CHAPTER 4 - 1000 MILES

It’s the Summer of 1973. Barbara Hammer has had a busy summer, zigzagging across California on her motorcycle, camping and visiting ex-lovers, lesbian conferences and festivals. Along the way, she meets Terry Anderson, a feverishly intelligent single mother of two, an academic with an artistic mind.

Together, they embark on a 1000-mile adventure that will lead them to Hornby Island Ja-Dai-Aich along with two 19-year olds, Martha Ross and Rosemary Allenbach. On Hornby, Barbara Hammer takes three rolls of film, documenting a brief moment in all of its charged artistic and romantic energy.

In this chapter of New Friend, we delve into the torrid mystery of Barbara and Terry's long-distance love affair across dozens and dozens of letters, and culminating in an unforgettable, calamitous road trip.

Listener discretion: This chapter of New Friend contains references to addiction. 

New Friend is a five-part radio documentary exploring the storyt behind a series of photographs taken by the artist and experimental filmmaker, Barbara Hammer. The photographs were taken over one weekend in August 1973, on Hornby Island, Ja-Dai-Aich, in the Salish Sea.

Thank you to all of those who shared their stories, memories, and voices for the purposes of this project.

In this chapter, you heard the following voices (in order of appearance):

• Barbara Hammer
• Florrie Burke
• Martha Ross
• Rosemary Allenbach
• Derek Anderson
• The rocks, plants, trees, wind, and water of Hornby Island Ja-Dai-Aich.
• Sounds from Vancouver, BC, San Francisco and Berkeley, California, all courtesy of Radio Aporee. These recordings were made on the unceded, traditional, and ancestral lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), səlilwətaɬ​ (Tsleil-Waututh), and the Ohlone.
• You also heard excerpts from Barbara Hammer’s films I Was I Am (1973), X (1974), Sisters (1973), and Psychosynthesis (1975), and from an interview with Barbara Hammer for Jeu de Palme, 2012.
• The writings of Barbara Hammer and Terry Anderson, through their diary entries and written correspondence, are voiced by Martha Ross.

Credits:

• Hosted by Bitsy Knox.
• Production, research, script and sound design by Bitsy Knox.
• Mixing and mastering by Robert Steenkamer. 
• New Friend was originally aired on Cashmere Radio Berlin and 96.5 CHFR Hornby Island Community Radio.
• Cover image courtesy of The Estate of Barbara Hammer.
• New Friend is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.

Thank you to:

• The Estate of Barbara Hammer
• Hornby Island Community Archives
• Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
• Cashmere Radio, Berlin
• 96.5 CHFR Hornby Island Community Radio
• KOW, Berlin
• Company Gallery, New York City
• Florrie Burke
• Louky Keijsers Koning 
• Martha Ross
• Derek Anderson
• Rebecca Dunne
• Emma Walter
• Emily Harrison
• All beings, human and more-than-human, of Hornby Island, Ja-Dai-Aich, and its surrounding waters—where I am a part-time, uninvited guest on the unceded, traditional, and ancestral land of the K'omoks First Nation, the Eitsen, Pentlach, Sasitla and Sahtloot peoples.

Go here to learn more about the work of Barbara Hammer, including upcoming screenings and events.

Bitsy Knox is an artist, editor, radio producer and writer. She grew up on the unceded and ancestral territory of hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh speaking peoples, the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, also known as Vancouver, Canada. She is based in Berlin, Germany. Follow her on Instagram here.

For more information, and to support independent community radio, visit Cashmere Radio and 96.5 CHFR Hornby Island Community Radio.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_06 0:00

Trigger warning. This chapter of New Friend contains references to addiction. Listening discretion is advised.

SPEAKER_08 0:15

Do we ever know anyone? I don't think we do. I think we die alone and we're born alone, and I try my damnedest to show who I am by making films because I think I must have always felt that aloneness. Um and that person is a layered person, you know, an expansive forever, you know, person. I don't want to be contained.

SPEAKER_06 0:44

Chapter 4, 1000 Miles.

SPEAKER_02 0:48

I am a single woman alone in the universe, and I sing the song of myself.

