Disclaimer: This site is neither official nor officious. It is a place for personal grief.

Kathy Acker: 1948-1997

Her New York Memorial: January 4th at the Drawing Center.

Sources of Mourning and Information:

Her Words: http://acker.thehub.com.au/gift.html
Our Words: http://acker.thehub.com.au/acker.html

Re(a)d, Not Dead

(One of Kathy's favorite directors was Dario
Argento, after whom she wrote the novel,
My Mother, Demonology. Argento
was quoted as having said
I dream in red. The cover
of Demonology
was also red.)

When I recall Kathy's company, what I remember
most fondly were the nights we spent at her
old New York loft, renting tape after tape
& savoring Argento's oneiromantic red.
Even now, I can hear her measured
speech slip into a Brooklyn drawl:
Woid yuh hang up on me so fyast?
On such nights, we made jokes
about subjects so sexually
un-PC that citing them
in public might have
resulted in at least
two criminal
indictments.

In 1989, when Kathy & I went to the Psychedelic Solution to ogle
the paintings of Robert Williams, I met her friend Cindy Carr,
who wore a woolen jacket on that summer afternoon. I recall
that Carr was polite but very withdrawn. And now, reading
the obituary she published in the Village Voice, I discover
that Carr portrayed Kathy as a loner. That description
says far more about Carr than Kathy: No loner ever
befriended so many, nor enjoyed keen attention
more in public and private. My social circle
is far wider than it might have been
without Kathy: Many of my
dearest friends are
Kathy's legacy.

And now she is gone. Even in this moment of wrenching mortality,
even when I remain literally speechless after surgery, it gives me
pleasure to conjure Kathy's voice. She is the fifth person in
eight years whom I've watched die or disappear and could
do nothing to help. It is good to be able to read her and
remember. In the words of David Antin: Her works
will answer for her. They remain alive.

A Few Last Letters

November

November 11, 1997

[Friend]:

I don't want to call her at the hospital but I must. She told so many of us she loved us that she left us all with an impossible sense of obligation--with a sense of failing her whenever she herself grew self-destructive. If I thought I could console her, I wouldn't feel so apprehensive.

I knew this would happen. She wrote a London article about her cancer a few years back. It read like Mishima's Sun and Steel.

I'm told there's now cancer throughout her body. What is she, five-four, five-five? The poor little thing--the poor stubborn little thing. What help could naturopaths have offered?

They say she's dosed, blissed out. How long can that last?

All the best,

Rob Hardin

Date: Sun, 16 Nov 1997 13:52:42 -0500
To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Rob Hardin <scrypt@interport.net>
Subject: Grief to come

RIP, 1997: Burroughs, Laughlin, and now, barring a miracle, Kathy Acker (b. April 18, 1948). This is truly a sad and plangent year.
Emergate quandprimum, amici in ars morbi,

Rob Hardin

Date: Tue, 17, Nov 1997
To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Rob Hardin <scrypt@interport.net>
Subject: grief to come/*tragedy* et al

Although I did express grief over Kathy Acker on UB Poetics, and even though I did not use the word tragedy in expressing my grief, I do find Kathy's present condition intolerably sad. I am not part of your literary community; I am not an academic; I had been trying refrain from speaking publicly about the recent loss of Kathy and others. Those who know Kathy well must be aware of the strong and conflicting emotions she can evoke. The strength of those emotions took me by surprise when I posted here. I underestimated the intensity of those emotions.

If I'm reading them correctly, certain correspondents on this list are more interested in challenging grief than in acknowledging it. If so, remember: I did not post a discussion of scholarship or historical accuracy. Truthfully, I should not even have mentioned Kathy, since her health ought to have remained my private concern. Nor do I wish to go into detail about Kathy's condition. To challenge the assessments of others would mean to divulge more of what I ought to have kept to myself.

My reason for posting here was simple. People were discussing Laughlin's death while I was trying not to think about Kathy. Nevertheless, as the discussion continued, I kept thinking of her. I also thought of Lou Stathis, David Wojnarowicz, Ed McGranahan, Marky Sliker, Susan Walsh and Liz Brockland, all of whom died or disappeared without my being able to do anything about it. When I could not go on thinking about their passing, I posted blindly.

