In Loving Memory of
Eve Helene Wilkowitz
born April 17, 1959:
abducted and murdered
in New York City, March 1980
She was not a document. She was not a number or a photograph. Not an abstract idea or a madman's fantasy. She was flesh and blood.
— Susan Griffin, Pornography and Silence: Culture's Revenge Against Nature, 1981
In the summer of 1979 a young writer moves to midtown New York, city of dreams. With 8 months of drinking in those electric, grimy-grand avenues, he breaks into freelance work for educational textbook publishers—but, come midwinter, he's found the city both wildly alive and lonely.
Early Monday February 11th, 1980: he walks up Third Avenue to his latest gig at Macmillan Publishing, where a raucous community of creative colleagues clack away on typewriters, sustaining the dreams they're really after. The standard sterility of American textbooks ignites subversion in their constant banter: his morning's plan is to share out copies of an historical romance parody, "Love's Deep Disturbance." And there alone before him, working the xerox-machines, is Eve.
Her eyes are deep brown with an impish twinkle, her big ready smile tells the word-drunk writer her name, and he's a goner. Eve: meaning Life, primeval, innocent and wayward, there seems no more beautiful name for a woman and a Muse. From their first lunch onward, the cosmos between them goes Click.
Eve is on the verge of her 21st birthday that Spring: a smart strong happy outgoing person grown up in Oakdale, Long Island, and moving now from Bay Shore into dynamic relation with the world, through her college-course pursuit of a career in social work. She loves her Jewish family, old friends from Connetquot High School, home-cooked meals, horses, stupid movies, music (most lately, The Beatles): the first thing they love together is walking the great city streets holding hands, and talking and talking.
"Eve and I were not what anyone would consider popular at Connetquot," writes a close girlfriend (posted among other fond comments with "Eve, Spring, Flowers" at Wordpress). "Other girls were sometimes mean to her," and although Eve is "rather shy and fragile," people close to her know "one of the sweetest people I ever met." "I always felt she would contribute a great deal to society" because "she had such a lovely personality…from deep within." "She seemed to have blossomed after high school."
Eve's love for her family and her own life's hopes are a painful mix these days. Just a year ago, her mother has died young of cancer, and Eve hides the grief still in her heart. As she lives now to honor and care for her father and younger sister, she also "just has to get out" of their devastated home awhile, to find her way. And out comes her current situation—for she had jumped too fast into living with a boyfriend who, she avers, is boyfriend no more. She's stuck in a very uneasy living-space and longs to break out in new directions.
Weekly February dates for lunch become home-cooked dinners at the writer's midtown mouse-hole, and always a fresh red rose sprayed with baby's breath in his hand or on the table. He's holding back most of a million kisses as Eve urges him, "Go slow, go slow": she says the last thing she wants is new commitment, even as a girlfriend recalls that at the time, "she seemed the happiest I had ever known her to be." To him she seems endearingly grateful for any little kindness, such as taking her by crosstown taxi to the evening's last Long Island Railroad train, and constant offers (staunchly declined) to see her all the long way home. "There's nothing to worry about, I know everybody," she protests.
Eager to show what a patient, understanding fellow he could often pretend to be, he croons a few after-dinner songs with acoustic guitar. "Like James Taylor?" "Some," Eve shrugs. So, he plays, and as sure as it happens that two people instantly know they belong together, he can see her slowly melting toward the world he longs to give.
Well the sun is surely sinking down
but the moon is slowly rising
so this old world must still be spinning round
and I still love you
It won't be long before another day
we gonna have a good time
and no one's gonna take that time away
you can stay as long as you like
Soon, one mid-week morning, Eve rides into Manhattan early and just shows up with breakfast at the writer's door. Spring sunshine pours down through tall windows onto his ratty little table where they sit (talking, talking), and life between them is in full bloom. Her planned spontaneous visit happens in the same days when Eve starts a diary (later shared with the writer by authorities):
I bought this book to write in because I am very confused with the things I've been doing and feeling lately….I think I have a problem with guys and love. I don't want to fall in love and don't want a commitment. But it seems as if they do….I definitely don't. I do want a guy to care….I really don't know what exactly I want out of a relationship.
I know that right now I like Jack….I know that he likes me too, but I told him not to push….But so far he seems like a nice guy. He is honest, and he thinks that I am funny.
Although Eve hates and dreads office-gossip, she stops by his Macmillan writer's desk as work allows, and there one morning he invites her on a writing-trip to talk with his WWII-veteran uncle in Asheville, North Carolina. "What? When are you going? All that for a stupid book?"
"Stupid book? I think you should go away now," he says with obviously fake umbrage. Within hours an enormous red rose lands on his desk, with a card: Jack, Sorry. Hope this helps, Eve. He brings the bloom home and it unfolds like no rose he's ever seen.
March 12 1980. I think I am in trouble now. I think I am really starting to like Jack more than I wanted to. I have a feeling that this time I am the one who is going to be hurt. I asked him if he dates other girls and he said yes. And that bothers me, but I can't show it. I don't want him to think I care too much, or too little. I really don't want to lose this guy. He is really good to me and makes me feel good, I'm glad we're taking it slow like I said. But now I think about him more than I want to. I am afraid. I really don't want to fall in love with him, and I am so scared of being hurt.