SPEAKER_06 0:55

It's July 1973. Barbara is having a busy summer, zigzagging across California on her motorcycle. She rides from women's festival to lesbian music festival, from conference to meeting, from camping with one lover on the side of a mountain to collecting her belongings from another. She's just back from a tumultuous visit to see Marie A. Shaw, her first girlfriend, her first muse. With Marie, Barbara traveled around Europe on the same motorcycle, a revised trip of the one she took around the world with her ex-husband, Clay. Marie and Barbara spent 1972 miserable but in love, teaching English in Germany. And now, Marie is with another woman. Her and Barbara's love is no longer primary. Barbara is sleeping on her sister Marcia's couch and is at odds with her sister's rhythms. In the span of a few years, Barbara made a suite of seminal films within a short succession during her time as a film student. Films that she would later refer to as the psychosynthesis trilogy. She would call them the most vulnerable film she's ever made. I Was I Am was only her second 16-millimeter film. I was made during her first years in film school and directly influenced by Maya Darren's Meshes of the Afternoon. A year later, in the summer of 1973, Barbara would film X, a nine-minute 16-millimeter fugue.

SPEAKER_08 2:50

I, I, I, I, I. This is my anger, right? Me, me, me, me.

SPEAKER_06 3:02

In X, Barbara breaks down her various selves, chanting her subjectivity across a riotous spectrum of exhibitionism and solitude. A solitude born out of travel, the cacophonist hum of the road, the exhibitionism of the women's movement. Somewhere along the way, Barbara meets Terry Anderson. Terry's life, too, was in a moment of immense flux. A promising scholar and a dedicated activist. She was at first married to another academic, Dwight Anderson, but their relationship eventually fell apart as Terry uncovered her sexuality. Like Barbara, Terry was on the road a lot. But in addition to attending festivals and conferences, she was also shepherding her children, Derek and Valerie, from place to place in an attempt to find a new rhythm as a single mother and a newly out lesbian. With Derek, her son, I trace that time.

SPEAKER_01 4:42

My parents have separated. Then we moved to Montana. We live live through the winter months in Montana. Come spring, um Dwight, my father, and Terry decide to try to get together again. And so we moved back to San Diego. So three different schools, three different states, or three different different parts of the country, really, uh, in a single school year. And we end up in in San Diego um at the end of that school year. The the reunion with Dwight doesn't go well, it only lasts a few months. And so they separate again and begin divorce proceedings. Um and so for the 1972-73 school year, we are living in San Diego, but Dwight and Terry are living separately. Um at that point, I'm in the fourth grade. So then we get to the end of 1973. By this part, Terry has decided that she's gonna move to Vancouver. Uh, she turns down a full um fellowship, uh, you know, PhD program at Stanford to do so. Um she could go from Talabato with a full funded PhD program at Stanford, or she could go and try to fund find you know herself and fund things in Vancouver. Uh and that's what she chooses, and obviously that's when she meets Barbara. So in 19 the summer of 1973, we're in Montana, and Terry is not there. And Valie and I are kind of passed from relative to relative to relative.

SPEAKER_06 6:36

How did Terry and Barbara meet? Was it from across an auditorium hall, on the grass of a festival, a smoke-filled hallway at a party, a lesbian bar, one of so many of them at that time in the Berkeley area. Before the photographs, before the drawings, we find Terry in letters. The letters come together as a package of yellow legal pages. Barbara makes note of their sequence in a blue marker, one that she has carried with her from Germany. They begin to arrive in mid-July in overstuffed envelopes. In the first letter, Terry plays a cool. She speaks of business, the possibility of a collaboration. Terry is working on a production of Bitter Root ritual with her friend, the poet Barbara Miles, also known as Barbara Moore. Would Barbara Hammer maybe be interested in filming it if they got the money together? Money is the issue. Barbara is on Terry's mind.

SPEAKER_02 8:04

Of behind you on a motorcycle down the straight country road in the sun long. A fernhill kind of an image in our times way. Did we really intend to go after all? Your summer, wherever it is, is I hope good for you. For whatever your needs and work are now. I'm taking my children to a lake in Montana in a couple of weeks. Would like to hear from you. And if you send me a number, I'll call Winston sometime. Moving inspirate, Terry. I too have a history.

SPEAKER_06 8:51

Suddenly, on August 4th, Barbara wonders about accepting Terry's date. The next day, she's on the road, heading north this time, the Pacific to her left. Barbara's working on X. She's written its script in her diary. This is my transportation. This is my girlfriend. This is my ex-lover. This is my social conscience. At the end of the script, she jots down two more ideas for films. One shot at a low angle where the landscape buries you. And another, a portrait of women she loves. In her aloneness, Barbara is productive. She's keen. She's considering how to make a film without a single person in it. She writes a poem.

