Free Spirits: Annals of the Insurgent Imagination 0862871287, 0872861287, 9780872861282

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“ANNALS OF THE INSURGENT IMAGINATION

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/freespiritsannal0000paul

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Annals of the Insurgent Imagination I Editors:

Paul Buhle Jayne Cortez Philip Lamantia Nancy Joyce Peters Franklin Rosemont Penelope Rosemont

Bb CITY LIGHTS BOOKS San Francisco

©1982 by City Lights Books All Rights Reserved for the Authors

Designed by Nancy Joyce Peters

ISBN: 086287-128-7

CITY LIGHTS BOOKS are edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti & Nancy Joyce Peters and published at the City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco 94133

FREE SPIRITS Annals of the Insurgent Imagination

CONTRIBUTORS

Eric Althach, now a freshman at City Honors High School in Buffalo, N.Y., is delving into the Cthulu Mythos of H.P. Lovecraft and others. Paul Buhle is a historian and Director of the Oral History of the American Left. He writes for the Nation, the Village Voice, Cultural Correspondence and Radical America of which he was a founder. Hilary Booth is a poet, painter, and an editor of the Australian surrealist journal The Insurrectionist’s Shadow. Angela Carter is an acclaimed English novelist whose bold and witty study of sexuality and power, The Sadeian Woman (Pantheon), is now in paperback. Bill Cole, biographer of Miles Davis (Morrow) and John Coltrane (Schirmer), has a new LP record— Unsubmissive Blues (Bola Press), with Jayne Cortez reading her poems. Ornette Coleman, legendary jazz musician, has a new album just out— Human Faces (Antilles Records). Jayne Cortez’s fifth book of poems Spitfire was published earlier this year by Bola Press (P.O. Box 96, Village Station, N.Y.C.). Lawrence Ferlinghetti has turned into a painter. Peter Garland is a composer, ethnomusicologist, and publisher of Soundings Press in Santa Fe, New Mexico. David Gascoyne, one of England’s finest living poets, is the author of A Short Survey of Surrealism, forthcoming ina City Lights Books paperback. Janine Hartman, recently released from an obscure midwestern college only slightly less fantastic than the one that bounced Ezra Pound for harboring a female impersonator, is now completing an “impressionistic” dissertation on Sade, Baudelaire ef cie, and bathing like a sparrow in the dusty stimulation of the streets. Jamake Highwater, of Blackfeet and Crow parentage, has written many popular books on Indian life and arts. He is also classical music editor of the Soho Weekly News and writes on a wide range of subjects for many publications. Joseph Jablonski is a poet, essayist, and writer of unusual tales who has contributed to surrealist publications since the early 1970s. He is currently studying “alternative traditions of the paradisal persuasion.” Ted Joans, who lives mostly in Paris and Tombouctou, says “jazz is my religion and surrealism is my point of view.” Philip Lamantia’s most recent book of poems Becoming Visible, with a photomorph cover by J. Kar! Bogartte, was published last year by City Lights. Clarence John Laughlin is renowned for opening a new direction in photography that can reveal “the beauty and the terror, the strangeness and the wonder, of the world around us; a world which we only think we know... .” Mark Lause is a historian studying early radical workers’ organizations in the U.S. David Marc has written on media for American Film, NBC, and RA W. Jim O’Brien is a free-lance editor in Somerville, Mass.,and an editor of Radical America. Hal Rammel has issued two small books of his drawings and a surrealist comic book, Aero

into the Ether (Black

Swan

Press).

David

Roediger,

a labor historian, is completing a

full-length history of the struggle for shorter hours in the U.S. Stephen Ronan edits the irreverent xerox magazine Ammunition in Berkeley and plays with The Red Ants. Franklin Rosemont isa poet, surrealist theorist, and founder and editor of Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion. He has edited and introduced What is Accomplices Surrealism? Selected Writings of Andre Breton (Monad Press), Surrealism and Its Popular

(City Lights Books), and /sadora Speaks (City Lights Books). Penelope Rosemont, poet, essayist, storyteller, painter and co-founder of the Surrealist Movement in the U.S., has had paintings in many surrealist exhibitions around the world. James G. Spady is a writer, historian, and director of the Black History Museum in Philadelphia. Joyce Stoller travels throughout the country as an anti-nuclear activist and writes for that movement’s journals. £. P. Thompson's Protest and Survive (Monthly Review Press) has become a force in the international anti-nuclear-war movement. Robin Wells is the curator of the

Adan Treganza Anthropology Museum at San Francisco State University. Davey Williams, a native of rural Alabama, plays and performs free-improvised musics, most often with La Donna Smith, and is affiliated with the Iron Tortoise surrealists. Fred Woodworth edited the lively anarchist paper, The Match!, in the 1970s, and now produces The Mystery and Adventure Series Review (P.O. Box 3488.

Tucson, Az. 85722). Paul Yamazaki, director of the Asian American Jazz Festival, plays clarinet and is studying gagaku.

CONTENTS

Cover painting, The Circus by Maurice Kish Joseph Jablonski

Millennial Soundings: Chiliasts, Cathari, & Mystical Feminism in the American Grain E. P. Thompson and William Blake: The Education of Desire Poem Marvelous Mary MacLane Selections The History of North America from the Standpoint of the Beaver A Bridge Between Two Worlds Poem Beat Up the Bears: Baudelaire and Reagan Who Killed Karen Silkwood? Poem Poet Against Apartheid

Paul Buhle E. P. Thompson Penelope Rosemont Mary MacLane Jim O'Brien

Alanis Obomsawin Franklin Rosemont Janine Hartman

Joyce Stoller Dennis Brutus Dennis Brutus Pat Ferrero \ Nancy Joyce Peters

Out of the Mainstream:

Jamake Highwater Jamake Highwater

Philip Lamantia Philip Lamantia Wilson Harris Nelly Kaplan

Penelope Rosemont Jayne Cortez Col

Ra JOTICS

Melvin Edwards Lawson Inada Paul Yamazaki Amina

Baraka

Radical Humor

News

Bill Cole

Franklin Rosemont Arthur Cravan James G. Spady Ornette Coleman Ana Mendieta Angela Carter

Mario Cesariny Debra Taub Nelson Algren Franklin Rosemont

100 101 102 103 107 112 115 117 121 122 131 N3B2 131 134

Traditional

Arts and Untamed

Genius

Visions, Clowns, and Kachinas Doors to the Barbarians: Interview Poems Alice Farley: Dancing at Land’s End Voodoo, Trance, Poetry and Dance All Creation is Androgynous: Interview Poem Poems West Indies—Microcosm: Interview Lynch Fragments Testimony: Japanese-American Internment and the Loyalty Oath Oni-Gaku: Unholy Ghosts and Insurrectionary Spirits Poem Cartoons Improvisation in Music—A Black’s View All Things, All Men and All Animals: Arthur Cravan Poet and Boxer or, The Soul in the 20th Century Dr. J.: The Interstellar Connector Something to Think About My Thirst for Being The Cabinet of Edgar Poe Poem A Dance in the Forest So Human a Thing! On Nelson Algren

Charles Amirkhanian

135

Conlon Nancarrow

Peter Garland Eric Altbach

137.

Conlon Nancarrow: Chronicle of a Friendship

143.

Seeing Something New

Davey Williams Hilary Booth

145 147

The Unsettling Scores Poplar Poe Tree Dare Nunder

Alexis de Veaux Ted Joans Franklin Rosemont

Poem Wolfli K.O.s Dah Rats Live on No Evil Star: Palindromes The Overdefended or, The Tree as a Political Satire The Poet Prophets: Revolutionary Artistsinthe U.S. from 1870 to 1930

Nancy Joyce Peters Rusel Jaque

149 151 153. 154 156 170 172

Penelope Rosemont

174

Gustav Landauer

Gustav Landauer David Roediger

177. 178

Dream and Revolution Covington Hall: The Republic of the Imagination

Clarence John Laughlin Paul Buhle

Rusel Jaque: Vagabard and Cosmosan World Shaging Discovery and The Declaration of Freelandia

Covington Hall

181

In Defense of Dreaming

Mark Lause Arne Swabeck J. Karl Bogartte

182. 183 187

Arne Swabeck The Seattle General Strike of 1919: A Participant Remembers Questionnaire on Holidays and Celebrations

David Gascoyne

187.

Banners of The Spring to Be

Eugenio F. Granell

199

Gilbert Lascault Hal Rammel Michael Vandelaar Robin Wells Fred Woodworth David Marc Stephen Ronan Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Responses

to Holiday

Poem 200 La-Bas: Way Down There or Maybe Right Here 202. Dandruff in the Longhair of Music 206 Poem 209 UFOs and Fairy Lore 213. Mystery and Adventure: The School of the Marvelous 217 = Jollity and Gloom 220 Video Noir: Alfred Hitchcock Presents 223. ~=An Artist’s Diatribe

Questionnaire:

J. K.

Bogartte,

Mitchell

Cashion,

Guy

Ducornet,

Lawrence

Ferlinghetti, Thomas Falkner, Paul Garon, David Gascoyne, Todd Gitlin, Robert Green, Libby Gregory, Janice Hathaway, Miriam Hansen, Anne Janowitz, Zil Miller, Jim Murray, Irene Plazewska, Hal Rammel, Anthony Redmond, Rikki, Franklin Rosemont, Penelope Rosemont, Brooke Rothwell, Chris-

topher Starr, Hannah Stone, Cheikh T. Sylla, Debra Taub, Ken Wainio, John Welson, Davey Williams, Joel Williams, Fred Woodworth

Illustrations by: Aloise, J.K. Bogartte, Hilary Booth, Christin Couture, Melvin Edwards, E. F. Granell, Robert Green, Maurice Henry, A. K. El Janaby, Conroy Maddox, I. Maud, Ana Mendieta, Alistair

Morrison, N. J. Peters, Ribitch, Penelope Rosemont, Brooke Rothwell, Janine Rothwell, Debra Taub, Nick Thorkelson, Davey Williams, Joel Williams, Adolph W6lIfli.

FREE SPIRITS Annals of the Insurgent Imagination foToTo)

“What is now proved was once only imagin‘d’’—William Blake

Free Spirits desire the emancipation of all humankind Free Spirits conceive a habitable, harmonian

Free Free Free Free Free Free Free Free Free Free Free Free Free Free Free Free Free Free Free Free

Spirits Spirits Spirits Spirits Spirits Spirits Spirits Spirits Spirits Spirits Spirits Spirits Spirits Spirits Spirits Spirits Spirits Spirits Spirits Spirits

world

know that no revolution has gone far enough reject cynicism and despair resolve immobilizing antinomies dream extravagantly prepare the negation of capital mediate social transformation subvert the culture of regression and death affirm the power of the imagination seek the gold of time convulse with high humor reveal the poetry of life dispel religions via living myths find images to inspire action refuse to exploit misery evolve models of equality and freedom exalt love act in history leap into the unknown imagine possible futures move to realize surreality

foTe Jo)

“‘Transform the world!’ said Marx. ‘Change life!’ said Rimbaud.

commands are for us but one.” —André

Breton

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AMERICA = THE WILDERNESS MILLENNIAL

SOUNDINGS

Chiliasts, Cathari, and Mystical Feminism in the American Grain Joseph Jablonski

“This ts the land the sunset washes,

These are the banks of the Yellow Sea; Where it rose, or whither it rushes,

These are the western mystery!” —Emily Dickinson

I. Introduction.

An Influential Text It has been suggested by a handful of perceptive authors, but most directly by Karl J. R. Arndt in his monumental history of the Rappites, that few writings ever exerted a more profound effect upon the earliest European migration to America than the biblical Apocalypse. There is much essential truth in this observation. Early colonial America witnessed some of the world’s most exciting expressions of applied millenarian thought. Despite the crudity and chauvinism that have encrusted this older heretical tradition in 20th-century America, linking it with a bigoted religious nationalism that would have been shunned by all the earlier communitarian-minded pilgrims, there is about its infancy a sublime aura of paradisal hope, a glamour of impeccable nobility that remains forever pure in the historical memory. If poets and romantics have searched in vain heretofore in hopes of an epic worthy of the still unfulfilled possibilities of the specifically EuroAmerican idealist strain, I believe they may well find it in the accounts and the works of the mystic communitarians for whom the journey to the New World was an apocalyptic vision-quest. For here we learn of an anti-mercantile America founded on lyrical thought, wedded to the idea of the primacy

of inspiration, and willing to depose every institution standing in the way of the just transformation of the world. Among such suspect institutions were marriage and the family, private property, militarism, war, and male supremacy. The influence of this religio-radical movement in America’s early history was widespread, if little noted today in “mainstream” reflections on the past. For example, the Spiritualist and Theosophical movements of the 19th century, so imbued with the old-new concept of woman as seer and prophetguide, was a continuation historically of the sudden

wave of female mediumship and prophetism that took place in the underground conventicles of radical pietism and philadelphianism in 17th century Europe.' These two movements, which play an essential part in our story, were in reaction against the religious-monarchic rampage of the Thirty Years War that had utterly discredited the pretensions of the patriarchically-dominated orthodox churches. The feminizing tendencies were extremely active in the American Shaker and Ephrata movements, whose inspirationist arts form the main subject of this essay. Though limited in numerical strength, these tendencies were not a mere historical flash-in-thepan, a fringe phenomenon. From almost the beginning of European settlement, the American wilder-

10 ness magnetized successive generations, perhaps four or five in total, of radical, freedom-striving “sects” which hoped to realize the millennial dawn in their own lifetimes. Basing their socio-ecclesiastical orders on community of goods, often adapting celibacy, sexual equality, and a bisexual concep tion of a deity, such mystical movements embodied a stance toward spiritual authority that was more in keeping with the dissident, separatist writings of a John Milton or a Gottfried Arnold than with political or ecclesiastical loyalty.2 The theme of these sects, the theme of “the wider shores of Christianity” as it might be called, is even echoed in the legends of figures such as Christopher Columbus, who was a millenarian mystic and took the habit of the third order of St. Francis on his death bed; of Cabeza de Vaca, the legendary explorer-healer of the southwest; of Johannes Kelpius, who laboured on the banks of the Wissahickon to attain the tinctured crown of hermetic perfection; of Thomas Morton, that rare ranting spirit of Maytime, whose New England Canaan juxtaposed mad joy with the Puritan gloom. The whole story is, of course, vast in its detail and profoundly resonant. In the paragraphs below I have attempted to give a more distinct shape to the chapters that intrigue me most. The accounts of the Shakers and the Ephrata Solitary, and their unusual artistic production, will convey I hope some of the sociological and imaginative power that was generated by the millennial cathexis of “America” —the Wilderness.

2. The Bloody Theatre of the Cévennes It is a crucial fact that the period of North America’s earliest communal settlements arrived many years after the apex of militant, chiliastic revolt in Europe, the peasant risings and Anabaptist insurrections described in books such as Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium. The fact that millenarian thought and activity persisted even after it had been disarmed is a testimony to the deep-rootedness of the communal-egalitarian idea. In the face of crushing military defeats and incessant persecution, pacifism and non-violence became woven into the fabric of millennial life and thought.

hy

Eleanor Johanna von Merlau. Philadelphia diagram invoking the sixth church of the Apoca/ypse—the original (Jewish)

Christian church

Always balanced on a thin edge between the way of the sword and the way of asceticism, the left-wing of the Reformation had by the mid-17th century tasted so much futile combat that recourse to pacifism was all but inevitable. Even so, a definite impetus was given to many millennial sects, including the two America-bound groups that this essay shall discuss, by a bitter rural revolt in Southeastern France in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. This was the revolt of the socalled Camisards in the Cevennese mountain region close to the borders of Germany and Switzerland. It arose in response to the suppression of Protestantism in France following the 1685 Revokation of the Edict of Nantes which had guaranteed toleration of the Huguenots. The war that ensued between Louis XIV and the Huguenot population of the Cévennes was an emotionally tumultuous struggle, a lingering guerrilla resistance against relentless pacification troops. The guerrilla uniform was a white smock, which better displayed the self-sacrificial blood of the fighter. The Camisards declared themselves the sacred army of “the desert” and their movement was from the start engulfed in an apocalyptic tone of prophecy and divine wrath. The wholesale suppression of the Protestant church in the region meant the absence of formal church leadership. In the place of regular ministers, prophets sprang up who enunciated the apocalyptic ideology from the depths of trance, accompanied by. the

11

convulsive physical manifestations of mystical enthusiasm. Women, and even young girls, readily fell into the prophetic role when appropriate men were absent; the whole phenomenon of the “desert revolt” acquired an aura of miraculous inspiration, and fanaticism. Logically, all of Protestant Europe should have shown sympathy for the outlawed Huguenot minority of France, and to a limited extent it did. England, for example, funneled some arms to the rebels and had secret dealings with important Camisard spokesmen such as the fiery polemicist Pierre Jurieu. However, when emissaries of the Cévennese “Desert” appeared abroad, they frightened the authorities in the host countries and were sincerely welcomed only by those “sectaries” who shared the millennial expectations of these “French Prophets.” Fanatical, rebellious, calling down heavenly fire on their critics, the “French Prophets” introduced the trances, convulsions, and dire prophecies of “The Sacred Theatre of the Cévennes” everywhere they went. They angered not only the local authorities, such as in London and Western Germany, but even the more conventional Huguenot exiles who had dispersed from other parts of France. Thus when the Millennial Church, known as the Shakers, came to write their history after the successful transplantation of their English organization to North America, they proclaimed themselves direct descendants of the Cévennese Prophets. The Cévennese influence in England had long outlasted the purely military revolt; in fact it created a new trajectory of sectarian agitation leading to the innovations of Ann Lee and her Manchester followers in the second half of the 18th century. The course of development of mystically and chiliastically-oriented religious separatism in Germany too was profoundly affected by the Cevennese resistance, and particularly by the convulsive inspirationism that was its hallmark. For when some representative French Prophets crossed the Rhine in small numbers, after the period of serious armed struggles against the Revokation had passed, they found their best refuge in the area of Schwarzenau, and in the Berleberg-Wittgenstein enclaves, where a measure of toleration for diversity existed and naturally attracted, along with the Cévennese exiles, the persecuted champions of German radical pietism and philadelphianism. Eventually this community came to comprise a phenomenal assortment of

mystically-minded enthusiasts, unparalleled in the history of European Protestantism. Among them were people who were to come to America, where they would help to establish, on the Conestoga frontier, Ephrata—a type of community that was impossible in the old world. The Shakers’ “Millennial Church” and the “Community of the Solitary” at Ephrata are two brilliant examples of the interweaving of millennial and inspirationist influences. This pregnant relationship, so dramatically present in the Cévennese events of 1685-1715, was also responsible for the efflorescence, within the context of communitarian folkculture, of two magnificent examples of early American art—Shaker dance, and Ephrata poetry and hymnody.?

