet at 1:30 a.m. on Sunday, November 30. She
departed from the American Biologics clinic in Tijuana, surrounded
by her closest friends, her exit papers listing the cause of galactic
emigration as cardiopulmonary failure from complications due to metastasized
cancer.
The
woman who was teleported to wealthy parents in New York City in the
Roswellian year 1947, educated at Brandeis, U.C.-San Diego, and the
City College of New York, then disowned by her terrestrial family
and forced to work in everything from vegan bakeries to sex shows
on 42nd Street to make ends meet was barely 50 and virtually broke.
Diagnosed
with breast cancer in April 1996, she had a full mastectomy in San
Francisco and moved to London to recuperate. A year later she began
suffering from digestive disorders and pneumonia. When she returned
to San Francisco, she visited the Davies Medical Center and learned
the cancer had spread to her liver, pancreas, spleen, and lungs. She
decided to to cross the border with a handful of friends on 1 November
and take her chances at a holistic clinic near the seedy main drag
of the, yes, Avenue de la Revolution.
None
of these factors was the real reason she decided to leave us so prematurely,
my theory goes. She left because she had already collected enough
information about our species to file her report back home. Only I'm
here to tell you: we aren't going to come off very well in Kathy's
final write-up.
We
never did in the early drafts.
"I
don't know," she once told an interviewer. "I don't think
humans have done well figuring out what it is to be human."
Her
most significant ur-report will probably remain Blood and Guts
in High School (1978), which chronicles the life of Janey Smith,
a name that translates as "Kathy Acker" in her native planet's
tongue. Janey's mother dies when she's one. Her abusive father abandons
her at ten. She travels from the Yucatan to New York where she's kidnapped
and sold into white slavery, then gets cancer. Disgusted, her white
master forsakes her. She journeys to the Middle East, wanders into
the desert, and dies. In the afterlife, she searches for a book of
human transformations, longing to leave behind her alligator shape
and become a bird.
That
book of transformations, of course, is a metaphorized version of Blood
and Guts itself, of all of Kathy's work—more than 10 volumes,
including Empire of the Senseless and, only last year, Pussy:
King of the Pirates—which takes the form of proto-hypertextual
collages comprised of dramaticules, sexually explicit drawings, maps,
poems, rants, and Kathy's signature act of pla(y)giarism: rewriting
and rerighting key patriarchal texts.
Kathy
composed in what Donald Barthelme called "back-broke sentences"—sentences
that rupture conventional syntax and grammar while basking in an Aesthetics
of the Ugly that tracks back through the anarchistic punk sensibility
of the seventies, through the anti-formalist Black Mountain School
verse of the sixties, Burroughs's viral language and vision of the
fifties, and at last to Baudelaire's grimy nineteenth-century doorstep,
whose poems in Les Fleurs du mal are the first to embrace the
dislocated, dark, marginalized, transgressive multidimensional underworld
of urban irreality.
In
other words, Kathy's ur-reports are acts of literary terrorism. Janey
realizes this when she tells Jean Genet, who enters her fictive life
briefly, that "Terrorism is letting happen what has to happen.
. . . Tremendous anger and desire." More important, however,
Janey learns, in an echo of European Romantic thought, that "terrorism
is a way to health" and that "health is the lusting for
infinity."
"I
like books that are primitive," Kathy once said. "I trust
them. . . . I prize animal thoughts rather than cerebral thoughts."
Hers was a mode of consciousness radically antagonistic toward rigidity.
Hope existed within an ongoing process rather than a final product.
Every one of her protagonists is on a spiritual quest. Every one is
obsessed with literary patricide, the complex calculus of gender and
identity, stowage aboard the mothership of pirates, aliens, witches,
outlaws, and others whose lives are metaphors for fluidity and exile
from the dominant culture.
"We
may not always have agreed with her," critifictionist Raymond
Federman e-mailed me as Kathy prepared to commence her return flight,
"but we all always admired her guts." She taught a younger
generation of writers—among them Eurudice, whose f/32
tells the story of an escaped vagina; Doug Rice, whose Blood of
Mugwump Jesse Helms cited as a reason for terminating the N.E.A.;
and Shelley Jackson, whose hypertext Patchwork Girl pla(y)giarizes
Frankenstein—to be more extreme. She taught a generation
of readers—many of whom will be attending memorial services for
her this week in San Francisco, L.A., San Diego, Chicago, New York,
and D.C.—that we can only really change things if we change our
perceptions.
Though
we'd been in touch intermittently since 1988, I first really met Kathy
in the fall of 1994 when she visited my university for a week to guest-teach
a fiction workshop and give a reading. We were supposed to meet at
an outdoor Moscow cafe after she'd settled in to her hotel. Right
on time, a small muscular blue-jeaned middle-aged woman with close-cropped
orange hair ambled up the block sucking a cherry lollipop. We ordered
beers and sat watching life roll by on Main Street. Everything was
autumnally sunny and warm. Within five minutes she was confessing
how embarrassed she was that she'd accidentally left her gnarly-looking
vibrator behind on the bed at the B&B in Oregon she'd stayed at
the night before. "What do you think the lady who runs the place
is thinking about me?" she asked. Then she leaned back and laughed
and laughed.
As
her visit unfurled, Kathy turned out to be one of the most generous,
nurturing, and emotionally volatile people I ever met. Students fell
profoundly in love with her. When she stood to read in the standing-room-only
auditorium, people whooped and whistled like she was a rock star.
Almost
three years to the day later, Matias Viegener reported to writer Lynne
Tillman: "Kathy was very clear, looked us both [Matias and Connie
Samaras, her friends at her clinic bedside] in the eyes—we were
caressing her and telling her she was all right, that she was safe—and
just stopped breathing. She gasped a few times and then just stopped.
If there is any thing as a beautiful death, this was one. She knew
exactly what was happening and all her fear seemed gone; she had a
beaming, open look on her face. Connie and I just held her gaze, as
though elevated with her. Then her whole body relaxed, her palms turned
upward."
And
for Kathy the countdown was finally over.