SPEAKER_02 9:44

I am a single woman alone in the universe, and I sing the song of myself. I take pictures of people and places that interest me. I am an extrovert without audience. I am an introvert in my head. My voice rings millennials of ocean waves and sparrow chirps, the wind cleans out my ear, the ice plant cushions my ass. I am a woman on a motorcycle alone. A single meadow lark hidden in wild radishes by the cabbage shield, sings stereo right ear, breaking ocean waves my left. Where do the pieces go? I identify my environment, therefore I am mirror reflection. There I am in the bike mirror. I see therefore I am. Ego bound, concerned with self, blow away.

SPEAKER_06 10:57

It's August 7th. Barbara shoots X with Constant Kamen at her sister Marcia's house. When Marcia finds out that Barbara was filmed naked at the window, masturbating in the film, she's furious. Terry calls that same afternoon to cancel their date, but changes her mind as they talk, saying that she'll call before seven if she decides to come. She has her kids, Derek and Valerie, with her. In two days' time, Terry will move to Canada. Barbara hangs around Marsha's house, waiting for Terry's call, her decision. In the meantime, she considers a sequel to X, filmed in Nature. Call it XX. A film that may become dike tactics, recreating those Yuba River feelings. She thinks about another film, one on a housewives collective. And then Terry and her kids arrive at Marcia's house. Barbara and Terry's first date lasts a whole two days. After Terry and her kids have left on August the 9th, Barbara recounts the date in her diary.

SPEAKER_02 12:22

First reaction after Terry leaves. Ah, peace, quiet, alone. The distance I felt with our parting still hasn't worn off. As if my protection has grown over my heart. Where are the emotions? The heavy weight I felt this morning waking in bed, realizing she was going today. Where is the passion at her touch that I felt all day yesterday on the wharf, in the car, in the house, the touch that lost its feel by the 2 a.m. lovemaking?

SPEAKER_06 13:04

Their relationship lives between two places, between cities, between countries, between letters. It's a relationship like so many bridging distances that's built from its very inception on past and future.

SPEAKER_02 13:23

But where's the present? Memories are fine too, and letters and distant plans. Terry, I don't want this preciosity ruined. If one thousand miles keeps it, I am glad to know that.

SPEAKER_06 13:49

By now Terry's en route to Vancouver, dropping her kids off in Montana on the way. She calls Barbara from Winnemucca, Nevada.

SPEAKER_02 14:03

9:30. Terry calls from Winnemaca. She asks what I've been thinking all day in that rather severe tone she has, matter of fact. She has clarity that I am right for her. She is fresh on a new trio. I can feel the lust and rightness adventure brings in her. Emphasize no kids in Vancouver, she promises. Thinks she understands about me, how terrible it would be to be stuck in Vancouver feeling cut off from the world. I will see what Canada that small corner might offer me. I tell her I don't want to live in the same house with kids. She understands. Understands too my ambivalence and why I wouldn't want to leave quite yet. I tell her she may be seeing my image and not me or my work, but I doubt the words as I say them. She asks, does art imitate life or life art? I don't like my doubts, my lack of strength when I'm talking to her. She had a glorious day with her children. She said they loved me. That tugs my heart. It's me who's seeing an image. She's not the image I have of my lover.

SPEAKER_01 15:40

So I mean I know that Terry had to go to Vancouver by herself because she didn't want to arrive in a city without a place to live with two two kids. I mean, that you know, that's just bad. So to the my family has a cabin at Lake Placid, which is outside of Missoula. But it's entirely possible that we made a sort of a vacation kind of trip up to Montana in July. We drove back in early August. Terry leaves not for BC on August 9th. She leaves for Montana again on August 9th. And then drops us off. And then goes to Vancouver. It's almost as if the first trip to Montana is both vacation and a scouting trip. Can I find people to take care of Derek Bowie while I go find a place to live in Vancouver? And we go back to Montana to almost like pack up stuff and move, you know, really move and probably close wherever we were living there. And then she takes us back up to Montana through with Moka.

SPEAKER_06 16:54

The next day, on August 10th, Barbara tells Marie, her ex-girlfriend, about Terry for the first time.

SPEAKER_02 17:04

Marie calls, says my relationship with someone in Vancouver, similar to ours, reliance on writing. I am not apologetic. New love can live off energy for a while, can exist in distance. I tell her I am trying to order my life, make decisions, and be responsible for them. I'm not moving to Canada this year, but am going to check it out. Crying, she says, I would never follow her anywhere. She says she can't accept my love for Terry because it sounds primary, and that I am going to run away. I wish I'd gone to Montana, looking forward to leaving this city for the drive north. Would you drive a thousand miles for a week of love?