To David and Maria:

While it is terrible to read of someone's death, it is worse still to feel death's
immanence without being able to intervene. It is worse to watch impotently
as death descends. Your words do not correspond to my understanding of
death, nor have I endorsed your words; therefore I need not be true to your
words. I need to be true to the memory of those for whom I grieve.

I did not know your child prodigy. I have not stood at the epicenter of any
of the disasters you cite. Yes, these events are tragic. But while one can
lament them in the abstract, such events do not awaken pain.

What I want is not to win some argument over terms like grief and tragedy
and loss. What I want is for Kathy to remain alive. What I want is for Kathy
and others to resurface. It is unfair that we should live and they should not.
I wish they were alive and that is all I wish.

In the past, I have cared about rhetoric as ardently as I cared about people.
But now that I'm losing people, it is harder to care about rhetoric.

If you did not mean to attack me over an honest expression of grief,
then please accept my apologies for misunderstanding your reply.

However, if you did wish to quibble with me over texts, then please choose
a textual reference in any other post I have ever made. Please don't take me
to task over this one. Grief is bad enough. An autopsy would be torture.

All the best to you. May you be reconciled to this subject in a more adult
fashion than I have managed so far. I wish you no ill. I do not wish to fight.

All best always,

Rob Hardin

November 18, 1997

Date: Tue, 18 Nov 1997
To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Rob Hardin <scrypt@interport.net>
Subject: grief not merely mine, nor conclusions personal--

--when we voice fears that she may cease to be.

>Subject: rob hardin's grief

>shared by many, I have no doubt. And No, Rob, it wasnt you who used
>'tragedy". My chief concern was that Listpersons were posting in as if
>Kathy Acker's death were a foregone conclusion & this struck me as
>callously insensitive. What would it cost you-all to have at least as much
>patience as she needs to muster? David

David:

I can understand your position. You cite good and sober reasons for voicing it, not the least of which is compassion. But if you've read Kathy's cancer piece in the English press, then perhaps you know that she, too, has been impatient with her own mortality; has treated it as a foregone conclusion. She has been more dramatic about her own death than the majority of us could manage at our most excessive.

Those who fear the worst are not callous for expressing that fear: A callous person wishes the worst to be true. A friend fears the worst and wishes it were not. I would never have voiced my fear if I were not chafed and abraded from visits to the hospital that did zero good, from visits to the police department, from profitless searches for the others whom I've mentioned. What might seem like callousness is really the desperation of a useless friend. That desperation is personal and does not translate. "My" grief is a vain and frivolous subject which, I fear, is not worth anyone's attention. It posits but does not merit your eloquent response.

All the best to you,

Rob Hardin

Date: Fri, 21 Nov 1997

[Friend]:

Please send Matthias my address. I will do anything I can. Unfortunately, I won't be able to speak until December 14th: Have just been in the hospital for throat surgery and feel like an illustration for Black Sun:: Kristeva couldn't have chosen a more obvious example of speechless grief.
Again, if I can do anything, let me know.

All the best,

Rob Hardin.

PS: Thanks for your kind and eloquent note of support.

How horrible, always to lose one more, one more, one more.
One wishes one could die so that one could not lose anyone else.
But one cannot. One must live to testify that these people mattered.

December 1, 1997

Friends:

Kathy Acker is gone. She should have lived forever; she seemed younger than all of us.

I watched this happen to her from far away. Two weeks ago, a writer friend gave me her number in Tijuana. I couldn't bear to use it. I couldn't have taken the sound of her voice.

When people die in public, individual grief remains that much more private. Many writers will define Kathy for posterity without having known her deeply, and critics will circumscribe the limits of her circle without having understood its compass. Meanwhile, individual grief remains secret, mute. Yet in one's own life, grief's memory must triumph. One must try to go on remembering people "as they were".

Kathy once told me I was the little brother she never had. And when we were close, she really did feel make me like an ideal lost relation. She did that for a lot of her friends--made them feel important. One forgets these things until one can't forget.

Many people loved and hated Kathy. But those who hated Kathy are weeping, too.

No one will ever replace her. I can hear Kathy even now. I'm looking at my copy of Hannibal Lecter, My Father, the book I named. In it, she wrote "I'll love you forever." I thought Kathy would live forever. I'll always be touching a shoulder that isn't there.

All the best,

Rob Hardin