3. Shaker: the Dove as Eagle. “This little band of union, In apostolic life, Remain’d awhile in England, Among the sons ofstrife; Till the Columbian Eagle, Borne by an eastern breeze, Convey ‘d this little Kingdom Across the rolling seas.” — Philos Harmoniae+*

To most people who know of the Shakers, they were a small 19th-century American sect which established some prosperous communal villages, achieved renown as craftsmen and agriculturalists, and upheld some eccentric religious practices such as ritual dancing and celibacy. They were called “Shakers” because they had, in their English past, been categorized as “shaking Quakers” by those who wished to call attention to the uninhibited style of their ecstatic enthusiasm. In their own terminology, the Shakers were “The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing.” Their organization was also referred to as the “Millennial Church.” To all of these names an inspirationist aura is inevitably attached. They were by no means the first mystical group to link their convulsive automatisms of expression with an impending millennium. They were, however, the first to formalize bodily automatisms into a communal dance ritual,

12 and to dedicate the ritual to a celebration of the fact that the millennium had already arrived. For the Shakers, Christ’s second coming had taken place in the person of their founder, Ann Lee, the visionary Manchester factory girl who had denounced marriage, sexual intercourse, and reproduction, thus releasing her followers to a life of androgynous simplicity that prefigured the spiritual eternity said to await all awakened souls.

formation of the original Shaker group in Manchester, which drew directly on their influence. These earliest Shakers were likely to disrupt with their unusual meetings the calm of a neighborhood or an orthodox religious service with their mocking and challenging presence. In fact it was during one of her several incarcerations for “disturbing the peace” that Ann Lee witnessed the vision of carnal degradation in the Garden of Eden that brought to her the doctrine of Shaker celibacy. Of course, it might just as well have been the “vision” of the rape of a woman prisoner or factory worker. For behind the Shaker Millennium, giving it the driving force of an imperative, was the new capitalist Babylon of the “industrial revolution.” Having viewed the despevate meaning of this society for its underlings, both as wage slave in the factories and asa reluctant mother of four doomed children, Ann Lee had established, in her own experience, a link with the Camisard “7rembleurs” that was more than theological. The automatism of frustrated rage and other emotions was potent in this Holy Spirit, which had also moved Ann Lee’s Luddite contemporaries as they marched forth on machine-smashing expeditions.

Ecstatic Dancing Psychometric interpretation of Ann Lee, incarnation of the Second Appearing of Christ on Earth and founder of the Shaker Church

The Shaker dance was, par excellence, a millennial activity because it was terrestrial and bodily. It was‘a sacred activity; and yet it was one that transcended the obsolescent discipline of religion. It took place physically on the terrain of an inspired freedom. By the time the Shakers began to produce a written history of their American communities, the unstructured quality of their earlier motions had yielded to more organized forms of group dance. Nevertheless, they were able to recognize the origins of the latter in the “trembling” of the French Prophets, who had carried the fiery message of the apocalypse to England from the “Desert” redoubts of the Camisards. With their uninhibited manifestations of bodily and vocal hysteria, the French Prophets struck a profound chord in the sectarian religious underground, begetting a wave of “English Prophets” who echoed the apocalyptic message. The latter were intermittently active up until the time of the

Thus, historical and psychological necessities combined forces at the origin of Shaker dance, with aesthetic considerations being negligible, or even antithetical. Perhaps only in the pentecostalstyle meetings of the dissident sects, was it possible for individuals such as Ann Lee to shake off the encompassing despair of the world and break through to a more exalted orientation. Their convulsionary methods, viewed as grotesque and subversive by their critics, served to isolate them in a sense; but these methods also united them witha long tradition of entranced illuminates. Beyond the immediate predecessors, the French and English Prophets, there were earlier ecstatic movements such as the militant Anabaptists and the Zwickau Enthusiasts of the Reformation era; the mysterious Free Spirit orders of the Middle Ages; and the earlier preChristian “mystery cults” and religions of Greece and the Mediterranean world. Apart from this, the Shakers could list at least nineteen passages in the Christian bible that favored dancing or other bodily movements as a form of sacred expression.

13 Their early trembling and shaking in response to the Spirit led soon to whirling, marching, jumping and gesturing; which in turn led to individualistic dancing of the members en masse, with dozens of men and women in various areas or meeting rooms giving vent to a chaotic, free-form motility. This was the form of dance that predominated when the Shakers first came to America under the leadership of Ann Lee, landing at New York on August 6, 1774, but settling eventually in upper New York State and New England. Their free-form dancing, seen in town squares or on village greens commandeered by the roving Shaker missionaries, was America’s preview of a new, oddly Dionysian form of Christianity. One understates when saying that Shakerism was not well-received at first. Frustration, prison, physical abuse, and constant danger were their rewards, in place of the flood of converts they sought. Ann Lee herself died in 1784, partly as a result of violence she encountered during her missionary journeys. However, the fledgling community survived and slowly grew in numbers and fame. Joseph Meacham,

an American-born convert, was

the second successor to Ann Lee, following the short tenure of Elder James Whitaker, one of the Manchester originals. It was Meacham who first introduced a formal order into the dance movements. He was said to have learned the specific steps of this so-called “square order shuffle” in a vision of angels dancing before the heavenly throne. His directions produced a shuffling, slow-paced, overly solemn approach to the dance. Shaker movements grew slower and slower during Elder Meacham’s ascendancy, and after his death were suspended for two years. They were revived again in a more vibrant form when Mother Lucy Wright became the head of the central ministry about 1798. The angels she relied on for choreographic inspiration shuffled not at all. Their step was appropriately aerial and the dance was altered to reflect a more joyous and animated spirit. In addition, the display in devotional meetings of prophetic gifts and marvelous signs, phenomena that had fallen off in the Meacham era, again became manifest. There was even a return to the earliest, most spontaneous free-form movements that, by the early 19th century, had come to be known as the “back manner” or the “promiscuous manner.”

From the livelier patterns introduced under Lucy Wright, the Shaker dance evolved into a broadlyencompassing blend of styles that could include the whole range of emotions; from solemn, squareorder-style shuffles, to skipping ring dances accented with gestures, to free-form or “promiscuous” displays of spiritual gifts. The latter was more than just a mannerism. It was rather a direct expressive mode that could break out spontaneously whenever the feelings aroused in the dancers by the rhythmic group movements reached an appropriate pitch. The breakdown of orderly folk dancing into disturbing manifestations of spiritual mediumship, or into violent struggles with dissociated drives, clearly represents the return of Shaker movements to their origin and source, with millennial ritual re-enacting the chaotic convulsions of the old world that gave birth to the sect. Most of the more regularized Shaker dance patterns were superficially abstract, but most had definite symbolic concepts attached to them. One very powerful example was a pattern, described by Edward Deming Andrews from his extensive Shaker researches, that consisted of four concentric circles with singers in the center. The four circles represented the four epochs in the Shakers’ spiritual theory of history. These four epochs were in turn based on the four beasts (“full of eyes before and behind”’)

seen round the divine throne in Chapter 4 of the Apocalypse. Thus the innermost circle of dancers represented the Lion Epoch; the second circle was the Calf Epoch; the third was the Epoch of the Face-of-a-Man; the fourth and most inclusive circle represented the Flying-Eagle Epoch, which was interpreted as the epoch of the Shaker church. The symbolism of this dance pattern touched not only on spiritual history, but must also have been intended to enact stages of individual mystical development as well. As Elder Frederick Evans wrote in his book Revelation of the Apocalypse: “Jesus was a microcosm of the race. The whole Apocalypse is in each individual. .. The whole matter lies just heren Obviously, the Shakers’ insistence on the criterion of simplicity did not mean a rejection of all symbolism and metaphor. On the contrary, it broadened the application of symbolism to include the most simple things. The form or tempo of the dance step, and inclination of the head or hands, every

14

Shaker wheel dance: symbolizing the ascension of the Flying Eagle Church

gesture in fact, assumed a scope of meaning rarely present in other forms of “folk dance.” The body, immersed in meaning by the dance, could all the more easily become the channel of the spiritual and psychic forces with which the Believers sought to commune.

Equal Association In the formalized dancing, a strict balance characterized most of the patterns. This was made inevitable by the Shaker emphasis ona balance between the male and female components of the organization in all its facets. The order was based on an equal association of male and female principles, but without actual sexual intercourse. The male principle was thought to embody a predominance of rationality; the female, a predominance of affective qualities. This latter complex, often apotheosized as ‘“Mother’s Love” in the Shakers’ inspired songs and writings, was a direct appeal to Ann Lee, who after her death became a kind of spiritual presence still accessible to the mediums and psychic “instruments.” The cult of Holy Mother Wisdom, which was so important in the spiritualistic revivals of the United

Society (roughly ranging from 1835-1850), was obviously a feminist analogue to the rationality characteristic of leaders such as Elder Meacham and Elder Frederick Evans, who spoke so impressively for the Shaker viewpoint in the decades of decline after the Civil War. The Shaker dance exercises had an equal appeal therefore, to both male and female members of the society. Rooted in a kind of permissiveness that sanctioned a bodily release from the accumulated tensions of the world, the dance, no less than the free-form “labouring” movements and convulsions, was closely analogous to the process of initiatory conversion. In this way, the individual shook off the old world and its effects and burst headlong into a new, spiritual dimension of reality —one that became possible for true Shakers only when the doctrine of “Ann the Word” was placed side by side with the doctrine of Christ. It is well worth noting that the dance did not exist within a cultural vacuum in the United Society. Other important forms of expression, such as songs, drawings, and ritual games became significant during the heyday of Shaker life just before the mid-point

15 of the 19th century. These art forms were also characterized by inspired improvisation. In the act of giving voice to song or poem, or producing a drawing, painting, or calligraphic improvisation, the person involved (typically ‘““anonymous”) was deemed an instrument or medium of a spirit, whom the influenced one would frequently name. Thus a deceased Shaker notable, or another person conceived of as inhabiting the immaterial domain, would present the art work to the society as a gift, or direct it through the medium to a recipient. Art was always a form of communication with the higher realms; it was also implicitly a gift. The Shakers even anticipated the contemporary surrealist game known as “time-travellers’ potlatch,” in which imaginary gifts are conjured up for presentation to bygone personages; for in some of their playful ritual functions the Believers would engage in just such exchanges with the spirits. Chains of gold, leaves from the tree of life, silver bowls of wisdom, and countless similar idea-objects were passed on to the admired by the devoted. Many of these objects were reproduced in the delicate pictorial designs of the Shakers at the behest of spirits. Ceremonialism frequently involved the performance of “imaginary acts” with these same “metaphorical objects” manipulated by the mediums. We today might call such activities “mime”; for the Shakers it was much more than a performing art. It helped them to bridge the chasm between ideality and the present world. In brief, it was millennial magic, resolving contradictions that lay at the root of a degraded reality. When we come to the Shakers’ song texts and poems we find an amazing “revolution of the word” that occurred a hundred years before the avantgardist Jolas coined that famous phrase. The mediumistic texts transcribed from the Believers’ verbal automatisms are replete with glossolalic delirium and an engaging simplicity. In these lyrics, the many tributes to ascetic righteousness and Mother Ann must yield first place to the delightful incursions of Eskimo, Hottentot, and Cherokee spirits who came to Ghost Dance with the millennial people from Europe. Even the limited selection contained in Edward Deming Andrews’ classic of Shakerism, The Gift to be Simple, yields many jewels of phonetic originality and terse imagery.

And it would be rash to be condescending toward peculiarities of verbal expression that do manage to put us off, such as favors brought to other races by “whitey” or “shiney.” For the great unspoken thematic that underlies the utterly sincere and utterly realized Shaker slogans and imagery concerning simplicity is both congruent and continuous with older English radical concepts of levelling, the egalitarian and communitarian ideals of Winstanley and similar religious radicals. In the United Society of Believers, the rejection of aesthetic elegance and the trappings of conspicuous wealth had an implicit class message fully compatible with the spiritual message. It is there in the often fiercely critical writings of Elder Frederick Evans, the most consciously radical of the Shaker notables: anti-slavery, anti-landlordism, anti-capitalism. Yet it was linked quixotically with an asexual pacifism that was becoming increasingly passé in a Victorian, industrial-imperialist world.’

Radical Myth In their own way, and in many ways, the Shakers were a “plain people”; yet their plainness assumed inspired articulation. They lived a radical, antibourgeois, anti-aesthetic folk religion—a myth. Their thought and feeling was expressed most purely in the frank, didactic, folkish, monosyllable image— aimed straight to the human heart, but originating in some mystical, sublimated region where spirits communed. The Shakers were a people who could have, and probably did, invent a new kind of god out of nothing. But the rationale for that deity was expressed with characteristic logic in their hymnody even as late as the class-struggling 1870’s in the song “More Love”: “More love, more love, Alone by its power The world we will conquer; For true love is God. Tf ye love one another, Then God dwelleth in you, And ye are made strong, To live by his word.” ‘More Love” was a typical Shaker slogan, and a favorite greeting of the Believers. Untypical though, among religious groups, was their consistency and sincerity in actually feeling and practicing those words. In living their principles, their spiritualized desires, the Shakers also lived their art.

16

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lite J. F. Sachse. Drawing of the mystical Pelican motif

4, Ephrata: Domain of the Pelican “After this latest part of the inhabited earth had lain waste for over 5000 years, it was resolved ata council of the Watchmen to impart unto it a fruitful evening rain, which fell upon Pennsylvania in parLiCUIAT ae —Chronicon Ephratense

The lyrical production of the Ephrata Cloister community in southeastern Pennsylvania between 1724-1774 is properly regarded as one of the most prolific outpourings of poetic-musical creativity in the history of sectarian Protestantism, both in quality and quantity. It remains, nevertheless, a fact that the spiritual culture and communitarian achievements of Ephrata are relatively unknown today in comparison to the Shakers’ renown. Ephrata was different in some obvious ways. It was a Germanspeaking community, thus its story was and is less

accessible to the English-speaking majority. It was also more insular than the Shaker movement, in that it did not branch out appreciably; and its main establishment, on the banks of the Cocalico Creek in Lancaster County, was built earlier than the Shaker villages, and in a semi-wilderness part of the frontier. It had no Frederick Evans, and no retrospective apologists, apart from Peter Miller, author of the Chronicon Ephratense. There are also more subtle reasons for the obscurity of Ephrata over so many years. For this millennial community, which was rather famous even on the continentof Europe in the 18th century, embodied a spirit that came to diverge more and more from the practical curents of colonial expansion. The symbol of the Shaker Church was the eagle of the Apocalypse, an affirmative, proud, high-soaring spirit. The parallel symbol of the Community of the Solitary at Ephrata was the pelican; the bird that, mythologically, pierces its own breast to feed its young with its blood. In another phase of Ephrata mysticism, the pelican is an alchemical vessel used in distillation. The symbolic spirit of this bird is not expansionistic and optimistic, but

Ly

rather, transformative and deeply mystical.’ So Ephrata has not only been largely overlooked, it has also been misunderstood, ridiculed, or passed off as an aberrant regression to monasticism. In fact, most of those who have attempted to write about Ephrata have done so with the intention of exorcising it. Usually the strategy of this critical contingent has been to undermine the reputation of the movement by attacking the most important figure in Ephrata’s history, Conrad Beissel, known among the Solitary as Freidsam. But fortunately, the effects of this past campaign of negativism are on the wane. Recent scholarship and criticism, sparked largely by the firmly positive stance of John Joseph Stoudt, authority on Pennsylvania folk culture and biographer of Jacob Boehme, is turning the tide toward a more appreciative view of this very challenging subject. But in order to revalorize the inspirationist, millennial climate of the Ephrata movement, it is necessary to begin with its European roots. In the second half of the 17th century, the tri-partite religious regime in Germanic central Europe brought into force by the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) proceeded to hemorrhage internally. That regime dictated that in each principality covered by the treaty, the religion of the ruling prince would become mandatory. Public observance of the state religion, even if only a token gesture once a year, was incumbent on all subjects. In some domains the coercion was rather more severe, and everywhere the least punishment for non-compliance was exile. In this manner the Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist powers agreed to settle their religious differences in the wake of the disastrous Thirty Years War. Resisting this compulsory orthodoxy were several movements of dissent; Separatism, Radical Pietism,

Philadelphianism,

Chiliasm,

Quietism,

Rationalism. These tendencies were, to some extent, a continuation of the mystical-rational progressivism that sprang up in the early 17th century and was reflected in those confusing and controversial documents, the Rosicrucian Manifestos. Although the early Rosicrucian furor, centered in the Palatinate, was effectively smothered by the Thirty Years War, many of its ideals and metaphysical premises survived in a Christianized form into the next century. Replacing the Palatinate as nerve center for such activity was a small group of county-sized princi-

palities in Western Germany adjacent to the Rhineland. In this Berleberg-Wittgenstein region, the ruling princes, who were themselves attracted to sectarian ideas, offered an unprecedented tolerance to dissenters, mystics, Christian primitivists, millennial enthusiasts, and hermetic-theosophical visionaries. Their generosity was answered by an influx from all over Germany that included the most radical and the most persecuted of the Awakened. Many émigré Huguenots arrived also, and in 1714 the visitation by a contingent of the convulsionary French Prophets sparked the organization at Marienborn of The Community of True Inspiration (/nspirationsgemeinde), whose leading

figure was the trance medium Johann Friedrich Rock, already an intimate of pietist and philadelphian circles. Soon attracted to this new inspirationist wave was Johann Conrad Beissel of Eberbach, a young master baker who had abandoned his trade under religious persecution to pursue the twin themes of mystical piety and primitive Christianity. Beissel, who had already belonged to various pietist and Rosenkreutzer conventicles in the mystical centers of the Rhineland and Wittgenstein, readily learned to elicit the gifts of trance mediumship through the motive agencies of the spirit. He became an assistant to Rock and the Inspirationist leaders, and familiar also with other dramatic persons from the mystictheosophical spectrum, many of whom were later involved in the publication of the unusual Berleberg Bible, famed for its esoteric interpretation of the ancient texts.