SPEAKER_06 18:11

They're at a crossroads of romantic impulse. A chance encounter, a whirlwind date, an impending trip to see if, then what. What's one thousand miles? What's a week? On August 10th, Terry writes, Barbara, a postcard from Donner Lake, California.

SPEAKER_02 18:34

The energy I have from you keeps me driving all night, except that I occasionally yearn to turn back.

SPEAKER_06 18:46

Barbara takes a bath and records a long message to Terry. We don't know what she says on the tape, but it will come to Mark at an inflection point in their relationship. If a letter is a document of touch, send a thousand miles away. Maybe the tape is a document of listening, of another kind of perceptual intimacy. In anticipation of change that night, Barbara drafts her own will in her diary.

SPEAKER_02 19:18

I, Barbara Jean Hammer, being of sound mind and body, make this will should any accident befall me causing my unexpected death. I leave my 1972 BMW to Marie A. Shaw of 1092 Bill Road, Paradise, California. I also leave her $4,000 of my money in American savings. To my sister, Marcy Hammer Ebert, I leave $4,000 of money in American savings. To Terry Anderson of Vancouver, Canada, I leave $2,000. My rings, Jade Marcy Snake. Terry Plain Marie.

SPEAKER_06 20:22

What must Terry mean to Barbara if she's already leaving her money and one of her rings and her will next to her sister and her first love? Terry, meanwhile, is on the road. It's August 11th, and she writes Barbara a postcard from Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho.

SPEAKER_02 20:46

Perhaps we become what we behold, or how we are beheld.

SPEAKER_06 20:54

The next day, on August 12th, Terry Anderson arrives alone in Vancouver to start her new life there. She sends Barbara a postcard.

SPEAKER_00 21:06

And what of the people who live in this beautiful setting, which is Vancouver? How do people from other lands regard them?

SPEAKER_02 21:27

Canada goose can't fly south yet. California crow fly north. Better for us that way. Sappho R forty five listened to your tape in Bath Tomorrow Bomb queries, info argues, maybe a love bone. Six hours a day for you to study at my big desk. Sleep promised other bribes and rewards brings me. Sun or we'll go inland until we find it after you study. Keep coming around the circle until we close it spirally.

SPEAKER_06 22:11

It's August 14th. Barbara is about to leave California for Vancouver. She's making notes on X thinking of her mother. She wonders if the exhibitionist is really just an introvert.

SPEAKER_02 22:30

I am really quite an introvert. I like to be alone with my fantasies. My fantasy world, mulling over past, forecasting future, recalling hurts, things you cannot do in public. My secret world. The secret garden. I still want her approval, now dead and gone. She will not see me in my glory.

SPEAKER_06 23:05

It's August 15th. And Barbara gets on the road. She heads north.

SPEAKER_02 23:11

I'm going to sublet my soul vacancy. No cash required. Just a woman's heart and a place in it for me.

SPEAKER_06 23:24

Barbara's in Olympic National Park at the northern coastal tip of Washington. Like Terry, she's chosen a diversion by heading up the coast this way. To her north is Port Angeles, a short ferry ride to Victoria on Vancouver Island. While there, she notes down a question.

SPEAKER_02 23:45

What is the psychological attachment of imprinting that a lesbian puts on the woman she brings out?

SPEAKER_06 23:58

In the back of her diary, Barbara drafts a letter to Marie. She wonders about the end of their relationship, the enduring possibility of their love, and she thinks about the fantasy of Terry.

SPEAKER_02 24:17

As for Terry, she too will be far away, and I refuse to live off a fantasy relation. I wait so eagerly to see her. Wish she were with me. I'm lonely for her company. Wonder our future.

SPEAKER_06 24:38

She still desires Marie. She wants her freshness. She wants her to seek her out. She wants Marie to be her confidant. On August 19th, Pride Week begins for the first time across Canada. It's an event that would become a precursor for the pride parades we know now, said to mark a shift from the homophile movement, which held the aim of assimilating LGBTQIA people into mainstream society, to the gay liberation movement. In Vancouver, it's a picnic in Stanley Park. That same morning, from her Olympic Peninsula campsite, Barbara writes an ode to solitude in her diary. X weighs on her mind.

