Remains of (a Prayer for) Kathy Acker

by Doug Rice

Whenever Kathy Acker sent me her manuscripts, she always included instructions on how to read:

1. Use wet fingers to turn the pages.

2. Make your body vulnerable to your soul.

3. Do not read without breathing.

4. Be careful with your skin.

5. Use a knife instead of a finger.

6. Careless slips of the tongue make me come.

7. Had I known, I never would have written.

A month before she dies, she calls. “I cannot write anything, Doug, without doing great violence to myself.” Her knuckles always reminded me of the soul of a cat, lost and alone in some alley. Kathy wrote with a dildo shoved up her cunt. This is not a metaphor. Only followers of Descartes and PoMo critics have faith in dildos as metaphors. Dildos, of course, confuse Lacanians. Except those who cunt their lips on mirrors.

“Doug, I hope hope hope you get good and not just fetishistic (therefore narrow) stuff…I can’t decide if we should keep this as totally anonymous as it is at the moment…but the sex keeps getting hotter…very strange the whole thing…I can’t decide what to do and it’s a bad time for me, re the image business, my image in the world as a writer is really in my face due to all the reviews, etc. I sort of like anonymity but on the other hand.”

At a bar in Providence in 1996, I sat down beside Kathy and my skin was near her skin for the first time. Years of writing eachother. Our hunger to be near finally satisfied, thanks to an invitation from Bob Coover to read at the Unspeakable Practices Conference at Brown.

At first, after her reading, on meeting me, Kathy was disappointed. Did not think I could be the one who had written the novel she admired, Blood of Mugwump. The one who had been writing her long, tortured letters from Ohio. She thought my skin would carry more traumas. But I appeared to be just this man like any other who was more same than other.

We talked late into the night about reading. About our desires. We hungered for places where word and body became pleasures of text and flesh. The interpenetration both ways at once.

A line of flight becoming.

Sam Delaney sat silently in the corner with Paul Auster.

“I want to read you,” I said.

“And you I,” Kathy replied, her voice soft. This other Kathy coming. This girl inside her armor. The one she protected. Vulnerable angel always longing for some place to rest.

“You can’t write,” I told Kathy, “without recognizing the bodily act of reading. Writing is only, always, reading.”

“We write for our own pleasures of reading,” Kathy said. She put her hand near her skin. Her lips. Kathy was tired that night from jet lag, and I was nearly dead from a two-day train journey.

“I’m writing here,” I played with my drink and began scribbling on Kathy’s arm, “because reading does not exist any more.”

“Daddy was a black sheep,” Kathy said.

“Daddy was a whore.”

We both smiled our little-girl smiles.

Kathy called me after Blood of Mugwump was published. “Doug,” she said, “you have stolen three of my words on the very first page of your novel. Word for word, mine.”

I told her not to worry, that readers would take themselves back to her text. By instinct. Safe and sound. She was not convinced.

“It will not be the same.”

“No,” I replied. “No, my mouth, your words. This saliva lost becoming wet.”

“And you call this an autobiography. How can my words make your life?”

I slept with Kathy. She claimed that she had been accused of being an authentic poststructuralist. “Our experience, this opening of our flesh,” I was told, “would be even better than the real thing.”

We both knew what we were not saying. Saying and unsaying.