“The Woman

in the Wilderness”

In this milieu of exalted expectation, the still restless Beissel learned of the incredible Zimmerman-Kelpius expedition that had ventured to Penn’s Woods in the 1690's to plant a chiliastic pietist hermitage, “The Society of the Woman in the Wilderness,” on the banks of the Wissahickon River in anticipation of the Last Days, which were expected to arrive about the turn of the century. Hoping to join the brotherhood that was established by the original forty Christian magi of the Wezb in der Wiiste, Beissel took ship to Pennsylvania, travelling with companions of his earlier exile days. To be sure, Conrad Beissel was by no means the only figure from the Berleberg-Wittgenstein milieu

18 to journey to Pennsylvania before 1750; many others would have made for a formidable influence in Penn’s colony even if Beissel had never left the Rhineland. But as it happened, many inspirationists, mystic pietists, Dunkers (German Baptists) and other dissenters from the old world enclaves strengthened Beissel’s reputation and the movement that grew up around him in the southeastern Pennsylvania woodlands. Beissel arrived in America in 1720, proceeding to the village of Germantown near the town of Philadelphia. He made contact with the remains of the original Zimmerman-Kelpius community on the Wissahickon Ridge and became for a time a devotee of Conrad Matthai, who had inherited something of the magus-mantle of the deceased Kelpius. The old community had, however, fallen into decline. Instead of moving to a hermit’s hut near “The Woman in the Wilderness,” Beissel took residence with a Dunker weaver, Peter Becker, in Germantown. He was entered, by the ancient style of immersion-baptism, into the Dunker Church (the

German Baptist Brethren), a group well known to him from his recent past. Becker taught Beissel the trade of weaving. The next move for the restless pilgrim was again westward, into the semi-wilderness area of Conestoga which had become the frontier to the German settlers who were now arriving in increasing numbers. Between 1721-1728 the career of this remarkable man, like that of several other young pilgrims of conscience on the Conestoga frontier, was entwined with the evangelical and organizational concerns of the Dunker Church in the area between Philadelphia and the valley of the Susquehanna River. The result was that, by 1728, a philadelphian model of primitive Christianity, influenced by Conrad Beissel’s ideas and inspirationist methods, had

grown up and established itself as a definite community, branching off from the main body of the Dunkers. By 1733 the community, following its solitude-loving guide, had reached its permanent center on Cocalico Creek. There, from scattered

hermit dwellings, the Community of the Solitary was eventually concentrated into a cluster of large rustic-gothic buildings that received the name of Ephrata. That name highlights both the lyrical and the millennial orientations of this unusual community, with a note of primitivism thrown in for good measure. For “Ephrata” is the ancient name of the biblical town of Bethlehem, connected with the house of David the Psalmist, from whose line the mythic messiah of the millennial dawn is to spring. The hymn book of the /nspirationsgemeinde, which circulated in 18th-century Pennsylvania, was “The Little Davidic Song Book of the Children of Zion.” For many radical Christian millenarians, Zion was not a specific place such as Palestine; it was rather the symbolic west, specifically the cryptic wilderness of the Book of Revelations. Hermeneutically, West means Wilderness. Lyrical expression, poetry and music, were at Ephrata analogous to the dance in the Shaker communities; they were the main form of communal art. The record of that art is found in the volumes of poetry and song produced by Conrad Beissel and his followers, some actually printed on the press at Ephrata. Manuscript copies of a few choral books also exist, hand-lettered and painstakingly illuminated in the unique style that was as much a hallmark of the Solitary as their piercing choral sound. Beissel’s treatise on music also survives and it provides useful theoretical background. But simply reviewing the titles that were given to the major hymn books opens for us an insight into the community and its “clean and pure spirit of inspiration.”

The tabernacle in the forest, built by mystics of "The Woman

in the Wilderness,” ca. 1700

19

RY DIMA DIDI VORSPIEL DER NEUEN

WELT...

DIMA

DYIAAYIA

.

Prelude to the New World, which in the last rosy sunset has appeared as a paradisal refulgence unto the children of God. Illustrated in Songs of Love, Praise, Suffering, Power, and Experience—the crushed, cringing and cross-bearing Church on Earth, and also the Church Triumphant; which after a time reveals itself as a foretaste of Paradise. Offered as a sincere watchman’s call to all the children of God who are still scattered, that they may assemble and prepare for the soon-approaching wedding day of the Bride of the Lamb. [dated 1732, Printed by Benjamin Franklin| JACOBS KAMPF-UND

RITTER-PLATZ....

Jacobs Tournament field of Knighthood, where the Spirit of the Soul that loves Sophia, and longs for its Source, has wrestled with God for the new name and found victory. Devised in various songs of faith and pathos, and expressions of the mind, wherein there are set forth, upon the part of God, his unceasing work to cleanse such souls as trust in his guidance. .. . Etc. Published by a Lover of Truth, who dwells in solitude. [dated 1736, Printed by Benjamin Franklin} ZIONITISCHER

WEYRAUCHS

HUGEL,

...

The Zionitic Hill of Incense, or Mountain of Myrrh, filled with diverse types of beautiful, sweetsmelling scents; rendered through the Apothecary-art with countless expressions of love by godly souls, formed into numerous and charming spiritual songs, in which the final summons to the Last Supper of the great God is distinctly and beautifully expressed. Illuminated in the Western quarter of the world, in the land of the sunset, toward the midnight coming of the Groom. [dated 1739, printed by Christopher Sauer} DAS GESANG DER EINSAMEN

UND VERLASSEN TURTEL-TAUBE.

...

The Song of the Solitary and Deserted Turtle-Dove, namely the Christian Church; or spiritual and experienceful—songs of Love and Sorrow, as therein both, a foretaste of the new world as well as the intervening roads of the cross and sorrow are presented according to their dignity in spiritual rhymes. By one who is a peaceful and striving pilgrim toward the Silent Eternity; and now gathered together and brought to light for the use of the Solitary and Deserted in Zion. |dated 1747, printed at Ephrata|

PARADISICHES

WUNDER-SPIEL.

.

.

Paradisiacal Wonder Music, which in these latter times and days became prominent in the occidental parts of the world as a prevision of the New World, consisting of an entirely new and uncommon manner of singing, arranged in accord with the angelic and heavenly choirs. Herein the Song of Moses and the Lamb, also the Song of Solomon, and other witnesses out of the Bible and from other saints, are brought into sweet harmony. Everything arranged with much labor and great trouble, after the manner of singing of the angelic choirs, by a Peaceful one, who desires no other name in this world. |dated 1766, printed at Ephrata |?

QDMA AON ARIA OIDRVA YADA

20 These elaborate statements contain a strong dose of Ephrata mysticism in summary. The millennial themes of the New World, the visitation of the heavenly bridegroom, and the spiritual illumination of a perfected community (the Solitary) are deliberately emphasized. The exalted tone of this kind of language is omnipresent in Ephrata expression. The diction of the poetry and hymn verses is saturated with a sensuous imagery derived from the most poetic portions of the bible; the Prophets, the Song of Songs, the Psalms, the Book of Revelations, Genesis. A mystical-erotic motif, attributable partly to the influence of Gottfried Arnold, the great Pietist church historian and poet, is frequently found in Ephrata writings. The Solitary were not the kind of celibates who shunned all allusions to sexuality; rather it represented for them a major theosophical theme. Also important is the hermetic imagery that hearkens back to Jacob Boehme, Quirinous Kuhl-

mann, Paracelsus, and the spiritual alchemists of the 16th and 17th centuries. Such dramatic, urRomantic resonances are token of the fact that this lyrical spirit, unlike the dourly legalistic spirit of New England’s puritanism, had passed through the liberating ethos of the Schwarzenau-BerlebergWittgenstein milieu. In effect, a whole century and a half of European spiritual dissent, perhaps a whole esoteric current loosely continuous from the Reformation through the Camisard revolt, brought its aspirations to light in the Ephrata school of poetry.'° Thus the figurative, symbolic language of Ephrata was its “language of Canaan,” the spiritual language of those who are destined to see the descent of the millennial kingdom. Its uniqueness was noted by J. Max Hark, the translator of the Chronicon Ephratense, who referred in his preface to “the involved sentences, ungrammatical constructions, local idioms, mystical expressions, and ecclesiastical words and phrases, peculiar to the Ephrata Community.” The imagery was present not only in written poetry and communal song; it permeated everyday speech and life, including the austere wall hangings. In the rooms of the cloister buildings, large hand-lettered charts and posters depicted the stages of the mystic quest in symbol, cr featured verse quotations from the Ephrata hymns. Conrad Beissel’s conception of artistic creation was that of direct spiritual influence, a conception he had learned in the company of the Inspirationists

in Wittgenstein. Furthermore, he asserted that the full creative power was present in all, and he established schools of illuminated calligraphy and choral singing at the cloister to develop this universal power in the brothers and sisters. Brother Jabaez (Peter Miller), who was Beissel’s only contempo-

rary biographer, described his creative procedure: “He suspended his considering Faculty, and putting his Spirit on the Pen, followed its Dictates strictly.” [Letter to Benj. Franklin, 1771. |

His lead in this regard was enthusiastically taken up by the two celibate orders of Solitary at the Cloister, the Roses of Sharon (the women) and the

Brotherhood of Bethania, or Kedar. Drawing, writing, and singing became very popular, but no one could match Beissel himself in sheer output. He composed over half of the known poetic and musical texts produced at Ephrata, and there were many hundreds. It might also be added that the trance mediumship that he had practiced in earlier days remained with him in America. It did not, however, become as universal in the Ephrata movement as did the inspired hymnody. The Chronicon takes particular note of the latter: “The contents of these songs were entirely prophetic, and treated of the restoration of the image of Adam before his division, of the heavenly virginity, the priesthood of Melchizedek, etc. The gift of prophecy overflowed the Settlement like a river at that time; and close observation showed that the beautiful sun of Paradise had then already reached its meridian. .. .”

Sexual Heterodoxy Besides this generic inspirationism, a strong parallel between Ephrata and the Shaker community was their shared heterodoxy on sexual questions. Like the Shakers who followed them to America, the Solitary at Ephrata adopted celibacy and attributed an unusual significance to the female principle. While they refused to acknowledge Ann Lee as a female Christ when the arrival of the Shakers in the 1770s placed this question before all the existing sects in North America, they nevertheless had anticipated the cult of Holy Mother Wisdom with their own cult of the Virgin Sophia. Beissel had written of his own ecstasy in the contemplation of this irresistible symbol. This mystical feminism led him to devote a disproportionate share of his attention to the female Solitary, who at times invited

21 him to special love feasts at which no other brothers were present. The theory and practice of mysticism at Ephrata was structured in such a way as to reduce male dominance by eliminating its main supports— marriage, private property, and violence (including war and participation in civil government). The occult goal was the reconstitution of a single androgynous human nature. The millennium would be the paradisal restoration of the world that existed before the Fall."' Anexcellent example of Ephrata’s mystical-erotic poetry is “The Song of the Lilies” given in Hark’s late 19th-century translation of the Chronicon: “The heavenly drama, the perfume of lilies, Awakened anew the spirit’s desire; The roses of Sharon, though low on the ground, Bring heaven to spirits for the covenant bound. The apple tree's shade bends forward in pleasure And seeks in the field ofthe lilies its treasure.

“Oh heaven, how rich and how happy am I, For the beauty of lilies you showed to mine eye. She groweth as straight as the smoke on the plain, And love-like she clings to me, now and again. I stay with her always, because she so charms, As long as I breathe she'll rest in my arms.

Illuminated

These stanzas catch the Ephrata mood very well, a mood that has been likened to “a color of thought” by one historian. Passé such verse may be, but com-

bined with other atmospheric trappings of the Ephrata way, it can still have its effect on imaginations attuned to the past— though nevermore as in the days when it accompanied the visions described in the Chronicon. Behind the sensuous imagery of the poems and hymns, there went forward a way of life that was extremely hard, calculated to drive away the uncommitted and to purify the inner life of those who remained in the Camp of the Solitary. Asceticism was a leading principle in the community; applying to work, daily routine, conduct of meals, trivial comforts, and personal property. Of his singers in the choral school he directed, Conrad Beissel demanded an awesome asceticism in the training of the voice and body. It is likely that a theory similar to Molinist “quietism” was here being employed to subdue ordinary artistic feelings, so as to create a free space for more spiritual emotions to emerge in song. The goal: that the collective voice of the Solitary Turtle Dove (the renewed primitive church) could be heard in the celestial realms where the Bridegroom waits. Then perhaps the weird mating calls of the Apocalyptic Creatures could next be Heard For it is worth acknowledging that mysticalinspirationist and millennial forms of thought are intrinsically related. The millennium is but the realization in the outer world of the inner transformation wrought by mystic praxis. Our artists of

letters from the Ephrata ABC Book

22 Ephrata and Shakerdom were attempting through their expressions to extend the “divine lightning” outward and thus transform the world. It seems apparent that the philadelphians and other chiliastic sectarians of Europe were seriously expecting the inauguration of the “end times” around 1700. Comets, astrological conjunctions, and other signs of the times, significantly including recent waves of mediumistic “gifts” and prophecies, had played a major role in spurring the Zimmerman-Kelpius expedition to “the wilderness.” Upon their arrival, these people had begun to hold midnight vigils in the forest atop a tabernacle constructed out of logs. Thus it was that when Conrad Beissel, who had studied with survivors of the Kelpius band on the ridge, secured some authority, he instituted midnight vigil services at Ephrata that would sometimes last until dawn.

Apocalyptic Fervor When astrological conjunctions and comets similar to those studied by Zimmerman in the 1680s appeared again in the early 1740s, a wave of apocalyptic fervor was unleashed at Ephrata. A comet appeared at Christmas-tide 1743, at sunset. The hopes of the Ephratans concerning it were so high that they published a book about it on their newly-installed press. A revolution was predicted that would

place Zion (Ephrata) at the center of the New World. The Zionitic Brethren, the most exclusive and esoteric order at the Settlement, would be the new keepers of the temple in the West.’ This period in Beissel’s life was described in the Chronicon Ephratense: “The Superintendent in those days was lifted above the world of sense, and had surmounted time with its changes. His hymns composed then are full of prophecy, and belong to the evening of the sixth time-period, that is to the holy Ante-Sabbath. They represent the mysteries of the last times so impressively, that it seems as though the kingdom were already dawning.” These were the hymns that went into the last great Ephrata song book, The Wonder-Play of Paradise. The contents of this Wunderspiel, instead of presaging a New World to follow, marked the end of the initial dramatic surge of Ephrata as a creative phenomenon. It can be said that the intensity of the Community’s poetic-musical output slackened there-

after. Despite the continued strength of Ephrata as a cultural refuge and a mystical pietistic center, its original creative output declined again after the death of Beissel in 1774. Performance of the existing older music, however, continued impressively for decades; and even after it lost much of its inspired quality at the Cloister, it underwent a kind of renaissance at a branch community, Snow Hill, near the Maryland border. A modified version of Ephrata community life, which included the musical system and a unique local style of the illuminated script, was followed there well into the 19th century. Ephrata remains very difficult to sum up. In this short view of it I have not probed into the hermetic, or imputed “Rosicrucian,” aspects of the Settlement. Unique personal histories and scores of anecdotes, omitted here, also colour the legend with multifarious and contrasting hues. Its communal goods system bears investigation, for the productive power of the society had a potential that was considerable, but was deliberately held back due to ascetic considerations. Yet I have discussed Ephrata at somewhat more length than the Shakers because of the general unfamiliarity with the subject ... and the difficulty of summing it up!

An Ephrata water-mark: the cross links Ephrata and Zion; with mystic keys and auroral blaze

One thing is certain: the convulsive is a powerful motive, and when it is not moving the body or voice or the writing hand, it may be scripting new dreams and prophecies. And the convulsive, like the millennial, is close to the heart of the people at all

23 times. That is why Ephrata, for all its eccentric features, was an organic part of the folk-culture. As John Joseph Stoudt shows in his Pennsylvania FolkArt, an Interpretation, Ephrata’s art and poetry shared a common imagery and a deeply chiliastic mood with ordinary German settlers and mysticallyminded dissenters of all groups. In a very straightforward sense, the idea of inspiration—the convulsive — stands for freedom; and the idea of apocalypse— the millennium— stands for justice. (One of the unknown brethren listed in the records of Ephrata was self-named, simply, “Just.” Thus Ephrata was not inhabited, as its detractors have hinted, by self-indulgent snobs seeking a theatre for religious “camp.” The community was related, even while it was spiritual. Its emotiveness was not uniformly joyous, but “bitter-sweet.” Bitter because life was felt by the Solitary as bitter, based on hard experience. Sweet because the power of love was also a part of the heterodoxists’ experience, and this power was to be invoked to transform the world through their ascetic, apocalyptic praxis. The asceticism may seem to us harsh, and rather pointless, but it catalyzed a profound spiritual voracity and a bitter-sweet exaltation in poem and song that projected the millennium as a long-awaited love-tryst; and a prelude to a New World aborning.

5. A Flight of Differing Stars, A New Apocalypse To relieve the impression of historical exclusiveness implied by my concentration on the Shakers and Ephrata, it is worth noting that before Conrad Beissel’s arrival in America, there had already been three noteworthy communal attempts: e

e

e

by Pieter Cornelis Plockhoy’s Dutch socialistic settlement at the Valley of the Swans (1663): by the Labadist pilgrims at Bohemia Manor in Maryland, consisting of followers of the reformer Jean de Labadie (1683); by Johannes Kelpius’ Woman in the Wilderness, mostly German and northern European émigrés (1694).