SPEAKER_02 25:41

The exhibitionist is not really one, but so far out towards living the personal existence fully that she seems crazy to other people. She goes on long beach walks. She beachcombs exoskeletons and her mind for new awarenesses. When she returns to the city scene, she is changed so that she appears incongruous. She feels one day she cannot. She returns to the caged box, an expensive apartment, looks inside, and turns away. No audience. Her exhibitionism isn't seen, so therefore her essence. She turns away to the beach where she makes collections of things she finds. All skeletons, crabs, trees, clams. She stops worrying about her exhibitionism and exhibits her collections.

SPEAKER_06 26:55

On August 20th, Barbara Hammer arrives in Vancouver. She begins an experiment of love, but arrives with an image of her lover in mind, an image that challenges the new world she's built for herself. It's an image of a middle-class woman trying on radicalism like a new shirt. Months later, Barbara would recall her image of Terry in Vancouver in a misplaced page of her autobiographical novel, My Life is Henry Miller.

SPEAKER_02 27:32

She wore her silver rings and her contact lenses as if they were inevitable. Now, in the close shaven yard of a friend of a friend of a friend, oh my how she had stretched it, she passed the man of the house, assuming him the hired help, to move from the impersonal world of the highway into a Vancouver neighborhood. What century could she expect? Her meditation had zoomed her fifteen hundred miles down a jury whose end she was not sure. The French radio broadcasts, the tentative picking out word by word of a language whose intonations she found enchanting, like little hills and valleys, she thought. The French had taken her away, away from the stucco and laundromats, the safe way marketing and the dirty, dirty pavement. Nine years of encasement in a hobby house as a kept wife, bursting free like an angry wasp from a paper nest, I struck out on my irreparable and damaging career as an independent woman of the world. Naive and without survival training, I fell into hive after hive, the captured queen. First the bed of an artist who lost weight because of me, secondly into the emotional net of a lesbian with dependency needs, and now she questioned herself into the arms of a waiting infatuation. She wanted a change, as was this the newest excuse to not make her own way.

SPEAKER_06 29:22

Was it Terry that Barbara was seeing? Or an image of another self? In her diary, Barbara catalogues what she encounters in Vancouver day by day.

SPEAKER_02 29:38

Women's movement, lesbian rap, art gallery.

SPEAKER_06 29:44

Together, they talk of film and plans for new films. Barbara begins to notice Terry's drinking. On August 24th, they head to Squamish, the fantastic mountainside with the crows. Barbara remarks on Terry's talk at dinner. She writes a poem in her diary.

SPEAKER_02 30:13

Barbara the beauty queen, bouncing on the log, with the smiling, approving mother, be seen and you are alive. Definition of existence. Mirror of her eyes. Or distilled fear that it's alright to be loved like this. Or to be loved like this is like this. The damage comes the fifth day.

SPEAKER_06 30:50

The night before they'll leave Vancouver. They stay up late. Barbara paints Terry. Well, Terry writes Barbara a letter. It's Monday, August 27th. Barbara and Terry board a ferry to Danaimo, which Barbara calls a cruise. Barbara's feeling menstrual and underslept. She wonders about Terry's distance.

SPEAKER_02 31:25

She feels the pressure of time. Pressure of numbered days left. Want all, all the time. She writes privately, keeps private notes.

SPEAKER_06 31:39

On the ferry, they meet two young women. Who are hitching to Hornby Island. They invite Barbara and Terry to come along with them. They're 19 years old and are about to embark on their own lives.

SPEAKER_02 32:00

Of that moment, Terry writes, They are strong and good young women. A creative and right way we went with them together, not manipulative. I don't think we use them for our own ends, though through their presence and our work, we were brought together again. We got on to the ferry, and before we knew what was happening, Barbara leapt out of her car and grabbed the Hornby Island Ferry red fire axe and threw it into the trunk of her car. And then we were then we drove off the ferry. And we were just shocked. Um because, well, for for years after I'd go on the ferry and I would see the outline of the act that they hadn't replaced. And so Rose and I felt shocked and amazed that someone could do that, but also kind of guilty that we didn't say, uh Barbara, that's they might need that act.

SPEAKER_06 33:34

Why are Barbara and Terry there? What force has propelled them to Hornby Island? Adventure? A performance of the what if? The as if in her letters. Terry worries that she is disposable to Barbara. She can feel Barbara's restlessness. She can feel the presence of Marie.

SPEAKER_02 34:01

Why are we here? To find out if and what? And now we have a glance at what's at stake, and maybe why for each of us differently.