Nine days later—Friday March 21st—they glide down Third Avenue from Macmillan to his place on 36th Street. Under red evening sky young street-poplars bloom out yellow and purple. Sharing wine, laughing, kissing, talking challenges and hopes: he's rolling a smoke, Eve comes from behind to wrap his neck and nuzzle, and the man dissolves. "Eve, don't be afraid. But I love you. I love you and I want us to move in together." Alright, she replies. Because I love you, too.
Their first declaration, sealed with a long, long kiss. Now, some dinner? And that stupid movie she wants to see?
It's stupid alright, but she can't stop chatting comical queries in her seat, nor can he stop kissing her. Back outside and tiring out, Eve takes on a serious stomach-ache (or at least first lets it show): they go back to his apartment to wait for the night's last LIRR train, and it's the usual debate about his seeing her full-home. "How can I not worry? You even say sometimes that you think someone has followed you from Bay Shore station to your house."
"Yes, and I know you mean just sleep here, but I have to go. I have commitments Saturday with friends and family. But then I'll come back: we'll eat deli and look for apartments in the paper."
"Can I kiss you again, Eve?" "Yes."
Now she's falling asleep in his arms. "Promise you'll wake me for the train." Yes, but he can pretend to fall asleep too, till it's too late. He awakens her. They careen across town in a cab with shattered shock absorbers, and "Eve's curse" of menstrual pain is worse by the time they're half-arguing again on the stark subterranean platform. There's a minor flood in the station and a hubbub of late-night fans just out of a game at Madison Square Garden. "See, lots of people," Eve protests. "I told you, I know everybody. Yes, I promise to cab it from the station home, it isn't three blocks. Thanks, Jack. Now, good night."
Kiss. Through the train's big windows as it loads, he watches Eve find a seat. It won't be long before another day. And then, she's gone.
***
A visiting out-of-town college friend takes this photo during that very weekend of waiting, after he learns by phone that Eve never made it home. Three days of brain-boiling agonized worry, and then on Tuesday March 25th (Spring Equinox), the bottom drops out from under Spring and the universe. A Suffolk County Homicide detective says that Eve has been found, murdered, and that this kind of thing is "an everyday event." The man with the last friendly face she saw rightly becomes their prime suspect, until his alibi, their lie-detector and a much later DNA test prove out.
From there, through the next 42 years of travail—Why is this my culture's "norm"?—there's not a day or step or book of mine that isn't hers. I have curled my strength around her sleep. She led me to the earliest art-history I could find, and there were the stunning "unknown" Minoans of ancient Crete: a woman-centered, joyful, dynamically creative and peaceful people without predatory "kings," and they revel in life at the root of Western civilization for centuries longer than Rome or any period since. Such is the genesis of every work in these pages of Ancientlights.org today: a life's work to document that we have other teachers, smarter ancestors, better choices—that The Garden is remembering we're in it.
For the record (see for yourself with Links below), this Minoan world—a dynamically creative well-being in Nature's eternal present, bound together by trade and intermarriage (and protected by strict limits on executive power)—was still going strong when natural disaster and war-loving, self-wrecking clowns (the mainland's Mycenaeans) combined to take them down. This was the historical emergence of patriarchy, the rule of autocratic men, whose rape for profit and rage for power they sell to us with gods and goods as normal: "Homeric glory."
He cannot control himself, and rather than learning, wallows in degenerate all-controlling fear of anything more powerful. So it is She who must cover herself, numb herself, be invisible, silent, obedient, pure yet alluring, please him in all things and, "ideally," die.
Books, bricks and walls of "his-story" bear down to bury our original Minoan success in nihilism, desperate to convince us that we're cursed and trapped, while a toxic edifice from blood-exploiting media to crime-fiction and movies gives the lie—as a blossoming young woman who "must" be repeatedly cruelly killed. After an age when our brilliance sang the sanctity of women (hence, of Life), this is daily eucharist, central sacrament in the ritual murder of the best in us. Try counting how many times per day we fakely face the "tragedy" of her annihilation. The last 42 years of this faded Eve's murder into one among thousands and thousands of Cold Cases round the world that men wish for and pretend to rule.
Always a fresh "compelling" scenario round the same murder takes us worse than nowhere. Pornographic culture (turning Life into dead commodity) soaks the nervous system in erotic indulgence, but leaves us not with deeper more miraculous perception: instead, dis-spirited, de-moralized, numb and ever-more hungry for true ecstatic consummation. That is, to live and evolve our souls in this living flesh in a living world and universe. Hollow grifters rob us daily of real eternal life.
It seems erotically urgent that we accept this. Publishers and agents "don't even want to look at it" if you're going to make people feel something, while farming out millions to any who can "entertain" with the sick aesthetic of an Edgar Allan Poe—who declared "the death of a beautiful woman" as "the most poetical topic in the world."