Perhaps the largest recognizable sect to transfer to America was the Society of Friends, the Quak-

ers, whose William Penn was responsible for stimulating much overall sectarian emigration. The Quakers were, of course, awash with many of the same pietistic and inspirationist influences as the other groups. Lesser sects were in continuous transfer, especially from the area of the Rhineland to the region of the Delaware River and westward. Very early in the 18th century, the antinomian Matthias Baumann, a Palatine day-laborer, brought his Neugeboren

(or Newborn)

sect to Penn’s Woods,

later to clash with the ascetic Beissel. Such groups were, along with the Quakers, apt to be categorized as Freigeister (free-spirits) by the more orthodox of the German settlers. In addition to the pilgrims of Dutch, English, and Central European background, there were a few seekers of French origin, well exemplified by Dr. George de Benneville, physician, Universalist, and visionary, who had worked on the mystical Berleberg Bible and whose autobiography, Life and Trance, contains descriptions of his visits to the

spirit realms. De Benneville was a friendly neighbor of the Ephrata Solitary and was one of those who claimed to have seen an apparition of Conrad Beissel shortly after that magus’ death. In 1742 there entered the colony, secretly and under an alias, the remarkable Count Zinsendorf, leader and reanimator of the Hussite-descended Moravian Church. He had come to found the Moravians’ communal economy of Bethlehem and made an unsuccessful attempt to unite the various German-speaking sects into a common federation. On Christmas Day of that year he composed extemporaneously a poem of thirty-seven stanzas. Zinsendorf wrote at least a thousand known poems during his year-long sojourn in America... ." Looking north along the route of the Delaware River from Philadelphia, one is facing the direction of the home region of a sister folk-culture, that of the Shakers. The area of the Hudson River Valley, northern New York State,and western New England, has a history that is equally suggestive of the idea that certain regional environments are predisposed to the moods of mysticism. Conrad Weiser, interpreter of the Pennsylvania colonists to the “Six Nations” tribes, spent a large portion of his youth in those dramatic northern regions learning the Iroquois language. Later he entered Ephrata as one of the few married Solitary. It was in this same

24

general area that Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper located their romantic tales of dream-haunted settlers and noble savages. This was a locale so consumed by successive waves of hell-fire evangelism that it came to be known as “the burned-over district.” But here also was a home of those New Light Baptists, also called “the merry dancers,” from whose ranks the Shakers drew Joseph Meacham and many other early converts.

through New York State and New England; Oneida, Brook Farm, Skaneateles, Fruitlands, and others. Considering the existence of this ambient, mysticspiritualist folk-culture in the rural northeast, it is not so inexplicable that a thinker such as Benjamin Paul Blood, uneducated by academic standards and unconnected with any sophisticated intellectual milieu, should have arisen in provincial Amsterdam, New York, to become the “pluralistic mystic” announcing a startling new “anesthetic revelation.” Blood and the late 19th century still had the elixir of the millenarian impulse in their veins. But it had by then been transferred from the receding religious environment to one with a new outlook, a modern spirit of creative liberty incompatible with the authoritarian aspects of theism." e

Albrecht Durer. Woodcut. eats the prophetic book

Deep in vision, the Apostle John

Finally, it was in northern New York State, in the 19th century, that mediumistic spiritualism, nurtured for nearly two hundred years in the tiny millennial and inspirationist circles of Europe and Colonial America, first broke into general public attention with the phenomenon of the Fox Sisters, thereafter to grow into the most spectacular new religious movement of the time. During this period, many new communitarian experiments spread

The story told in the above paragraphs demonstrates, I believe, the considerable affinities connecting inspirationism, apocalyptism, and a certain exalted, mediumistic approach to artistic expression. Of equal sympathy are the communitarian ideals and the tendencies to sexual equality that go with them. In this complex of affinities, the forms of lyrical thought (inspirationism etc.) complement and reinforce the moral and utilitarian aspects of community-of-goods. Such complete systems flourished, it seems, only in the early days of American opportunity, at a time when utopian and Christian socialist thought were beginning to mature and the creative spirit of millennial inspiration had not yet been purged from religious groups. Imperfect as they must certainly have been, these early systems nevertheless embodied something unique: call it a visceral intuition into the importance of poetic and mythic faculties for forging the social bond. Nor is millennial thought dead, nor its affinities broken, even today. Inevitably, these are now in the process of reassembling themselves on the present side of the great historical-spiritual divide that separates the world view of scientific materialism from that of religion and idealist thought. For millenarian thought does not depend solely on Christian doctrine or on the Book of Revelations. in itself, it is no more nor less than the generic transformational ideology that will always be provoked by the painful contradictions of unequal or Class-divided societies. Still entwined with lyrical

Pa, thought and poetic consciousness, this criticalmagical ideology is rooted in three fundamental categories of anticipatory experience always accessible to men and women: the Immanent, the Imminent, and the Marvelous. The Immanent. This is the basic, intuitive, gutlevel understanding that “the world” is not really the world, that there is a deeper layer of power and meaning in the world than is represented to us by the powers that be. The sense of an indwelling divinity throughout nature, of a potential for infinite evolution on the part of the grossest materiality, is necessarily included in the feeling of the immanent. Most important here is the sense or conviction that the latent forces within the world can come to manifest themselves at any moment. Mysticism, inspirationism, prophetism, poetry, all thrive on the atmosphere of immanence and its promise to unseal the most fabulous treasures at a climactic point in history. Up to that climactic point, the Immanent provides the whole moral sustenance of hope, which hope is really confidence in the latent powers of life.

The Imminent. Such a concept is best summed up with reference to evil, “impending evil.” It is the reverse side, or the negative, of the concept of immanence, for it also tells of a latency ready to manifest the unseen forces at any moment and without warning. A devastating evil, this is often the most apparent and sensationalized feature of religious apocalyptism, as opposed to the positive, paradisal content of popular millenarian thought. Many of the most striking images of Revelations represent embodiments of imminent evil, a force of “mystic justice” that cannot be evaded nor even faced. Whether through dialectical analysis or intuitive sense, we can easily arrive at the conclusion that the Immanent and the Imminent are not only related but are in fact the same thing. What they ultimately come to mean in a world transformed must depend on how the unseen is channelled by the human heart and will. The Marvelous. With the Marvelous those powers have already begun to intrude themselves into the world. The marvelous, the spontaneously miraculous evidence of deeper sources of being, functions in at least two ways to help recall men and women to their possibilities. It can provoke

and invite them to consider what they have never thought of before, or it can corroborate their previous intuitions of the immanent powers. Millennial thought has always viewed the marvelous as a prelude to a world totally transformed. It has always looked for prodigies of nature and prodigies of human inspiration and genius, hoping to find in them signs of an emergent new world, heralds of the end times. The marvelous is the actual breakthrough of the powers of love and negation. The millennium is the total realization of the marvelous.

RVD AFTERNOTES 1. The most influential of such women

were probably

Jane Leade, inspired medium and guiding light of the English Philadelphians; Eleanor Johanna von Merlau, a visionary who became the wife of the important German Philadelphian theologian Dr. Johann Wilhelm Petersen; Anna Maria von Schurman, important literary figure and collaborator with the reformer Jean de Labadie; Rosamunde von Asseburg, “an inspired phenomenon of the times” who worked with the Petersens on apocalyptic studies. Naturally, female mediumship and leadership existed in the less famous echelons of this movement. J. F. Sachse mentions a number of visionary maid-servants in his work The German Pietists of Provincial Pennsylvania, p. 304. 2. The thesis The Radical Pietists by Delburn Carpenter (AMS Press, N.Y., 1975) presents many summaries and tables illustrating the extreme heterodoxy of some of the Pietist communes. 3. The inter-relationship of the French Prophets, the Camisards, and the English sectarian origins of the Shakers is discussed in The American Shakers, From Neo-Christianity to Presocialism by Henri Desroche (Univ. of Mass. Press, 1971). The connection of the

French Prophets with the English Philadelphians is found in The Decline of Hell, by D. P. Walker (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1964). On the influence of the French Prophets in Germany, a few sources; Chronicon Ephratense, by “Lamech and Agrippa” (English translation by J. Max Hark, Lancaster, Pa., 1889); Ephrata, a History by James E. Ernst (Allentown, Pa., 1963); The European Origins of the Brethren by Donald F. Durnbaugh (The Brethren Press, Elgin, IIl., 1958). 4. Philos Harmoniae is believed to have been Richard McNemar of the Union Village community in Ohio, a composer and compiler of Shaker hymns. 5. This gravity of Meacham’s does not discount his very important contributions to Shakerism in other respects. He was a dogmatic Christian communist, and was responsible for introducing the collective economy that

26 made the Shaker way viable and productive in so many communities. Thus his work was ultimately admired by people as diverse as Engels and Tolstoy. . The Four Creatures also represent the evangelists. Sachse, in his book on the German Pietists, reproduced

a broadside published in Berleberg, Wittgenstein (169093) that appears to be a woodcut illustrating this portion of chapter 4, Revelations. Here then was an important theme of the early Philadelphian dissenters, who believed that their small conventicles, springing up all over the world, were in fact the emerging Church of the Millennium, the same Flying-Eagle Church the Shakers identified with. Many Philadelphians also shared the theory of the apocalypse-in-microcosm, an important rationale for mysticism, and even for hermeticism. Said Paracelsus: only a magus can interpret the Book of Revelations. . Evans was, according to his own account in his Autobiography of aShaker (1888, and AMS Press, 1973), a

social-political radical and a materialist before he entered the United Society. He was converted by a series of supernatural experiences and illuminations he underwent while a guest of the Shakers at Mount Lebanon, N.Y. in 1830: “One night, soon after retiring, I heard a rustling sound, as of the wind of a flock of doves flying through the window (which was closed) towards my bed... .” . A much-reproduced emblem of Ephrata is a drawing by J. F. Sachse based on the signet of an anonymous Ephrata sister. Pelican lore and imagery is found in the bible, and found its way into Christian hymnody, arriving in America with pietistic German settlers. See Pennsylvania Folk Art, an Interpretation by John Joseph Stoudt (Schlechter’s, 1948). . Additional bibliographical information on this school of mystical hymnody and related writings can be found in Mysticism in the German Devotional Literature of Colonial Pennsylvania by E. Ernest Stoeffler (Schlech-

ter’s, Allentown, Pa., 1949). Beissel’s own writings on music can be found in Music of Ephrata Cloister by J. F. Sachse (AMS Press, 1970). A valuable compen-

dium, covering the period from the arrival of “The

Womah in the Wilderness” through the 18th century, is Church Music and Musical Life in Pennsylvania in the Eighteenth Century (Phila., 1927, 3 vols., Penna. Society of the Colonial Dames of America). . Heinrich Jung-Stilling (1740-1817), pre-Romantic, neoPietist author, presented a theory of the German heterodox traditions that involved Paracelsus, French quietism, Jacob Boehme, and the Enthusiasts, i.e. Inspirationists. Jung-Stilling wrote a novel Theobald, or The Enthusiast which found its way to 19th century Pennsylvania. jit Beissel’s theosophy was explained in his fantastic speculative work, A Dissertation on Man's Fall. Beissel himself called this text a ‘“Wunder-Schrifft.” It was held in the community to be an inspired revelation on a par with the Apostles. It was written soon after the hymns of the “Wunder-Spiel,” while the author was still “spiritually exercised.” Thus there is a strong possibility that it has some form of mediumistic or auto-

matist origin. The verbal exaltation soon spread among the Solitary. As the Chronicon puts it; “they ate again

of the Verbo Domini. .. ,” and “the gift of prophecy descended upon the offices. .. .” 12. For an account of the celestial signs relevant to this history see Pennsylvania Folklife, Vol. XXV, No. 1: “Pennsylvania German Astronomy and Astrology XII; Conjunctions of 1683, 1694, and 1743” by Louis Winkler. The “Zionitic Brethren” were, according to some accounts, engaged in occult rites of regeneration aimed at assuring them a phenomenal earthly longevity. 13. The Moravians’ communities were not steeped in the same ascetic and chiliastic mood as Ephrata. On their own part, however, they created a splendid musical culture. Extemporaneous verse was apparently much in vogue among them, again in a less sombre tone than at Ephrata. 14. It has never been more obvious than today that without the mystic or lyrical world-view to give it wings, religion degenerates into a timid program of social controls, and becomes merely an adjunct of reactionary politics.

Additional Sources:

Andrews, Edward Deming, “The Dance in Shaker Ritual,” in Magriel, Paul, Chronicles of the American Dance. N.Y.: Holt, 1948. , Visions of the Heavenly Sphere, A Study in Shaker Religious Art. Charlottesville, Va.: Univ. of Va. Press, 1969. Arndt, Karl J. R., George Rapp’s Harmony Society, 17851847. Phila.: Univ. of Pa. Press, 1965. Henderson, Louis K. The Story of the Shakers. Girard, Kan.: Haldeman-Julius, 1945. Holloway, Mark. Heavens on Earth, Utopian Communities in America 1680-1880, N.Y.: Liberty Publishers, 1951. Joy, Arthur F., The Queen of the Shakers. Minneapolis: T. S. Denison, 1960. McCort, Dennis, “Johann Conrad Beissel, Colonial Mystic Poet,” in Tolzman, Don H., German-American Lit-

erature. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1977. Robinson, Charles E., The Shakers and Their Homes, A Concise History of the United Society of Believers called Shakers. N. Hampshire Pub. Co., 1976. Sachse, Julius Friedrich, The German Sectarians of Penn-

sylvania, A Critical and Legendary History of the Ephrata Cloister and the Dunkers (2 vols. covering the years 1708-1800, and privately printed at Phila., 18991900). N.Y.: AMS Press, 1971. Stoudt, John Joseph, Pennsylvania German Poetry, 16851830 (Vol. XX of The Pennsylvania German Folklore Society annual publications), Allentown, Pa.: Schlechter’s, 1955. Anthologized poetry is in German. Wallace, Paul A. W., Conrad Weiser, 1696-1760, Friend of Colonist and Mohawk. Phila., Pa. Univ. Press and Oxford Univ. Press, 1945.

By

THE EDUCATION

OF DESIRE

William Blake and E. P. Thompson Paul Buhle Nearly twenty years ago E.P. Thompson, in his monumental Making of the English Working Class, closed with the tragedy of workers’ culture separated from the British Romantic current:

After William Blake, no mind was at home in both

cultures,

nor

had

the genius to

interpret the two traditions to each other. It was a muddled Mr Owen who offered to disclose the “new moral world,” while Wordsworth and Coleridge had _ withdrawn behind their own ramparts ofdisenchantment... In the failure of the two traditions to come to a point of junction, something was lost. How much we cannot be sure, for we are among the losers.

This was direct enough for the problems of the late 19th-century British proletariat. But Thompson meant to tell more on both sides of the immediate subject, more about Blake and more about the implications of the Englishlanguage Romantic tradition for the working class today and tomorrow. The 1976 Postscript to the new edition of his William Morris: From Romantic to Revolutionary gave us another and more ordered glimpse: Communism

(as Morris saw it) involved

the subversion of bourgeois society and a reversal of the whole order of social life: “the attainment of that immediate end will bring about such a prodigious and overwhelming change in society, that those of us with a grain of imagination in them cannot help speculating as to how we shall live then.” It was not Morris’ intention, in any of his utopian writings, to offer either doctrine or systematic description of the future society. He was often deliberately

evasive as to “arrangements.” Exactly for this reason he drew upon his Romantic inheritance of dream and offantasy, accentuated further by the distancing of an archaic vocabulary... His intention was to embody in the forms of fantasy alternative values sketched in an alternative way of life. And what distinguishes this enterprise is, exactly, its open, speculative quality, and its detachment of the imagination from the demands of conceptual precision... In such an adventure two things happen: our habitual values (the “common sense” of bourgeois society) are thrown into disarray. And we enter into Utopia’s proper and new-found space: the education of desire. Here, of course, Thompson is with Blake again. How completely, only those who have heard his lectures on Blake can guess. Somehow the thread that pulls together the political as well

as cultural sensibilities of this veteran Marxist, labor and peace activist, champion expounder and lyrical polemicist, leads straight back to the 1790s and to that inspired poet-engraver whose work remained all but unknown for generations. This is not the same Blake who tantalizes English-department specialists in ambiguity, bent on proving Blake’s anti-political perspective. And not the same Blake, one might add, that an occasional superficial radical seeks to place ina too-restricted framework of“Scientific Socialism.” Thompson’s Blake is profoundly historical because he is revolutionary, and revolutionary because he is so much a part of his historical time. Thompson reminds us that Blake was first of all an engraver, one of those artisans who stood

28

somewhere between the professional artists and the printing trade workers. He was part ofa long tradition of engraver-radicals that runs all the way down to the socialist art nouveau work of Walter Crane, a tradition that left many a mark on the course of the revolutionary movement in America as well as in Europe. Thompson also stresses the milieu in which Blake lived and worked. As an engraver he inevitably encountered authors, poets, artists, publishers and booksellers. As an engraver with revolutionary inclinations living in revolutionary times, he could hardly have avoided coming into contact with other revolutionary intellectuals. And in fact Blake’s friends and associates included Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and other leading radical thinkers and activists in England. Thompson further makes it plain how closely Blake’s politi-

cal views coincided with those of these friends. In opposition to many Blake commentators in recent years, Thompson strenuously upholds in this regard the views of Blake’s earliest biographer, Alexander Gilchrist—who knew people who had known Blake—that the author of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell was a “vehement republican and sympathizer with the revolution, hater and contemner of kings and kingcraft.” Blake was finally—and contrary to a great deal written about him—a man of systematic inclinations. Volney, the great speculator on ancient history for the European intelligentsia of that time, celebrated Man’s advance from religious irrationality to Reason as the dawn ofthe Golden Age. Blake perceived that step as an ambiguous one, recognizing that the power of the ancient poets to create myths had been essentially a poetic expression of universality. Blake accepted the Deists’ account of the ways in which human mystery had led to priestcraft, and toa great extent he shared their critique of, and disdain for, modern religious institutions. But he did not share the Deists’ quest to banish myth entirely because he saw the re-creation of myth as one of the essential, perhaps the most essen-

tial, faculties for self-transformation that Man possesses. The Deists might talk of “enlightened self-interest” as the end-point of human striving. But for Blake, it is /ove—and first of all the sexual love of man and woman—that holds the absolute key to brotherhood and salvation. And love is not reasoned but felt.