SPEAKER_06 34:15

For Terry, their impromptu trip to Hornby Island might have represented a space of possibility, a sudden opening, an omen of an adventurous new life in Canada to come. And yet it was becoming clear that Terry's ghosts were following her those 1,000 miles from California. Ghosts of her past, of her first marriage, of her addiction.

SPEAKER_04 34:49

Yeah, my feeling is that I mean, I don't know whether she was an alcoholic, but Barbara sort of suggested that. And also the feeling was that when she did have children, but where were they? She would have been divorced.

SPEAKER_03 36:08

And we would talk about that. Um neither of a drink. But she was by the way people changed when they were drinking. And uh, like we would go out with some couples, and she'd go, I really don't like to be around them when they've been drinking, they become somebody different, and I just don't like it, and blah blah blah. And it got in the way. Uh she would just say, you know, I'm not gonna put up with this, I can't.

SPEAKER_06 36:43

On Hornby, the weather is unseasonably cold and windy, even if the sun still feels warm. The season is about to change. They wear their jackets buttoned up as they visit Hellywell Park. In Barbara's photos from the day, we see Martha and Rosemary giggling in the tall grass, a photo that will become friends, Northern California coast. One of several that would be geographically mistitled. But in its air, reveals the swirling of women and places that Barbara was encountering up and down the Pacific coast. There's a self-portrait of Barbara, too, partly burnt away, looking quiet, grounded. In another, which will become Love and the Grass, Barbara and Terry are found in a naked embrace, their bodies pressing into the tall grass of Heliwell. The grasses they lie in are part of the northernmost Gary Oak meadows in North America. That night at Martha's cabin, they perform a ritual.

SPEAKER_02 38:02

She was just um she just had such energy. She was she was contagious. Her energy was contagious and so and inspiring. It's like, yeah, okay, the inner goddess, let's do it.

SPEAKER_04 38:15

We probably had the flood fire on, maybe not in August, but I just have a very clear memory of, yeah, 50 years ago, of Barbara's voice. And I think she had a beautiful, strong voice, and I remember her saying, reach within yourself and find, you know, the strength within you. And we were passing something around. I don't know what it was, maybe it was a candle, but Martha, I can't really remember. But I remember me turning to Martha and handing her this object, this object power. And then Martha, who who is a great actor, she doesn't do anything that's not dramatic. And I can remember her turning and handing it on, probably to Terry. And even at that point, I just remember, whoa, Martha had a really nice breast, and she looked like she had her hair, she had a band down on, she just looked like, you know, some young person with, you know, some ceremony, you know, maybe covered with, you know, whatever it was, just that your gesture as you did it, her her suggestion, you had actually taken it and you were being empowered or being bold or whatever it was. It was great. I mean, you know, you don't remember things that clearly a half a century later.

SPEAKER_02 39:35

No, we don't. I don't remember that. And uh it's partly because you know, I um my background in this wild United Church uh that my parents got us into. Uh we did so much of that. So it that that wouldn't have been new to me, but it would have been new to Rose, so she might have remembered me. Remember that? Like sensitivity training and like everything was a ritual. So it's maybe why I wasn't at all shocked by anything that Barbara and Terry proposed. Like it was just like, oh yeah, right, a a ritual with an object. Like I don't, but um it was more their intensity that I was constantly aware of. It's not what we did.

SPEAKER_06 40:32

The next day they drive Rosemary to the ferry. She's getting ready to take a two-year trip around the world. Rosemary's an adventurer. One day she'll become a producer for CBC radio. Back at the cabin, Martha, Barbara, and Terry head to the beach in front of them, just to the left of Whaling Station Bay. There, along the sandstone beach, amongst the driftwood, Barbara takes an entire roll of film, with Martha at the center, her dancerly body writhing and stretching across the driftwood, as in bowsprit. Barbara and Terry practice wrestling in other shots, supposedly in preparation for a film. And in another, Barbara and Martha channel Aphrodite, emerging from a sandstone rock formation known locally as the Dragon's Maw. They're naked, scraping their way out of the womb-like cave in a series of photos that would come to be named Aphrodite's Earth.

SPEAKER_02 41:51

I just remember um drumming, and that's what I really remember drumming on the driftwood and embracing the driftwood. Just being so confident we are lesbian, or certainly barber. Um and Terry seemed a bit like she was emerging from a cave, and um yeah, it's not like it's not like it was a torture. It didn't feel like they were tortured with each other. It seemed like they really loved each other. But it just felt like, no, their world is apart. There's a visible mountain. That was my nineteen-year-old perspective.