Love's deep disturbance is the sham values of patriarchy built on the profits and rewards of psychotic dysfuntion: ignorance, fear and hatred of Earth, of women and peace. Of Life, in a word. If this seems too polemical, look around: Earth dying faster than ever, rights and human institutions crumbling, and the greatest investments by far in soldiers, weapons, and destruction on a planet still with plenty for everyone. The verdict of 2022 is that we've learned nothing, and fake necessity prevents it under the rule of men who lack only the courage to feel, question, control themselves, find another smarter way. Yet, there are ways out.
Consider the "logic" shared between Eve's murderer and the global gangsters stumbling toward suicide, anatomized by Susan Griffin's brilliant Pornography and Silence. For all that we refuse to feel, change and evolve, Life (the Erotic) just keeps coming back to demolish adolescent wishes. The psychotic spiral accelerates, for the rituals of fear increase it: "the mind that believes in delusion must still face reality."
So comes a choice: come to terms with reality, or force the world to resemble the delusion. And where can we look for the quintessential expressions of our choice so far? The daily murder, conquest, exclusionary walls and never-enough-weapons of Zionist apartheid Israel are its failing monuments, maintained by a senile Zero-Sum American Empire, in whose (wishful) world only more death-machines can bring peace, and there can be only one all-controlling power.
What can we positively do? Peace is not the absence of war, nor does a practical problem-solving global family happen by default. Those long-gone Minoans actively fostered both with their heterarchia, a nature-based cyclic round of festivals promoting the sharing of power across differences. (The elements of this in Calendar House.) This was so fundamental to their long success that we find it inscribed 1,000 years after them on the wheels of the world's first computer, the Antikythera Mechanism. The answers are behind and before us.
Pornographic patriarchy ends when each of us feeds it no more of our daily life-sustaining labor—and learns to share the world again.
***
I cried every day for the first two wretched years of losing Eve (for as Dante said in La Vita Nuova, "how she has been among us, and is not"). It ate me alive that I hadn't ignored Eve's wishes and seen her safely home; and that her gentle soft-spoken father let me ride with his shattered family from funeral-home to the grave, while holding me rightly responsible. At last one day I broke open as wide as the morning when we shared that luminous breakfast. This is how much I can love, and now I cannot lose, because this feeling is to win. Another desperate day, Dante's Comedy cracked open to the very page (Canto V, Inferno) where it seemed Eve was speaking to me still:
Love, that in gentle heart so quickly wakes,
took him with this fair body, which from me
was torn: the way of it still hurts and aches.
Love, that to no beloved remits his fee,
took me with joy of him, so deep in-wrought,
even now it hath not left me, as thou dost see.
And so we come to the March 2022 day when dedicated detectives of Suffolk County Homicide announced a positive DNA-match, proving who had somehow abducted Eve, held her and raped her through four nights, and then strangled her, to dump her half-clothed body in a family's backyard not half a mile from her uneasy Bay Shore home.
The murderer himself (29 at the time) died of cancer only 11 years after Eve. Truth by way of un-burying. It seems that a person so beyond pathetic had to need help to do what he did. But at least by the news stories closing the case (linked below), likely we will never know more.
Historian Barbara Mor's 1981 reply when my first letter sent her Eve's story and pages of the 15-year labor called Ariadne's Brother:
I've put off to the end here your experience, the 'everyday' destruction of a young woman named Eve. Yes. That's all I can say: Yes. Our world is built on it, like a vampire is built on blood….One of my biggest revelations was really focusing on the timing of historical events; realizing that The Inquisition, the 'witch'-burning, the pornographic details of the dungeons and the tortures of daily life which we sloppily relegate to 'the dark ages' truly occurred, in their maximum ferocity and misogynistic legality, during THE RENAISSANCE, that glorious time of Shakespeare and Rubens and the glorification of Greek nakedness and female flesh and the gorgeous reawakening colors of life.
That's when most women were burning at the stake. That's when the stench of their flesh was 'a daily event,' the quotidian incense. That's when horror was so habitual, we are still numb: we, the inheritors of those who survived, we still don't know what happened to us. That's how all-pervasive it was. It's Gestalt Theory: the thing we notice least is the thing that is everywhere, we no longer question it, the daily background. It takes a personal tragedy to hook into that background, like a terrible crochet needle, and pull it forward: we see the threads of life are all bloody. They are made of the torn tendons and screams of tortured beings. It's explained as 'human nature,' and that is what we must question now….
The last lines missing from Dante's verse: "Love led us both to one death. He that sought/and spilt our life—Cain's Hell awaits him now."
I wish no one in Hell. No one. Only the lie that such "everyday events" are our inevitable inheritance.
Let us awaken. If not us, who?
Let us correct this. If not now, there won't be a later.
We can do this.
It won't be long before another day.
— 5 LINKS —
Suffolk investigators crack 42-year-old homicide case
Cold-case murder on Long Island has finally been solved after 42-year mystery
Eve spring flowers: Notes on a murder 32-years unsolved
People of the Sea, Life beyond the catastrophe cycle
WOOP: We the Workers of the World WALK OUT ON PROFIT
***
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