This is Thompson’s Blake and the source of the poet’s creative survival into a Thermidorean age when others made their compromise with propriety or lost their voice. He could hardly have finished his vast self-appointed task of reorganizing and re-creating the mythologies of old. But there was an intensity in Blake’s vision that brought his Antinomianism to its full potential as the expressed promise of the truly liberated and whole human being, free of millennia of social repression and self-repression, reconciled at last to Nature and the Society which had been necessary sources of the initial alienation, but at an almost unimaginably higher level. Almost unimaginably. This “almost” is the historical limit which Thompson aims to explain and explode. It is the whole purpose of his historical inquiries and his theoretical excursions, and if their incendiary implications have not been expressed so clearly as their Marxist and scholarly aspects, the fault cannot be attributed to ordinary reticence. It sometimes seems that Thompson has been waiting his whole life for that Moment when the Imagination’s flame will definitively ignite the powder of the Real. He has gone over the historic ground with the meticulous care of an archeologist examining the ruins of ancient hopes, and has taught himself incantations to release the elder dreams from the spell cast over them by bourgeois life. His own poems—few of which have been published—may be out of step with current literary fashions, but are firmly in line with the great prophetic tradition. And if he grows more daring, more lucid, more precise, it is because he senses that we are all nearer the goal because we no longer have any choice if we are to survive.

29

E. P. Thompson King of my freedom here King of my freedom here, with every prop A poet needs—the small hours of the night A harvest moon above an English copse...

Backward unrationalised trade, its furthest yet Technology this typewriter which goes With flailing arms through the ripe alphabet Not even bread the pen is mightier than... Each in its statutory place the giants yawn I blow my mind against their sails and fan The mills that grind out my necessity O royal me! Unpoliced imperial man And monarch of my incapacity

To aid my helpless comrades as they fall— Lumumba, Nagy, Allende: alphabet Apt to our age! In answer to your call T rush out in this rattling harvester And thrash you into type. But what I write Brings down no armoured bans, no minister

Of the interior interrogates. No one bothers to break in and seize My verses for subversion of the state Even the little dogmas do not bark. I leave my desk and peer into the world Outside the owls are hunting. Dark Has harvested the moon. Imperial eyes Quarter the ground for fellow creaturehood Small as the hour some hunted freedom cries I go back to my desk. If it could fight Or dream or mate... What other creature would Sit making marks on paper through the night?

William Blake. The Body Reunited with the Soul

SH

MARVELOUS

MARY MACLANE

PENELOPE “I of womankind and of nineteen years, will now begin to set down as full and frank a Portrayal as I am able of myself, Mary MacLane, for whom the world contains not a parallel.” Thus begins one of the most unusual books in our literature, by one of the most scandalous American writers. When The Story of Mary MacLane was published in 1902, its author was skyrocketed to nationwide notoriety. The book was an immediate sensation. Nothing like it had ever been seen before, and the fact that it was the work ofa teen-age girl—living in Butte, Montana, of all places—made the scandal complete. Here for the first time was a young woman’s “Inner life shown in its nakedness”: I have discovered for myself the art that lies in

obscure shadows. I have discovered the art of the day of small things...I care neither for right nor for wrong—my conscience is nil. My brain is a conglomeration of aggressive versatility. I have reached a truly wonderful state of miserable morbid unhappiness... May I never become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity—a_ virtuous

woman....

Respectable critics roared their disapproval. “Mary MacLane is mad,” wrote the New York Herald; “she should be put under medical treatment, and pens and paper kept out of her way until she is restored to reason.” The New York Times urged that she be spanked. When the Butte Public Library announced that it would not allow the book on its shelves, the Helena Daily Independent applauded, arguing that if this book “should go in, all the self-respecting books in the library would jump out of the window.”

Janine Rothwell. Collage

ROSEMONT

The Story of Mary MacLane became a bestseller, and its author remained front-page news for years. A vaudeville team did a burlesque of the book. A spoof appeared, titled The Story of Willie Complain. “Montana’s lit’ry lady” found her way into the comics and popular songs. There was even a Mary MacLane Highball, “with or without ice-cream, cooling, refreshing,

invigorating, devilish, the up-to-date drink.” The

rage for “MacLaneism,”

against which

leading critics from coast to coast declaimed so fervently, also had its more somber aspect. It was reported that a Chicago girl who had organized a Mary MacLane Society was arrested for stealing a horse; she said she committed the theft because she needed the experience for a novel she was writing. And on 4 May 1902 the Great Falls Daily Tribune told of a Michigan 15-year-old who “imagined herself ill-used and misunderstood. The reading of the morbid ravings of the Butte girl convinced her that she was, and a dose

of arsenic followed. She died with a copy of the book in her hands.” Who was Mary MacLane—this Montana girl who drove literary critics to distraction and made moralists furious, and whose book was said to provoke insanity, crime and suicide? Descended from “a long line of Scotch and Canadian MacLanes,” Mary was born in Winnipeg on 2 May 1881. Her family moved to Minnesota when she was four, and a few years later pressed on to Montana, finally settling in Butte in the mid-1890s. Those who knew her in her early years recalled her as a studious, withdrawn and somewhat morbid child; her schoolmates called her “The Centerville Ghost” because she liked to prowl around the local cemetery at night. She seems to have read whatever came her way—everything from Nick Carter pulp myster-

a2

ies to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Drawn to the great Romantic poets, Byron and Keats above all, she also was fond of “books for boys.” She did not, however, care for “girls” books”: “I felt as if I had more in common with the Jews wandering through the wilderness, or with a band of fighting Amazons.” Well-versed in the history of feminism, she read and liked the feminist authors, but took no part in the organized women’s movement. Similarly, she admired “the noise and color and morale of the crowds on a Miners’ Union Day” (Butte was a stronghold of the militant Western Federation of Miners, and later of the |WW), but remained outside the ranks of organized labor. “I am always alone,” she wrote. “I might mingle with people intimately every hour of my life— still I should be alone.” Outwardly her life was as severely restricted as that of most women in _ turn-of-the-century America, crushed beneath the weight of custom and crippled by prejudice. But inwardly her spirit yearned for love, adventure and the marvelous— and teemed with a defiance that found expression in her writing. It was what she did with these yearnings and this defiance that makes her work so unique and important. And what did she do? Simply, brilliantly, rigorously, she revealed the real working of her mind in the various circumscribed situations of daily life. , “The clearest lights on persons,” she noted, “are smajl salient personal facts and items about them and their ways of life.” Out of these “small salient personal facts” Mary MacLane elaborated her own myth—a myth ofherself: From the seemingly most trivial things that surrounded her, she distilled a pure magic. She wrote, with sensuous detail, on “the art of eating an olive,” on her long walks over Butte’s endless “sand and barrenness,” on the sexual longings stirred in her by seventeen engraved portraits of Napoleon. Narcissistically, obsessively, playfully, she explored the infinite irrational depths of her recalcitrant subjectivity. “Just to be Mary MacLane—who am first of all my own self!—

and get by with it!—how I do that I cannot quite make out.” The Story of Mary MacLane and its sequels do not fit into the usual literary classifications. They are neither fiction nor non-fiction; they are not “stream-of-consciousness” narratives and should not be confused with “true confesions”; they are certainly not autobiography, philosophy or psychology, any more than they are stories, essays or poems. She defied the existing genres and created her own. Poetic humor is her hallmark. Much of her work, such as “The Six Toothbrushes” and “The Back of a Magazine,” makes us think of Lautreamont and Jarry. There is an “anti-literary” quality about her writing—anti-literary in the sense indicated by Andre Breton and Paul Eluard when they declared that “poetry is the opposite of literature.” “I do not write what my thoughts are saying to me,” she acknowledged, although “now and again I think I catch some truth by the sweat of its Rhythm.” But “something lives, lives muscularly in me that constantly betrays me, destroys me against all my own convictions, against all my own knowledge, against all my own desire.” With the same striking candor she recognized the limits of her own self-assigned project: “It is as if I have made a portrait not of Me, but of aRoom I have just quitted.” If most critics disparaged her with uncomprehending malice, there were at least a few exceptions. Gertrude Atherton, who visited her and wrote about her at length, said that her “criticisms of current authors were acute, unbiased, and everything she said was worth listening to.” Hamlin Garland praised “her crisp, clear, unhesitating use of English,” and H.L. Mencken said he knew of no other woman writer who could play on words more magically. Socialist Oscar Lovell Triggs admired her courage in portraying “the inner history of her life.” And Harriet Monroe said she had never met anyone with more analytical power. After The Story of Mary MacLane was pub-

3 lished, the young author went East for a time. She found life in Boston and Cambridge dull compared to Butte, “where the people are so much more virile and full of imagination.” Wherever she went she was sure to confound the philistines with her unconventional behavior. She went out of her way to insult Butte society matrons who staged a literary reception in her honor. She simply could not be “domesticated.” We find her refereeing a prizefight in Thermopolis, Wyoming, and frequenting low-class gambling dives on 42nd Street in New York. Always, everywhere, she freely expounded her controversial views on marriage, the family, sex, religion, literature, morality, the idiocy of the rich, and anything else that came to mind. She published two more books: My Friend Annabel Lee (1903) and J, Mary MacLane (1917). She also contributed feature articles toa number of newspapers. In Chicago in 1917, she scripted and played the heroine—herself—in a film characteristically titled Men Who Have

hardt). Not surprisingly, the film was banned by the Ohio Board of Censors as “harmful to public morality.” In August 1929, following a long illness, Mary MacLane died in her Chicago hotel room. Since her death she has remained an unknown. Her books have long been out of print and today are difficult to find, even in libraries. Standard

literary histories and anthologies ignore her completely, and even feminist writers rarely refer to her except in passing. She is not listed in the three-volume reference work, Notable American

Made Love to Me. Most critics didn’t care for it,

needless to say, although a few begrudged her some ability as an actress (at least one commentator compared her to the youthful Sarah Bern-

An

old

Women. Yet hers is an important voice, rebellious and original, and surely will be listened to again. “I can shake my life like a hollow gourd,” said Mary MacLane, “and hear the eerie rattling sound I make in it.” There is a bitter humor in these words, as in so much of her writing. Although she felt that her humor was “far too deep to admit of laughter,” Montana’s greatest author coolly and calmly insisted on keeping the last laugh for herself. “In my black dress and my still room—I say inwardly and willy-nilly, and with all my Heart and relishingly: Ha! ha! ha!”

rascal

Bible, now

reported

Mary McLane.

Wallace Goldsmith, from The Foolish Dictionary,

1904

mentioned

in the

engaged

to

Mary MacLane: Selections THE SIX TOOTHBRUSHES In this house where I drag out my accursed, devilish, weary existence, upstairs in the bathroom, on the little ledge at the top of the wainscoting, there are six toothbrushes: an ordinary white bone-handled one that is my younger brother’s; a white twisted-handled one that is my

sister’s; a flat-handled one that is my older brother’s; a celluloid-handled one that is my stepfather’s, a silver-handled one that is mine; and another ordinary one that is my mother’s. The sight of these toothbrushes day after day, week after week, and always, is one of the most crush-

ingly maddening circumstances in my fool’s life. Every Friday I wash up the bathroom. Usually I like to do this. I like the feeling of the water squeezing through my fingers, and always it leaves my nails beautifully neat. But the obviousness of those six toothbrushes signifying me and the five other members of this family and the aimless emptiness of my existence here—Friday after Friday—makes my soul weary and my heart sick. Never does the pitiable, barren, contemptible, damnable, narrow Nothingness of my life in this

house come upon me with so intense a force as when my eyes happen upon those six toothbrushes. Among the horrors of the Inquisition, a minute refinement of cruelty was reached when the victim’s head was placed beneath a never-ceasing falling of water drop by drop. A convict sentenced to solitary confinement, spending his endless days staring at four blank walls, feels that had he committed every known crime he could not possibly deserve his punishment. I am not undergoing an Inquisition, noramla convict in solitary confinement. But I live in a house with people who affect me mostly through

their

toothbrushes—and

those

I should

like,

above all things, to gather up and pitch out of the bathroom

window—and

oh, damn them, damn

them! You who read this, can you understand the depth of bitterness and hatred that is contained in this for me? Perhaps youcana little if youarea woman and have felt yourself alone. When I look at the six toothbrushes a fierce,

lurid storm of rage and passion comes over Two heavy leaden hands lay hold of my life press, press, press. They strike the sick, weariness to my inmost soul. Oh, to leave this house and these people, this intense Nothingness—oh,

me. and sick and

to pass out from

them, forever! But where can I go, what canI do? I feel with mad fury that I am helpless. The grasp of the stepfather and the mother is contemptible and absurd—but with the persistence and tenacity of narrow minds. It is like the two heavy leaden hands. It is not seen—it is not tangible. It is felt. Once I took away my own silver-handled toothbrush from the bathroom ledge, and keptit in my bedroom for a day or two. I thought to lessen the effect of the six. I put it back in the bathroom. The absence of one accentuated the significant damnation of the others. There was something more forcibly maddening in the five than in the six toothbrushes. The damnation was not worse, but it developed my feeling about them more vividly .... I am weary of self—always self. But it must be sO. My life is filled with se/f. If my soul could awaken fully perhaps I might be lifted out of myself—surely I should be. But my soul is not awake. It is awakening trying to

open its eyes; and it is crying out blindly after something, but it can not know. I havea dreadful feeling that it will stay always like this. Oh, I feel everything—everything! I feel what might be. And there is Nothing. There are six toothbrushes. From

The Story of Mary MacLane,

1902

A LITTLE EVIL WOULD DO One can have no idea of the things buried in the minds of one’s acquaintances. And mostly they are fools and have no idea themselves of what germs are in themselves—of what they are capable. And in most minds it is true the dormant devils never awaken and never are known. It is another sign of my analytical genius, that I, aged nineteen, recognize the devils in my character. I have not the slightest wish, since things are as they are with me, to rid myself of them. There is in me much more of evil than of good. Genius like mine must needs have with it manifold bad. “I have in me the germ of every crime.” I have no desire to destroy these germs. I should be glad indeed to have them develop into a ravaging disease. Something in this dreadful confusion would then give way. My wooden heart and my soul would cry out in the darkness less heavily,

less bitterly. They want something—they know not what. I give them poison. They snatch it and eat it hungrily. Then they are not so hungry. They become quieter. The ravaging disease soothes them to sleep—it descends on them like rain in the autumn. When I hurry over my sand and barrenness my vivid passions come to me—or when | sit and look at the horizon. When I walk slowly I consider calmly the question of how much evil I should need to kill off my finer feelings, to poison

Mary MacLane,

1902

thoroughly this soul of unrest and this wooden heart so that they would never more be conscious of too-brilliant lights, and to make myself over into a quite different creature. A little evil would do—a little of a fine, good

quality. From

The Story of Mary MacLane,

1902

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THE BACK OF A MAGAZINE All my life I’ve liked the Back of a magazine. Some black-browed Wednesday I purchase a magazine, a fifteen-cent one, and read it through. I read the stories and they deeply engage or lightly interest me. I read the “special articles” and if they tell about flying machines or wild birds or hospitals or woman-prisoners in penitentiaries they charm or absorb my thoughts. | look at the illustrations and try to decide whether they are art or science or mechanism. I read the verse and if it’s poetry it exhilarates me as if closed shutters were opened to let Day into a gloomy Room. Then I read the advertisements in the Back and they do all of those things to me in comforting life-giving oxygen-furnishing ways. Each advertisement is a short story with an eerie little “plot” in it: each is a special article full of purpose: each is fruitful poetry: and in my two hands I all-but have and hold those wonderful Things they CXplol 2.5 I like everything in the Back of a magazine. I like the Revolvers, handsome plausible short-barreled Revolvers with pictures of ordinary people in dim-lit midnight bedrooms, and ordinary expected-looking burglars climbing in windows—Revolvers of ten shots and ofsix, and of different calibers, and all of them gleamingly mystically desirable. I like the Soaps, smooth amorous appetizing Soaps, some in luxurious Paris packets, and others spread out in blue water and rosy foam, splashed in by athletic Archimedesque young men and fat creamy babies and slim beautiful ladies— Mary Garden Soap of pungent delicious scent, tar Soap for the long lovely hair of girls, austere Ivory Soap—it floats. I like the Rubber Heels of resilient charm so tellingly pictured and described that at once I desire them beneath my spirit-heels—springy and solid and thick and firm. I like the Toothpastes and Tooth-powders and Tooth-lotions in tubes and tins and bottles, each

£9)

bearing beneficent messages to the human white teeth of this world—one unfailing kind coming lyrically out like a ribbon and lying flat on the brush. I like the foods—of miraculous spotless purity and enticement—Biscuits and Chocolate and Figs, and Foie-gras in thick glossy little pots, so richly pictured and sung that merely to let my thoughts graze in their pasturage fattens my Heart. I like the men’s very thin Watches, and men’s Garters—no metal can touch you—and men’s fluffy-lathered shaving sticks, and men’s trim smart flawless tailored Suits, in none of which I have use or interest until I find them in the Back

of a magazine—where at once they grow charming and romantic. I like the jars and boxes and tubes and glasses of Cold Cream, Cold Cream fit for skins of goddesses, fit for elves to feed on—a soft satiny scented snow-white elysium of wax and vaseline and almond paste, pictured in forty alluring shapes till it feels pleasantly ecstatic just to be living in the same world with bewitching vases of Cold Cream, Cold Cream, Cold Cream—always

bewitching and lovely but never so notably and festively as in the Back of a a magazine.... From J, Mary MacLane,

1917

PROVERBS “What’s a bird in the hand worth?” said I. “A pound of cure,” said my friend Annabel Lee. “What does a stitch in time save?” said I. “Two in the bush,” said my friend Annabel Lee. “Where does charity begin?” said I. “Betwixt the cup and the lip,” said my friend Annabel Lee. “What may a cat look at?” said I. “The broth,” said my friend Annabel Lee.

“What does many a mickle make?” said I. “A multitude of sins,” said my friend Annabel Lee. “What do too many cooks spoil?” said I. “Us all,” said my friend Annabel Lee. “Whom does conscience make cowards of?” said I. “Dead men and fools,” said my friend Annabel Lee. “What is it that has no turning?” said I. “A full stomach,” said my friend Annabel Lee. “What fortifies a stout heart?” said I. “A stitch in time,” said my friend Annabel Lee.

“What does money make?” said I. “An ill wind,” said my friend Annabel From My Friend Annabel Lee, 1913

Lee.