SPEAKER_06 42:51

Barbara, Mull's ex. She's thinking about her relationship to Terry as a relationship to herself.

SPEAKER_02 42:59

She wants a relationship that doesn't depend on It's self-analysis for support. Lesbian affairs tend to be foreclosing in this manner. Endless backbending on what's happened, what's to happen. Really, there's more.

SPEAKER_06 43:20

The poem that follows is a keyhole into Barbara and Terry's conversations, their occupations and their hopes.

SPEAKER_02 43:29

Barbara wants. She thinks I feed my heart off of love. I wait for her time to come again. I know it will. I am not ashamed nor afraid. I am content to let it happen. This is the first time for me. Spiral to sleep, she says, drinking beer in the back room. I'm writing you a letter. I can't speak to you. What is Barbara afraid to let happen?

SPEAKER_06 44:29

To fall in love? To break up? She crosses out her resentment at Terry's insistence on writing as opposed to speaking her emotions. It's the ninth day of her trip. And Barbara lays out an assessment.

SPEAKER_02 44:46

If we can't talk, then we write in honesty. Why can't we talk in honesty? Hurts and truths will not shatter us. She seeks what binds them. Tease needle eye, jade, reflection, our bug vision. The crows are friends. She should be too. Two witches, two contemplatives, too stubborn, too articulates.

SPEAKER_06 45:20

In her diary that night, Barbara catalogues her fears in a tide pool.

SPEAKER_02 45:28

What could be worked out on Hornby Island? Life is an experiment. One explores by losing limits and expectations. That there would be no cars on Hornby Island. Jungled city nerves, I feel city slickness, new and emotional constancy. I feel a fragility of character. I am frightened to death. Back to Clayton. My break from him, my fear of sanity. LSD flashbacks, chug chug pile driving across the island. Why can't I just let it be? The seagull cried, the older way, the eagle's beak I couldn't see.

SPEAKER_06 46:24

In the same notebook, Barbara writes down the addresses of Martha and Rosemary. Rosemary is simply general delivery, the post office on Hornby Island. It's with this detail that I'm able to locate them. In her second letter to Barbara, a farewell before she leaves BC, Terry mauls her decisions. They're on the ferry back to Vancouver.

SPEAKER_02 46:53

She writes, What is real? Are you my alter ego? The care I would be? Does one try to integrate an alter ego or hold it separate? Are you to love the part of my life I can't? Is the point assimilation ingestion or attentiveness and its cautionary? And who am I for you? The sun is breaking as we land. We could talk about the difference between lonely, alone, solitude. We could talk about what you need most and should have. We could talk about the polarization in my life that seems, threatens, to tear me in two.

SPEAKER_06 47:46

And then Terry signs the letter for the first time. Jessica. It's August 30th. Barbara and Terry speak about work and ambition. Terry tells Barbara that she better get a serious body of work behind her to feel the pressure of youth at her heels. Those brilliant 19-year-olds, Martha and Rosemary, are on their minds. Barbara scribbles down ideas for X on yellow legal pad.

SPEAKER_02 48:21

No lip sync of protagonist. Can never see her as she isn't real. Her exhibitionism, a false self. Voice over sound, little girl remembering. T's idea. Flashes of real self, mine at moment of self-awareness, dignity of integrity. As she rejects exhibitionism, she becomes more and more the scene and speaker, the subject and less the personified object.

SPEAKER_06 48:58

There's another scrap of the same yellow legal pad, torn and coffee stained, an exquisite corpse of different pens, pencils, and markers of Barbara and Terry. At the top of the page, in blue marker, Barbara has written back from Hornby with shaking hands. It's the beginning of a long letter from Terry, who writes in quivering pen with a pencil.

SPEAKER_02 49:28

When we came to an island to find a change of way, we moved instead to find to find a change in writing.

SPEAKER_06 49:41

Terry says that Barbara is making her walk a tight rope. The next day, back in Vancouver, they go for a walk in Stanley Park, but it's a dry goodbye. On September 1st, Barbara leaves Vancouver. We hear from her in Wolf Creek. She's on the road, and she can feel the creative intensity that awakens her with insomnia. She feels imminent death and the urgent need to create. She imagines three female graces dancing nude, feeding on melon at Whittig's green house. These are rites, rituals that will be described later in filming Dyke Tactics. The same day as Barbara leaves, her children arrive. Terry writes of their excited arrival, their indignation at not getting to see their new friend Barbara.