38

I DON’T KNOW The things I know are jumbled and tangled into an indescribable heap inside me. The things I Don’t Know are separated and ranged of their own volition in long orderly rows in my conscious mentality. The things I know glow with tints and gleams and will-o’-wisp lights and primal colors and waveringly with the blinding gold-purple lightnings of all-Time. The things I Don’t Know glow—each one separately—with a small precise lanternbrightness of its own. Also in my wide background are things I don’t know and am unaware of it: the mass of my luminous Ignorance—it shines with an earthy phosphorescence. When I look at the things I know I get an undetailed perspective of me like a bird’s-eye view of London. When I look at neat formal rows of things I Don’t Know I have a clear look, as if through an uncurtained window into a bare little room, at my quietest self sitting knitting or plaiting straw. I reckon up and count up and check up lists of

big and little things rapidly:

I Don’t Know—like

this,

I Don’t Know what ink is made of, nor howto fire a Maxim gun: I don’t know how to make a will: I don’t know how to cook a prairie-chicken, nor what to feed a pet weasel, nor who invented the snarling-iron, nor what it is. I Don’t Know what food people eat in the Himalaya Mountains, nor how Lord Cornwallis felt when he surrendered: I don’t know the color of a chicken’s gizzard, nor of sand, nor of fishscales nor of mice: I don’t know whether an English cabinet minister needs strength of mind or strength of will, or both, or neither. I Don’t Know how I hurt the true heart of my friend: I don’t know astronomy nor solid geometry: I don’t know what I think with: Idon’t know what ooze leather is, nor who pitched for the Tigers in nineteen-nine.

I Don’t Know a good horse froma bad horse: I don’t know why a bat sleeps head downward, nor what wasps live on: I don’t know how to open oysters, nor how to milk a cow: I don’t know the Latin for “whiskey”.... I Don‘t Know how to sharpen a carving knife, nor how to roll a cigarette: I don’t know the real English meaning of the French noun “elancement”: I don’t know whether my sex is a matter of my genital organs or of my mental inwards: I don’t know how to determine the contents ofa circle in square inches, nor how to pronounce “7eota. I Don’t Know whether Edgar Allan Poe is big or little: I don’t know how many soldiers fell at Shiloh: I don’t know whether temperament or nature or circumstance makes one woman a happy kindhearted whore and another an unhappy cruel-hearted nun: I don’t know howto grow artichokes: I don’t know what brimstone is, nor how to play the accordion: I don’t know what quality in me forms my handwriting.... I Don’t Know what makes each day a Day of dark Gold and life mournfully precious: I don’t know where is God: I don’t know how they make tea in Ireland: I don’t know how to pronounce the word “girl”: I don’t know how to make lace: I don’t know whether I hear a sound or feel it, nor why a spool of thread looks exactly like a Spool of Thread. I Don’t Know—I Don’t Know—I Don’t Know, rapidly, to the end of the mystic commonplace infinitudes .... From /, Mary MacLane,

1917

||

RAYAa

A We SiWN

Nick Thorkelson

TRAPPED

IN A SYSTEM...

The History of North America from the Standpoint of the Beaver Jim O'Brien

Robert Benchley was talked out of a diplomatic career after he turned ina college thesis on a certain fishing treaty, written from the point of view of the fish.’ At the risk of some comparable punishment, it may be interesting to describe the sweep of events on our continent from the vantage point of what beavers have done and what has happened to them. As I hope will be clear, such an exercise when applied to this particular animal gives us a way, not only to gnaw at the limits of our speciescentrism, but to comprehend our own history in North America as well.

There are two reasons for thus calling the beavers front and center from the vast ranks of our fellow mammals. One is that they manipulate the physical landscape more than any other animal besides the human. In the course of blocking streams and accumulating a food supply they cut down certain trees, drown others at their roots,

raise the water

table,

check soil erosion and flooding, create a new home for a host of aquatic animals, and (over

time, as the pond fills in with silt and organic material) leave rich meadow lands. There isa

sense in which it would be fully legitimate to

40 say that North America was “empty” until the first beavers waddled along and began applying their industry to it. The second reason for singling out the beaver has nothing whatever to do with the first. By the simple accident of their fur— which has tiny barbs that facilitate a type of hat manufacturing practiced in Europe, and which in

“NAVY”

CONTINENTAL" COCKED

COCKED

HAT

HAT.

(1800)

(1776)

the late winter has a rich, smooth texture— the

beaver became an irresistible magnet that guided European penetration of the North American interior for nearly three centuries. The “fur trade,” it was called. Other animals such as marten, otter, muskrat, bear, wolverine, mink, you name it, were sought, but above

CLERICAL. (Eighteenth Century)

all other lures was the beaver. It is Canada’s national symbol to this day. In the onrush of the “fur trade,” not only was the beaver threatened

with extinction but the Indians

(who

supplied the animals in exchange for the products of European technology) had their traditional cultures severely jarred and their own numbers drastically reduced. Elsewhere, Spaniards sought gold and silver and slaves, but the more advanced capitalist cultures of northern Europe made an even greater impact on the New World by simply setting a high price for the skin of a dead animal. So the beaver is “important” in two respects: as the continent’s “furry little engineer,” to borrow a chipper anthropomorphism from A. Radclyffé Dugmore, F.R.G.S., in The Romance of the Beaver,’ and asa source of capital accumulation, with all the human consequences

that phrase implies. I put the word “important” in quotes to express a vague unhappiness at having to justify organizing a history around the fate of a particular species of animal. You will never see anyone introduce a biography of Charlemagne, or Eugene V. Debs, by saying that “humans are important to write about because they’ve changed the landscape so much and because they were the first really successful predator of the beaver.”

(1812)

L

(THE

CIVIL.

D'oRSAY.)

(THE REGENT.)

(1820)

MODIFICATIONS

(THE PARIS BEAU.) (1815)

(1825)

OF

THE

BEAVER

HAT

Written history, in fact, as it has taken over from mythology, has been one of the main intellectual vehicles for separating out human beings from other animals. Historians have been secular handmaidens of the ideology that Pope Pius IX expressed when he proscribed the formation of a society to protest cruelty to bulls, on the ground that animals don’t have souls. For modern historians, nobody has a soul, but human beings have identities. The eighteenth-century French naturalist Buffon,

who would be laughed out of any decent historical gathering—and who, if the truth be known, classified beavers as fish—had something profound to say on this subject. John

41

Berger translates him as follows: To the same degree as man has raised himself above the state of nature, animals have fallen below it: conquered and turned into slaves, or treated as rebels and scattered by force, their societies have faded away, their industry has become unproductive, their tentative arts have disappeared; each species has lost its general qualities, all of them retaining only their distinct capacities, developed in some by example, imitation, education, and in others, by fear and necessity during the constant watch for survival. What visions and plans can these soulless slaves have, these relics of the past without power? Only vestiges of their once marvellous industry remain in far deserted places, unknown to man for centuries, where each species freely used its natural capacities and perfected them in peace within a lasting community. The beavers are perhaps the only remaining example, the last monument to that animal intelheencem a

The profundity here lies in the fact that, however wildly inaccurate when taken literally, Buffon’s description is right on the mark if, where he says “animals,” we substitute the phrase “animals as understood by humans.”

of Mammals, gives several examples of this, including the judgment of Robert Beverley, the historian of early Virginia, that beavers had “a regular form of Government, something like Monarchy, ... [under a superintendent, who] walks in State by them all the while, and sees that everyone bear his equal share of the burden; while he bites with his Teeth, and lashes with his Tail, those that lag behind, and

do not lend all their strength.”* As a Hudson’s Bay Company trader said, denouncing one writer’s fanciful report, “little remains to be added to his account of the beaver besides a vocabulary of their language, a code of their laws, and a sketch of their religion, to make it

the most complete natural history of that animal.”® The Hudson’s Bay man, whose business it was to know about beavers and no nonsense, wasn’t fooled; and his good-humored exasperation is shared by our present-day business civilization. With their talk of monarchy and production supervisors, the naive European writers were of course mixing their anthropomorphism with ethno-centrism. The North American woodland Indians, who knew the beaver, had much more complicated and sophisticated ways of looking at it, although their perspective is also foreign to ours today. They did not embellish the beaver with human behavior, but with com-

“The Beaver and His Famous

Lodges.” Print, 1755

In truth, the beaver at that point in Western history was almost the last animal to have human complexity imputed to it. The museum keeper Clifford Moore, in his engaging Ways

plicated motives and spiritual powers, which it shared with every other part of nature from animals to rocks and from trees to human beings. One can document and elucidate that pre-industrial attitude toward animals, as a number of writers have tried to do in this time of ecological crisis. However, unless it has been a living experience for us, we can never write with that attitude. To recount the course of events in North America as they relate to the beaver, a modern urban historian has a choice of values and of emphases; but as edu-

cated citizens of modern capitalist society, we look at the beaver across an abyss that was not always there.

42

That's Enough Methodology for Now It is the question of cultural perspective that is most intriguing. The history itself can only be a crude summary when confined to an essay. But maybe if we can find some factual wood chips scattered along the path, they will help lead us to the tree of knowledge. Besides, the beaver has been significant for other species, including our own, and the following outline history will indicate how.

tome Plagues and Peoples, on epidemic disease in world history.) The beaver’s responses to these two problems dovetail nicely; and they account for this animal’s unique impact on the landscape. Although Buffon held that beavers had gradually become fish by eating them,* the truth of the matter is that they don’t eat other animals at all. They live on vegetation, and above all on the bark and young shoots of trees. (That’s why they never made it to South America, you see: the dry treeless deserts of northern Mexico stood in their way.) Armed with four big incisors, which stay sharp because they keep growing through a lifetime and wear out faster on one side of the tooth than the other, they collect their delicacies by cutting ¢ -wn the whole tree. And the less edible parts of the tree, along with rocks, mud, old boots,

and whatever else is available, go into making dams and lodges. These are necessary because the beaver on land is slow, conspicuous, and a 1. Beginnings.

Unlike humans,

who came

here fully evolved over the “Siberian land bridge,” beavers were here for millions of years, experimenting with different sizes and shapes. The prehistoric giant beaver (Castoroides ohioensis) cut a striking figure in the northern lakes, reaching eight feet in length and weighing as much asa black bear. It coexisted with the earliest humans

in North America,

then be-

came extinct along with other Ice Age behemoths as the climate warmed. Less spectacular but more ofa survivor was the dam-building Castor canadensis, a close cousin to the Euro-

pean Castor fiber. The differences between these two species, which are apparently due to the geographical isolation of North America from the Eurasian land mass after the last Ice Age, are too subtle for the average predator to notice. For the historian, the only difference is that Castor canadensis was far more numerous. Every kind of animal has to eat something and has to keep the tendency of other animals to eat /t in some

kind of check.

(What eats

humans? See William McNeill’s bloodcurdling

potential meal for the nearest hungry wolf, bear, wolverine, bobcat, or coyote. (Only a potential meal, let us add. Beavers have sharp teeth and hind claws and are built compactly. There are even instances where they've dragged the would-be diner to the water and administered a quick drowning.) It is in the water that the beaver becomes fast and elusive, vulner-

able only to the relatively scarce river otter. Hence the dam, which uses a small stream to create a pond. Even the winter freeze can be finessed: with the water level raised, the beaver colony can build a lodge big enough to house an underwater food supply plus above-water

compartments with a thick roof; the builders need never leave the lodge except to swim *Where do these incorrect ideas come from? They come from social practice. The nominally Catholic fur trades of French North America were not about to stop eating beaver meat on Friday or any other day. The Catholic hierarchy in Canada performed various intellectual gymnastics on the beaver question so as to avoid a direct confrontation over the issue of eating the succulent meat on Fridays. This must have been the indirect source of Buffon’s “mistake.”

43

under the ice, and thus they are fully protected from land predators during the winter months. In a continent filled with trees for millions:

of square miles, the beaver had free rein. Asa beaver colony expands and begins putting pressure on the surrounding food supply— beavers have to stay as close to the water as possible for protection—an instinct is triggered by which parents will expel their older offspring from the colony on pain of injury and even death. The outcasts may be able to set up another dam slightly downstream, or they may have to make the perilous overland trek fora suitable site. On the way, or after finding the stream, each will try to attract a beaver of the opposite sex and thereby found a new colony. Life expectancy is around twelve years, and an offspring may be exiled at age two, so it is easy to guess that a beaver during its lifetime may have descendants who live dozens of miles away. By the time the Europeans came, beavers had long since expanded throughout the area where the lay of the land made it possible. 2. A human presence. Of course the Europeans weren't the first people here, though you would never know it from reading the average history book. Anthropologists are now tossing around figures like nine million for the pre-Columbian population of the New World north of Mexico—an extraordinary figure which was not reattained by European immigrants for more than three centuries. While any species is important first of all to itself, the advent of humans was important to the beaver as well.

Indians did not threaten the beaver as a species. The great naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton estimated toward the end of his career that there were 60 million beaver in North America when the Europeans came: It is hard to imagine how there could have been more even in the absence of the Indians. Now the question is: How do we look on the relationship of two species, one of which hunts, traps, and tries to kill the other? Each individual encounter may be marked by violence and cruelty on the one side, helpless terror on the other. In a stable relationship, though, the predation is often an alternative to starvation and disease. As Calvin Martin reminds us in Keepers of the Game: Indian Animal Relations and the Fur Trade’ the primal world view includes a belief that people appropriated animals for their use only, and with, in some

sense, the

permission of the spirits of those animals. The killing of animals was part of an elaborate and complex culture, full of beliefs which worked to insure that particular kinds of animals would not be overkilled. Woodland Indians enjoyed a stable relationship with nature than an ecologist of today can only look at in envy.

Here was that wonder of wonders, horror of horrors, a land animal that could chase the

beaver out of the water and kill it when it chose. The technique was crude—it typically involved breaking the ice with axes and setting dogs after the fleeing prey— but adequate. (It was to prevail for well over two centuries after the beginnings of the fur trade in the 1500s.) The human beings could kill the beaver at will. Here we come to an interesting question of values. Let us make clear at the outset that the

Beaver. Kwakiutl painting for a housefront

44 3. The Europeans.

In the Donald

Duck

comic book Tralla La (May-June 1954), Donald

and the three nephews parachute into a remote valley whose inhabitants are blissfully unaware of the outside “civilized” world. By mistake one of the nephews lets a bottle cap fall to the ground; on finding it the natives suddenly go berserk and begin fighting each other for the privilege of offering their most valued possessions for more bottle caps. The whole society has been instantly disrupted. David Wagner (“An Interview with Donald Duck,” Radical

America, January-February, 1973) calls this a brilliant critique of Western imperialism. In fact, the comic book is backwards history, as we can see from the experience of North America. In that historical instance it was the Europeans who went berserk. They came here first for gold and silver, then for fur for decorative hats, then for drugs (tobacco, sugar, and

coffee). Was any of these an intrinsically useful product? The use-value of the products the Indians got in the “fur trade”—cloth, guns, steel axes, metal cooking utensils, the one

exception being alcohol— was far higher than the use-value of what the Europeans came here for. At the point of contact it is the European mentality that needs explaining, not that of the Indians. Of course the Europeans weren't really crazy. They just had a very different social system. As soon as the beaver pelts on the one hand, and the European trade goods on the other hand, are stripped of their practical uses and distilled into European currencies, we see

that the disproportion is all the other way. One nineteenth-century student of the trade concluded that the profits had gone as high as 2,000 percent.® In England and France— the Dutch were squeezed out fairly early—the buying and selling of beaver fur became an important source of what is disarmingly called an “economic surplus.” We can define an economic surplus as a concentration of wealth within a society such that the people who con-

trol that wealth have the power to direct the labor of other people in the society—and thereby gain further wealth and further power. A society may have an abundance of everything it needs—for example, a hunting and gathering society in which people have to do only four or five hours a day of what we would call work, and are quite comfortable— but unless

the wealth is unequally distributed there is no economic surplus because nobody has power to harness the labor of others for his own purposes. One important effect of the fur trade, as of the production of crops like sugar and tobacco, was to help make northern European

society more unequal, and thus further the cause of economic development, alias “progress.” (If the people who directed the European end of the fur trade were still alive, and had

the opportunity to do it all over again, they would seize the chance without the slightest hesitation. Whatever else it may be, that is not craziness.) But, to keep the beaver at the center of our

concerns, the specific relationship that matters here is that the French, Dutch, and British quickly discovered that Castor canadensis had fur very much like that of its almost-extinct cousin Castor fiber, and that the Indians knew how to trap it if they were of a mind to do so. The Europeans offered trade goods. More to the point, they offered diseases. Such ills as smallpox, measles, whooping cough, and chick-

en pox, which had become childhood diseases in Eurasia over the course of centuries, were entirely new to the Americas. Everywhere they had a catastrophic effect. Indian medicine, even though it was at least as good as the European medicine of that age, had no cure; and Indian cultures had no explanation that was not acutely demoralizing. It was this awesome loss of cultural cohesion—not to say loss of life— that led many woodland Indians to abandon their traditional practices and collaborate in the European animal trade. The results for the beaver were catastrophic. There was a wave of destruction fanning out

45 from the St. Lawrence River, from the Dutch and English colonies on the Atlantic seaboard, later from Hudson’s Bay, and still later from

John Jacob Astor’s fistful of the Oregon coast. In the final stages of expansion, in the Rockies, legendary white “mountain men” like Jim Bridger dispensed with the Indian trade altogether and wrought enormous destruction on their own.* And after the trappers came the white settlers, appropriating for their own exclusive use a landscape that had once been home for both humans and an immense array of “wild” animals. Even as European fashions changed, with less demand for beaver hats, the trapping of the diminished beaver population continued, especially in Canada. Between 1853 and 1877 the Hudson’s Bay Company sold almost three million beaver skins on the London market.? By 1891 the author of a book on the beaver could write that “progress is no respecter of persons or animals, so we must face the matter squarely and prepare to pay tribute to the loss of the great beaver host which will soon leave us forever.” Of the beaver’s ultimate extinction, “no possible question can exist.”"°

4. Back from the Brink. As any resident of a wooded, hilly countryside today knows, the North American beaver did not disappear as a species. It is hard to sort out the historical causation here, but the fact is that around the

turn of the century American states and Canadian provinces began to pass laws strictly controlling the killing of beaver. Wisconsin is an example. By 1900 there were probably no more than 500 in the state, all in the northern

Trading tokens

woods. Serious protection began at that time, and in 1908 the trapping of beavers was wholly forbidden. Given this breathing space, they began to multiply and disperse, and within a decade complaints began pouring in that the beaver had become a nuisance, by flooding roadways and drowning trees on farmer’s property. The state soon began a program of live-trapping the beaver in some places and transferring them to more remote areas, where they could perform their free labor of reducing soil erosion without getting in people’s way. Many were taken to other states, such as Pennsylvania, where the beaver had been exterminated by around 1913. By the early 1950s there were an estimated three thousand colonies in Wisconsin.'! So numerous had the beaver become on the continent as a whole that in 1951 an estimated total of well over 300,000 beaver pelts were taken by regulated killing in thirty-one U.S. states and seven Canadian provinces, without threat to the total

population.” In effect, human governmental agencies assumed a managerial role in relation to the beaver. The traditional four-legged predators such as the wolverine (‘the beaver eater,” it was sometimes called), wolf, bear, bobcat, and

fox had been reduced to negligible numbers. The partial check they had once exerted on *They did it with the marvelously efficient steel trap perfected by Sewell Newhouse in 1823. Who was Sewell Newhouse? Well, while European socialists of that era were lavishing praise on beavers (“a hieroglyph of Association,” Fourier called them), the socialist Oneida colony of upstate New York was busily manufacturing steel traps under the direction of one of its members, Sewell Newhouse.

the beaver’s proliferation had been removed,

but at the same time vast areas of woodland were destroyed to make way for farms, towns, and cities. Therefore, public agencies have stepped in, and the situations they deal with are complicated. The naturalists Lorus and Margery Milne tell the story of a beaver colony

46 individuals. All we know about the 4,000-footlong beaver dam found near Berlin, New Hamp-

shire—that’s pretty close to a mile—is that “some beavers” built it. “Some beavers” also built the 750-foot canal that was found near Longs Peak, Colorado, in 1911; canals, often

built with locks, are in some ways the beaver’s most impressive feat, providing a way to bring distant vegetation to the pond without risking too long a sojourn on dry land. “Some beavers” built a giant lodge housing at least thirty-seven of their number, as described by a Hudson’s Bay trader, and felled a tree measuring more

This ceramic plaque at the Astor Place subway stop in N.Y. City correctly identifies the source of Astor's fortune, largest in the U.S. before the Civil War.

ona remote tributary of the Arkansas River in Colorado which built a series of dams between 1949 and 1955, then outstripped the food supply and migrated en masse. In 1957 the untended dams gave way to the spring thaw, and “a wall of muddy water rushed across roads and fields, engulfing human establishments without warning.” Having broken into the pre-existing web of life, modern society has had to take control of this particular strand. And it is not easy.

More Methodology: What Were Their Names? Perhaps it is too bad that Robert Beverley

than three feet in diameter and 100 feet high in British Columbia." If beavers were like modern human beings, we would not know who actually carried out these exploits but we would at least have a name to attach to them— the name of whoever commissioned the work. But of course names aren't the real issue. We Americans

all have names,

yet our mili-

tary planners are moving closer to a nuclear war that would kill nearly all of us. The same culture that sanctioned the mass slaughter and near-extinction of the beaver now presents itself, with certain advances in technology, as having room for the mass destruction of its own people as well. Even class and racial privileges are negated by nuclear war, but that seems to have no impact on the momentum. It is not as easy to separate humans from animals as either Christian doctrine or the liberal humanism that underlies most historical writing would suggest. There may bea sense in which the ubiquitous

was wrong, that the beaver did not have a king

‘“Warning—I Brake for Animals” bumper

or a superintendent who “walks in State by them all the while, and sees that every one bear his equal share of the burden; while he

stickers are the most encouraging mass phenomenon of recent years. In part they represent a simple concern for highway safety, a plea against tailgating, but they also express a revulsion against the power that modern society

bites with his Teeth, and lashes with his Tail,

those that lag behind, and do not lend all their strength.” If they had, the names of these dignitaries might somehow have come down to us today, for our historical records. As it is, you

have to be a scientist or a beaver even to tell the males from the females, let alone pick out

holds over the natural world (in this case the

power to crush an animal between a heavy machine and a strip of concrete). They are a forceful reminder that, for all we have done to destroy parts of nature and undertake the

47 “management” of what is left, we are afteralla

part of nature. We have, in some profound sense, more in common with the helpless skunk or chicken on the highway than we do with the inanimate object at whose wheel we sit. In an age that tells us otherwise, it is an important insight. Joseph Wood Krutch wrote a wonderful book twenty-five years ago called The Great Chain of Life, which Marston Bates aptly called “The best introduction to natural history that has yet been written.” The book’s epilogue speculates on the importance of joy and playfulness in the lives of at least the higher animals such as mammals and birds. He also quotes an academic naturalist as saying that, while people sing in the bathtub because they are happy, the motives of a bird singing on the bough have “absolutely nothing” to do with “the joy ophie.”* Krutch goes on to give his own excellent reasons for disbelieving this hack. For our present purposes, however, it may be more apropos to try to see in what hideous sense the pedant may have been right. With the elaboration of capitalist civilization, happiness becomes more and more a commodity to be purchased on the one side and profited from on the other. Even the enjoyment of nature becomes a commodity (witness the vital role of the railroads in lobbying for creation of the National Parks system in the early twentieth century). Work is rigidly separated from “leisure,” and the latter is defined by “consumption.” Within the militant wing of the civil rights movement, which was angry at the federal governmentfor failing to protect southern blacks in the early 1960s, it was said that “There is a town in Mississippi called Liberty, there is a department in Washington called Justice.” To this we can add that there is a product in the supermarket called Joy. The bird on the bough is not experiencing leisure as we know it, and we are constantly tempted to believe that it is not expressing happiness.

There is no way to translate “Thank God It’s Friday” into bird language. It is a fool’s game to try to draw too sharply the differences between humans and the animal world. We are first and last a part of that world, an episode— however remarkable— in the evolution of animal life on the planet. Neither for pre-contact North American Indians nor for nature writers like Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Edward Abbey, Grey Owl, John McPhee, Farley Mowat, and

Loren Eiseley has the exalting of animals been a way of diminishing human worth and dignity. Nor do those who lead the way in demeaning the animal have anything to say to us about the value of human life. The same agribusiness corporations that pack live cattle, chickens, and pigs into the most hateful of cramped artificial quarters and force-feed them with drugs are also pushing vast numbers of Third World people off their lands and creating the conditions for mass starvation. The same cultural logic that converted beavers into capital by abstracting the animal and attaching value only to the fur has a similarly limited use for ordinary human beings. In the face of capital accumulation, the fact that we are all human gives us no claim on the mercy of the accumulators.

When, as a culture, we

lost our kinship with the animals, we lost something profound that has not been replaced. And this gets us back to the relationship between the beaver and history. It is the commerce in beaver that is endlessly documented in the records that are the acceptable grist for historians. The thousands of years in which beavers and humans lived side by side as elements of nature are virtually opaque to us. History, even when it focuses directly on an animal, can treat the animal only asa historical object, not as a subject. So the world in which the beaver had a spirit is hidden from history. Unless history is augmented with enlightened anthropology, and poetry too, there is no way to understand that

48

world— no way even to glimpse it. And this is not a trivial matter. What is at stake is not simply a way of looking at the past, but the urgent need to find our way out of the cultural logic of capitalism. Human potentiality is much

more varied than anyone could realize who knew only the history of the modern age; and this is important for us to grasp. Fighting to understand the past is, after all, part of a bigger struggle to survive the future.

> Nick Thorkelson

PAW-NOTES 1. H. Allen Smith, The Complete Practical Joker (New York: Morrow, 2nd ed., 1980), p. 228.

2. A. Radclyffe Dugmore, The Romance of the Beaver (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1914), passim. 3. John Berger, About Looking (New York: Pantheon,

1980), p. 10. 4. Clifford B. Moore, Ways of Mammals (New York: Ronald Press, 1953), p. 135. . Ibid., p. 134. . Ernest Thompson Seton, Lives of Game Animals lose) (Boston: Charles T. Branford Co., 1953), 4:447.

7. Calvin Martin, Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relations and the Fur Trade (Berkeley: U. of Calif. Press, 1978) passim.

8. Fred W. Lucas, quoted in Horace T. Martin, Castor ologia, or the History and Traditions of the Canadian Beaver (Montreal and London,

1892), p. 146.

9. Victor J. Cahalane, Mammals of North America (New York: Macmillan,

1961), p. 461.

10. Horace T. Martin, Castorologia, pp. 132, 59. This is a wonderful book, by the way. I wish some reprint publisher would save it from extinction.

11. Hartley T. Jackson, Mammals of Wisconsin (Madison: U. of Wisconsin Press, 1961), pp. 194-95; Harry R. Roslund, Mammal Survey of Northcentral Penn-

sylvania (Harrisburg: Pa. Game Commission, 1951), p. 30. 12. Lorus J. Milne and Margery Milne, The Balance of Nature (New York: Knopf, 1961), p. 100. 13. [bid., p. 98. 14. Leonard

Lee Rue,

The World of the Beaver (Phila-

delphia and New York: Lippincott, 1964), pp. 77, 11618, 65-66.

15. Joseph Wood Krutch, The Great Chain of Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), p. 222. Cf. the Canadian writer Grey Owl in Pilgrims of the Wild (New York: Scribner’s, 1971): “I had watched fat little beavers sitting up like queer diminutive Buddhas on a river bank, solemnly wagging their heads at the rising sun, while the mother lay by and crooned at them, plucking them towards her at intervals and rolling on her back from time to time, murmuring with contentment, happy with her young and the sheer joy of living” [2 SP

What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity. By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death. The ideal ofa single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life. — Octavio Paz

49

KROM ABENAKI A Bridge Between Two Worlds Alanis Obomsawin

I don’t know the exact place of my birth. I do know that I was born around Lebanon, New Hampshire. I lived there for six months, then my mother returned to her reservation in Canada. I’m from the Abenaki Nation. The word comes from Wamabenaki and means “People of Sunrise.” We are eastern woodland Indians. Originally our land was all of New England. Groups of Abenaki people still live in Vermont and in Maine. On the reservation in Canada, I lived with my aunt who had six other children. We lived mainly outside, whether

it was winter or summer. I was very fortunate to know my aunt and an old man that was my mother’s cousin. He told me a lot about the history of our Nation. He also taught me many songs and stories. Those two people gave me something special and strong. It was my best time. I left the reservation when I was nine. We settled in a small town in Canada. That’s where all the problems started. We were the only Indian family there. It was bad. I remember sleep as being my best moments. I had such fantastic dreams about animals and birds. But it was the bad time of my life. I attended a French school in the town’s slums. That’s when they told me that I was poor, that I was dirty, and that we were savages. The tall lone savage in the back of the classroom. When I grew older, the same people who had beaten me up for years and years all of a sudden started flirting with me. It was strange. It took me a long time to lose the hate. I really had a lot of hate in me. Those memories are in my songs. I started collecting music and singing professionally about twenty-five years ago. I always used to sing. I remember rocking my rocking chair and singing all the time, as a young girl.

Alanis Obomsawin.

Photo by Amoo

Later I started singing for friends. But I never had any idea that I would go and sing on the stage in front of other people. Folkways was organizing a concert at Town Hall in New York City. Several Canadian performers were involved. They wanted Indian sounds on the program. They asked me if I would sing. At first Isaid no. After weeks of phone calls anda lot of discussions, finally I said yes. It was a very difficult thing for me to do. It was hard getting up on stage. Fora year or so after that, I refused to make any stage appearances. Slowly I began to say yes for children. I sang a lot for children before going back to sing for adults. I started writing songs about fifteen years ago. Mainly making sounds of what was happening. What I was seeing at the time, and of

50

the visions and dreams | had. I put them into sounds for singing. I also sing traditional sounds and tell stories and legends. I make songs in Indian, in English and in French. It all depends on how it’s speaking to me. I don’t really think about the audience when I’m singing. I feel I have to sing what is real to me, through me. If they feed me something, it’s not because I’m thinking of them. They’re either giving me something or taking something from me and it makes me feel a certain way and that’s what comes out. I’m very insecure until the last minute because I don’t know what those people are. What they’re going to make me say. I don’t even make rules in terms of a message. It’s experience of my life and intuition. I can only go by that. I have to admit that I'ma very emotional person. I live my life that way. So every word is like pulling a tooth out. It has to do with what happens around me, or in me. Working with musicians like Bill Cole, Abdul

Wadud, Julius Hemphill and others is a plus for me. The experience really turns me on to something else. They are so sensitive to what I'm doing. It’s fantastic to work with them. Sometimes I’m afraid because I don’t know how to read or write music. I never will be able to be in that category. I don’t follow those notes. I don’t know how. Indian singing doesn’t follow the same scales. At least that’s what I’ve been told. My purpose is to preserve and maintain the history and culture of Native people. That’s why I sing. That’s why I make films.

I started making films about twelve years ago. I make mostly documentary films. I’ve produced several films for children because I feel that’s where it all starts. Iwant our children to know their languages. To know who they are before anything else, before anybody else. If you know who you are, you can stand anywhere in the world and not be afraid. If you’re always told that your parents were dirty, ugly and pagans, you know what the hell you think you're going to look like when you look at yourself in the mirror, because you are a reflection of what they told you; and it takes a long time to figure out that it’s alright to be what you are, and not what they said about you. It shouldn’t take half of your life to figure that out. You should know who you are when you first begin and then deal with the rest of the world. In the films I’ve made I try to focus on some of those problems. I made two educational kits for children. They are programs concentrating on one reserve, one village, one tribe. In this way a child can hear the language, see the people, know something about the history and customs, and begin to feel another Nation.

The kits are distributed through the film board all over the world. I also made a one-hour film on the Native women of Canada called “Mother Of Many Children.” I tried to show the beginning of life to the end of life. How a woman stands when she’s in the village and how she stands when she’s in the city. In the village she is never alone. If she’s working, her man is working with her. Her children are surrounding her

and helping out. She belongs to her family and to the whole tribe. In the city she walks on her own and it’s very lonely. I'm talking about a large amount of the population. Of course there are always those who can do alright for themselves,

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but the number

is

small. Many Indian people who go to the city end up going to skid row. They go there to find someone who resembles themselves in the way of thinking or in the way of talking and touching. It’s a world of no jobs. A world of liquor, re-

Syl

jection and isolation. The need for spiritual expression is high. They long for the worship of the great spirit and they say, “I'll be alright, the great spirit is going to come and get me.” You see Indian people dying of sorrow in the heart from having been insulted, having been made fun of, having been thrown out of their own village because they’re no longer registered or they’ve married into another world. The Indian population in jail is very, very high. A few years ago it was sixty-eight percent all over Canada. Now there are many programs. The government has spent millions of dollars the wrong way. The only real help is when it’s done through the people themselves. I mean the people who have been there and have gotten up and formed something. They’re the ones who should be given the money and centers and countryside and farms to help other people, because to have the understanding, the patience and compassion needed, you have to have been there yourself.

Penobscot

Sometimes I feel like a bridge. It’s good that I have the responsibility of being a producer and director with the National Film Board of Canada. It’s good to be in a position of power. It’s important. The decisions of what goes into the films comes from us. It doesn’t come from the outside. It comes from the people who are in the films and from myself. I can consult with the people who are involved and we can decide together. I’m really a bridge between two worlds. It comes through in my songs, my stories and my film work. I’m a fighter, a free spirit, but to be a free spirit at this time is very painful. You’re choked by everything around

you. You go outside and you're choked by the pollution. You’re choked by the cars. You’re choked by the traffic lights. You’re choked by the law that tells you what you should be, what you have to be. How can you be free if you have to think ofall those things they tell you to be. It puts to sleep what you are.

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So to become free you have to fight. You have to fight and there is no war. Your soul, your spirit is wanting to breathe, wanting to express itself but you walk outside and you can forget it. So you have to be damn strong to be able to allow your spirit to live the way it should. You cry all the time. It’s like dying and nobody buries you. Your real feelings are constantly being suppressed. You're not even allowed to bea child. Just like when the different tribes signed the treaties and they were told, “As long as the grass will grow, as long as the water will flow.” The people never knew that the newcomers would be able to turn rivers the other way and pretty soon there would be no grass. No one thought that would happen. So who knows what they willdo. All I know is that the power of the soul, the spirit and the brain is extraordinary. I’m sure that long ago all beings were able to communicate without traveling. Communicate through their brains, through their souls,

through their visions. People were able to do magic. They didn’t have all this shit we have to put up with. That’s why they had peace in themselves. They could spend time and become very well educated with what they were—

B2

through their brains, through their experiences. They could perform operations. They could cure people. They could bring down good or bad people. They had powers which today cost millions and millions of dollars to have just a tiny bit. People have forgotten this. Thank god there’s an underground movement in terms of our religion, in terms of our medicine men

and in terms of how it is important to not listen to the threatening force that tries to manipulate you. You have to look at what is, and work from that. In other words, work from inside.