SPEAKER_02 50:53

Oh, why did she have to go? I have my bracelet still, see? A nice penguin. Why didn't she fix the TV? That's a picture of both of you. How long was she here?

SPEAKER_06 51:09

Terry is regrouping, transiting. Traces of Barbara are everywhere. She finds herself wandering through her new life.

SPEAKER_02 51:20

Finding sunspots on the floor to sit on. She unpacks a book. Durrell's Justine. To everyone we turn a different facet of the prism of ourselves. You know I never tell a story the same way twice. Does that mean I am lying? Durell's quartet is partially mainly about a woman seen many ways by the others whose lives she intersects. She is, depending on who is seeing her. The infinite complexity of the human spirit and its twisted lives almost rendered to satisfaction. I read them just before, well, during getting married. She, an exhibitionist to some, saves her secrets. Multiple lives, but not disintegrated really, more a lifelong search, shadows, negative space, resonance. I remember lying with you yesterday afternoon, not being able to feel which was your skin, which was mine. Yes, whoever. Terry Jessica Milady.

SPEAKER_06 52:48

Terry writes that she told everyone Barbara was just an old friend from San Francisco because she didn't know how to say the other, especially to her kids. It's September 2nd. Barbara's back in Berkeley.

SPEAKER_02 53:06

She writes, Crazed mighty summer end, dry grass herbal scent, musk mornings, legs of you, and still be on my feet. You lay me flat, gas stations closed, lines of consuming trawlers.

SPEAKER_06 53:30

Back in Berkeley, Barbara knows that things are decidedly over with Marie.

SPEAKER_02 53:40

She hopes I continue my painting. Marie is my painting side.

SPEAKER_06 53:48

Hornby is still on her mind. In her diary on September the 5th, she writes. It's running, no sprinting between X and her lovers. Status comes from who recognizes whom. She's seeking self-reliance. She wonders if she needs Terry to guide her. Terry is on her mind. Or perhaps Terry as object is.

SPEAKER_02 54:49

Jessica is a secret name and can be used to address letters.

SPEAKER_01 54:56

This is also about the time that she also developed alternative signatures for both Valerie and for me and for herself. Her name was legal name was Elizabeth Terry Carpenter. And so she used ETC a lot. She's this fiery lesbian radical on the one hand, and she's is you know, in some ways very traditional. This is how you do things. She would say my grandmother would be very unhappy with me right now because I'm not, you know, the kitchen isn't tidy. I mean, she'd actually say something like that. So, you know, there's these these like all of us, there's different sides to her uh to her personality. I can see Jessica as being an expression of part of her identity.

SPEAKER_06 56:47

The only thing that surprises me is the name for Terry's testing out aliases names to differentiate between herself, her head, and her superego. Her radical self, her middle-class self. Terry is her logical self, the academic, the mother, and Jessica is impulsive, romantic, poetic. Barbara too is becoming interested in the process of psychosynthesis, the therapeutic model dedicated to the recovery of the self through the synthesis of one's subpersonalities.

SPEAKER_07 57:34

Psychosynthesis is a film of gestalt fantasy work, uniting my subpersonalities of athlete, baby, witch, and artist.

SPEAKER_06 57:44

In 1975, she'd make the final film in her psychosynthesis trilogy, expanding on the work she'd already done in I Was I Am and X. What strikes me is that both Barbara and Terry were exploring the potential of their alter egos or subpersonalities through their letters.

SPEAKER_07 58:08

The beat of my measure.

SPEAKER_06 58:20

New Friend is made by Bitsy Knox with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Barbara Hammer Estate, and the Beineggy Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, as well as 96.5 CHFR, Hornby Island Community Radio, and Kashmir Radio, Berlin. The voices of Barbara Hammer and Terry Anderson via their diary entries and letters are voiced by Martha Ross. You heard clips from Barbara Hammer's films, X of 1974, Sisters, 1974, and Psychosynthesis 1975. Thank you to all of those who contributed their voice to this chapter of New Friend. Flori Burke, Martha Ross, Rosemary Allenback, and Derek Anderson. To the sounds of water, rocks, wind, sky, plants, and all living and non-living beings of Hornby Island, Jadai. I extend gratitude and respectfully acknowledge that these recordings were made on the unceded traditional and ancestral lands of the Comox First Nation. Recordings were also made on the unceded traditional and ancestral lands of the Mosqueam, Slaywetude, and Squamish Nations, and the Ohlone, all of the Pacific coast of North America.