Work from your heart, and then you go out. Not out, and then tear up your heart—there’s nothing left. I think the damage done to human beings starts in school. It’s the teaching. To be stamped

by the title teacher is not acompliment. Some people who have that title take it for granted that they’re smarter than other people. They begin to oppress those they feel are inferior, which is a word that came with the newcomers. In our language there is no word to say inferior or superiority or equality because we are equal, its a known fact. But life has become very complicated since the newcomers came here. And how does your spirit react to it? It’s like they're going to bury me tomorrow at five o’clock when the door bell rings. It’s painful. You have to be strong to walk through the storm. I know I’m a bridge between two worlds. All I ask is for people to wash their feet before they try to walk on me. Micmac

Franklin

Rosemont

OCTOBER 1917: THELONIOUS SPHERE MONK Too easy for eons the vortices’ darkness knocks its knees sliced into furious fractions of light

Minutes of hot metal retrace their inward footsteps under the spreading chestnut tree looking for luck deluxe All dire in the audio Mephisto’s readymade spleen writhes foxier than a cross-section of tomorrow’s whole wheat today halved and quartered by eye and by tooth wrestled to a mere frazzle of the forgotten

Chimney-sweeps on the ascendant speak of wristwatches reminiscent of bliss Roving in the half-sleep between dream and door Diogenes and his friends the wolves have just arrived

53

BEAT UP THE BEARS Baudelaire and Reagan Janine Hartman

The poet Baudelaire and President Ronald Reagan hold in common a perception: both have defined art as the enemy of the state. Only one of them defined the state as the enemy of human aesthetic potential. Baudelaire, who said that being a poet in the nineteenth century made him an enemy to his time, understood that there is no such thing as an ancillary relation between a government and the artist. Art, as a means to, and expression of knowledge, has nothing to do with politics practiced as “the art of the possible.” Art is a casement opening onto the impossible, and the artist the person whose hand understands the latch. It is an impulse beyond nature to a condition of transcendence; in that sense, the

artist is Sade’s “natural man,” infected with crime in the very womb. As it is protohuman, the act of creating and appreciating art is anti-social. Art is too personal to be “cost-effective,” and, ultimately, subversive because it reminds a citizen that his judgment, being and consciousness are ultimately atomistic and unique phenomena. Government seeks commonality and is antithetical to uniqueness. The pursuit of art implies that visions can occur; it laughs at material manifestations. That which is not matter is not readily catalogued or labeled. The finding of the moment of art is not capable of being perfectly described. A process beyond the scope of the technical writer is not justifiable to a budget-writer; indeed cannot be contained in a bag, or “budget,” in the original sense of the word. That those calling themselves “artists” in America permitted themselves to be “bagged” in this fashion is itself an interesting question. Answers advanced were: education for the masses, opportunity for contact with the marvelous extended to the population, or the Villonesque taking of greater resources by those lacking mastery over the material sphere in order

to sustain existence. Neither party ultimately helps the other—despite government support for the arts. Until now. In the great tradition of Paris Spleen, Ronald Reagan, and the government, or form of order he

represents, have greatly aided art by redirecting it to alienation from public opinion and mass culture. Reagan’s fiscal offensive has reminded the artists of America where they belong. Denial reaffirms the revolutionary nature ofart, its personal focus, and has clarified the artist’s gaze away from a mirage in a Cadillac window, the fantasy of agreement, of amity, with the idea, let alone the mechanism, of government. And by taking from the artists, and the population of the United States, “recognition,” or support for the arts, Reagan has shown them that beauty is not the “priority” of any social entity, but ultimately created, experienced and recognized by the individual. Should one individual realize a moment of perception or power or gentleness which he temporarily places in material form and wishes to share with another, it is the right of the many to offer him the means. This chance of offering, Reagan has vetoed. But the money,

the need, and the funds are not

his. The American people have perhaps not considered that art, and the financial means to aid in its creation, belong to them. This is because they have never questioned the political order which

mnBN

exacts money

assaulting a beggar who asks alms of him. The beggar fought back, took the money, and told the poet that he understood what to say next time. By beating the beggar, Baudelaire showed him how to be, in fact, a fit antagonist. Mistreatment sometimes produces revelations. Reagan’s recognition of the true significance and potential of art, and his actions, are good news for artists, and those who hope for the impossible. Our poet would, however, ask what benefit will Reagan derive from liberating the revolutionary potential of the American arts? Once you start feeding the bears, always remember to have something for them, every time, or someday they will remember that they are bears.

from them as a matter of course,

for projects about which they are not told and will not be told. This exaction was never questioned, as Americans were supplied with every sensory need, and that includes the appearance ofa partially accessible culture. And the country never thought about it, as it never thinks of bakers, until bakers strike. The artists never struck. And now they have been laid off. Baudelaire would be pleased. He said more than once that he mistrusted a man flexible enough in his convictions to seek government aid or honors. His most useful advice, both for the artist and the population as a whole, is contained in a vignette in the Spleen. Usually translated as “Beat Up The Poor!” Baudelaire recounts here of

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NUCLEAR

LEGEND

Who Killed Karen Silkwood? Joyce Stoller

In 1955, Robert Aldrich made a who is pursued and terrorized because are being secretly diverted and sold on to reveal what she knows, her car is run

film called Kiss Me Deadly about a woman she has knowledge of nuclear materials that the black market. Just as the woman is about off the road by an unknown assailant and she

is killed.

On November

13, 1974, this happened in real life.

The woman’s name was Karen Silkwood. Asa union activist at the Kerr-McGee plutonium plant in Oklahoma, Karen Silkwood had collected evidence of high radiation exposure to workers, falsification of quality control data on the fuel rods used in nuclear reactors, and the ‘loss’ of enough plutonium to make five atom bombs. This information was on the seat beside her as she drove to meet her union representative and a New York Times reporter. She never got there. Fifteen minutes after she left her union meeting Karen Silkwood was dead, her car a mangled wreck on the side ofthe road from Cimarron. The papers that she had with her that night have never been found. For seven years now the circumstances surrounding Silk wood’s death have revealed an ever widening circle of conspiracy, collusion, and cover-up between the United States government, private police agencies, and the nuclear industry. There have been numerous formal investigations, all of which were terminated with major issues unresolved and_ significant evidence ignored. But something else has been happening these past seven years. An anti-nuclear movement has grown up in which Karen Silkwood has become the first martyr and hero, a symbol of not only the danger that menaces us if we remain passive, but of the urgent necessity to take direct and immediate action.

Historically, the anti-nuclear movement continues the traditions that were established by the civil rights, anti-war and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Originally comprised of the veterans of these movements, and the college-educated elite, the anti-nuclear movement

has, since Three Mile Island, grown

to include every segment in American society. Just as radiation doesn’t recognize sex lines, class lines, or state lines, the anti-nuclear movement has united groups that only a few years ago were on opposite sides of the barricades. Who would have thought, for example, that the largest antinuclear conference held to date would have been called by nine international trade unions, most of whom supported the Vietnam War to the bitter end? In

1975

the

Oijl,

Chemical,

and

Atomic

Workers Union and the National Organization for Women launched a nation-wide campaign to call fora full investigation into Karen Silkwood’s death. NOW declared November 13th “Silkwood Memorial Day” and since then commemorative activities have been held all over the world on the anniversary of her death. The mass pressure generated by these actions and the growing anti-nuclear movement provided the backdrop for a trial in which Kerr-McGee was found guilty of willful, wanton, and reckless conduct in the radioactive contamination of Karen

56

Silkwood. Even before her car was run off the road, someone had tried to terrorize Silkwood by poisoning her apartment with plutonium. Everything she owned had to be buried with other nuclear waste. Two key witnesses died mysteriously days before they were to testify. They were buried within twenty-four hours with no autopsy. A private investigator hired by the Silkwood lawyers was shot through the head. Attempts to dislodge more information from other witnesses were met with pleas of “national security” and “state secrets” by the U.S. Justice Department. Clearly the U.S. government doesn’t want the American people to know what Karen Silkwood knew. They don’t want us to know that workers and the public at large are being routinely poisoned by nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons production. The nuclear bombs that are supposed to protect us from our ‘enemies’ are today killing ws! They don’t want us to know that faulty welds in the fuel rods of a breeder reactor could lead toa nuclear explosion that would kill

many people, create a cancer epidemic, and permanently contaminate a large portion of the United States. And they don’t want us to know that bomb-grade plutonium is being secretly diverted from domestic nuclear facilities, and, with the apparent knowledge of the CIA and top government officials, shipped to right-wing allies abroad. A second lawsuit dealing with the civil liberties aspects of the case was dismissed by the U.S. Supreme Court on October 5, 1981. At issue was whether labor union organizers are protected under the Civil Rights Act against private and corporate conspiracy. The Supreme Court ignored evidence that Karen Silkwood’s phone was tapped, her apartment bugged, and telephone transcripts were made available to both the FBI and Kerr-McGee in ruling that union organizers are exempt from the Civil Rights Act. Daniel Sheehan, chief counsel for the Silkwood estate, said in a press conference after the ruli, z, that it now remains for the fourth estate of the American system of justice, that is, the

press, to bring to the American people the full story of what was done to Karen Silkwood, why it was done, and by whom. He also disclosed that a major film on the Silkwood story will begin production next year. Chain Reaction, starring Meryl Streep as Karen Silkwood, was held up for years because the producers themselves were the victims of harassment by the nuclear industry. This film, to be directed by Mike Nichols, is now set for production by ABC Motion Pictures. In addition, two new books, Who Killed Karen Silkwood? by Howard Kohn and The Killing of Karen Silkwood by Richard Rashke have recently been published. R. Diggs recreated Silkwood’s story in Corporate Crime Comics’ documentary stories about awesome crimes actually committed by U.S. corporations. Jehane Dyllan’s one-woman show Si/kwood is currently touring the country. “The play,” says Ed Asner (“Lou Grant”), tells the story about how an ordinary working woman became a legend by taking risks for her union, her fellow workers and her beliefs.” All these versions of the puzzling and menacing events surrounding the life and death of Karen Silkwood contribute to the birth of a genuine culture hero, a legend for our time. Underlying the ordeal of a single individual are vital cultural concerns: woman’s assertion of power, working peoples’ control over their own work and lives, and everybody’s stake in stop-

ping the destruction of the world. Over 1900 people were arrested during the blockade of the Diablo Nuclear Power Plant this past summer. When asked by police to give their names during arraignment, many of the women said “Karen Silkwood.” Karen Silkwood stands like a spectre to haunt the nuclear industry—a spectre to accuse a growing militarism. All over the world people are

saying “NO NUKES!,” “SHUT "EM DOWN!,” “STOP THE ARMS RACE!” Whoever killed Karen Silkwood multiplied her voice a millionfold.

Dennis Brutus

TERRIBLE KNOWLEDGE to the memory of Karen Silkwood, who died on the road to Cimarron, November 6th, 1976

On the road from Cimarron terrible knowledge spotted like an unnatural monster at the back of her brain

On the road from Cimarron terrible knowledge pursued her headlights lasering the back of her head On the road from Cimarron

terrible knowledge of a mutilating death rested with lethal casualness on her sleeve

On the road from Cimarron

terrible knowledge impacted on her brain with the shattering crash that smashed her car from the road:

they wished her to die with the terrible knowledge locked in her skull

terrible knowledge of a nuclear holocaust

terrible knowledge of a nuclear holocaust clumsily unloosed through carelessness or greed terrible knowledge that even now a few are dying slowly horribly lied to lied about and she had the terrible knowledge

Behind her out of the dark

hurtled a red glare: baleful Moloch, awesome fireball

glimmering: terror lunging to destroy

Out of the dark behind her a monstrous hound lunging from Erebus sharp fangs snapping to extirpate her terrible knowledge of impending death Terrible knowledge of the guilty ones — cops, executives, agents— who conspired to destroy her and her terrible knowledge and now conspire to plead their innocence their ignorance Terrible knowledge of our capacity to destroy of our potential for destruction,

of our destructive greed: terrible knowledge Karen’s knowledge,

our knowledge, terrible knowledge

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POET AGAINST APARTHEID DENNIS BRUTUS « Interviewed by Ellen Mark Throughout his life, the prominent South African poet Dennis Brutus has fought apartheid, the virulent, institutionalized system of racism which has been branded a crime against

humanity by the United Nations. Banned, imprisoned at notorious Robben Island, and exiled

rise above them. The notion of African people ultimately determining their own destiny, governing their own society, achieving full stature as human beings-— this is not admitted. In that context therefore, a simple assertion of

fighting deportation from the U.S. Why? Because of his efforts to keep apartheid out of international sports; to keep U.S. corporations out of South Africa; and to reveal through his writings the intensity, pain, and common aims of liberation struggles everywhere. His latest

humanity by an artist is made in defiance of a total denial of that humanity. “Perhaps the most positive thing people can do isa negative thing, and that is to ensure that the racism of South Africa does not penetrate to other parts of the world. It must be stopped. We need a cordon sanitaire surrounding apartheid, cutting it off. That extends to the aca-

book, Salutes and Censures, attacks oppressors

demic field, the artistic field, the whole cul-

such as John Voerster, just as it pays tribute to those who died to free Brutus’ birthplace Zim-

tural field. “And I include sports. We’ve had spectacular protests at rugby matches in France and Britain, effective action at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee where the Davis Cup was played. Today thousands of people are protesting racism in sports and attempting to keep apartheid from penetrating Australian and New Zealand society. “T would appeal to the people of the world to support us in the assertion of human dignity everywhere, but particularly in South Africa. There are opportunities almost every day to take a stand against apartheid— by resolution, by declaration, by letter. You can make these views known to government representatives: urge that they stop all U.S. official and corporate collaboration with Pretoria, that they cut off racist sports and cultural exchanges. While we are grateful for what has been done already, there is much more that can be done. We hope that you will do it.”

from his beloved homeland, Brutus is currently

babwe;

to the Sandinistas

of Nicaragua;

to

resistance leader Solomon Mahlangu who was hanged in Pretoria; to Angola’s Agostino Neto, and to America’s Karen Silkwood. Now teaching temporarily at Amherst College, Brutus made the following statement to Ellen Mark in an interview at Northwestern University, where he is a tenured professor of African and English literature. “All artists have an important contribution to make in an assertion of humanity and humane values! It seems to me that the mere act of creation, assertion

the creative process, of our human worth,

is itself an our human

dignity. And so we should be conscious of our responsibilities as people who are able to make that statement on behalf of all humanity. “T harbor the conviction that all human beings have creative ability, that the creative spark exists in all of us. It takes different forms; it must be nurtured and developed, but no one of us in incapable of a creative act. “In the apartheid society, blacks are told that they must know their place, that they are less than human, are subhuman. Told they must accept certain limited horizons and cannot

Dennis funds. mittee, Illinois

Brutus needs letters of support and defense Please write Dennis Brutus Defense Com39 South LaSalle Street, #825, eee 60603, c/o Ellen Mark.

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OUT OF THE MAINSTREAM Traditional Arts and Untamed

Genius

Pat Ferrero and Nancy Joyce Peters Peters: Your films are about art made by people who could all be called outsiders in one way or another: a film on ancient Mimbres pottery; Roots of Child Art; Possom Trot: the Life and Work of Calvin Black, Piki: the Hopi Way; other films-in-progress, Hopi: Land and Life; A Legacy of Hearts of Hands; and of course, Quilts in Women’s Lives which has won

many awards, including the prestigious Cindy. Over the years, we’ve both been attracted to the magic and power of creative expression beyond the boundaries of mainstream culture. The ritual forms of tribal and native peoples, the arts of naives, mediums, children,

and the so-called insane. At first glance there seems to be an abyss between extremes here— superbly evolved traditions and the untamed genius of the individual. Can we define what links them? Ferrero: Well, it'salways problematic to link artwork that may share only visual similarities— pattern, repetition, symmetry. If there is a link it’s simply that all these forms exist outside traditional Western art conventions. The work has all been made with an inventive daring and an indifference to its place vis-a-vis the art market. I do think it helps remind us that the creative impulse is innate. It is uniquely human to want to express beauty; and beauty is not only physical but psychological and spiritual. This leads to a question of meaning, the creation of meaningful forms— that is, symbols. All of this work has a kind of transparency that allows us access to the multiple levels of its meaning. Peters: Taking us immediately to that point where meaning and myth originate. Surely it springs from the deepest human desires. I find it surreal, in its direct connection to unconscious sources and in the integrity and vibrancy of the reality it represents. Because it comes out of inner necessity, it has immense power to awaken the mind, to enchant. But tell me, how did you first begin investigating this area? Ferrero: | have always been interested in folkart and traditional art. I had a job in a halfway (psychiatric) house because, as a painter, I was fascinated by socalled psychotic art, and I really wanted to understand the process by which such powerful images could flow through people who really did not think of themselves as “creative,” or “artists.” Their work was coming from a deep place; the images were balanced, symmetrical, cosmological, mythi-

cal. It was a world view that was beyond pesonality. Peters: Beyond personality, yes. Yet also, not without intention— and conveying an eerie sense of utter freedom. There’s something disquietingly familiar in it— dreamlike, dark truths we can’t quite name. Because the “mad” have ventured outside culture’s diminished realities, they show us an alien universe that startles us, for we feel its authenticity— the world unmoored from our conventional habits and values. Ferrero: \ felt that here were profound voices and a kind of clarity of expression that was absolutely new to me. I loved the work I saw. It reached the source, the place where art comes from. I could see that people got great pleasure from simply doing this work, and I knew that there was some significant function, a relationship I wanted to know more about. It

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was years before I understood that the image itself, not the intellectual understanding of it, could heal. Like dreams, these works of art tell the maker what needs to be known by consciousness. They are tightropes between the known and the unknown. Peters: Ever since Freud noted the way an obsessive emergence of form in a painting accompanied the painter's movement toward psychic balance, I suppose, there’s been systematic experimentation with that process. It’s unfortunate though that much psychiatric practice has given the doctor a deleterious power over the patient. Ferrero: Do you know Aloise? Peters: Indeed I do. I believe her paintings were first exhibited by the Compagnie de l’Art Brut in the late 1940s. ’'ve admired the dynamism and poignant charm of her paintings— and writings too— for a long time. What a remarkable amatory cosmos! Ferrero: 1 love her work too. The reason I mention her in particular is that her story demonstrates so well the political perspective of the doctor-patient relationship. She had had an adolescent infatuation with Kaiser Wilhelm II. When the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo and war declared, she had a violent emotional outburst. That very understandable adolescent demonstration was considered so inappropriate that she was committed toa mental institution and spent the rest of her life incarcerated. Actually, she was confined for what was, given the world political crisis, a reasonable reaction to an overwhelming set of circumstances.

Collection

de |’Art Brut

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Peters: Here’s proof of the relativity of madness, World War I being one of the most insane events in history! If a schizophrenic illness was triggered in Aloise, it testified to a superior sensitivity. Ferrero: A friend of mine, the French filmmaker Liliane de Kermadec, made a rarely shown but wonderful feature film in 1976 or so that placed Aloise’s story clearly in the political framework of women and madness. Aloise’s original paintings were used in telling the story of her imprisonment. Initially, she was belligerent, then silent; and then almost ten years later, she began obsessively to draw images of the great love stories of the past. Under the care of a “progressive” psychiatrist who was interested in modern art, she was allowed time to draw. But the doctor,withheld from her for years the information that he was exhibiting her work and that she had become an internationally recognized artist. The healing that might have taken place had she known she was communicating and reaching other human beings was refused her for years. Peters: Willfully deprived of power. It’s a singular illustration of what Foucault says about the way our society categorizes, isolates, and punishes in the context of how power flows. Ferrero: | am not interested in idealizing madness. The work of an Aloise may be lucid and powerful but her life was short-circuited, and all her lovers embrace in the union that was

denied her except in her imagination. Peters: An exuberant erotic imagination was in fact her crime; and the object of her punishment. We’re lucky Aloise’s fabulous work survives at all. How do we create conditions that allow the intoxications of love and art? That’s the question. But, to go back a little—

to your discovery of the magnetism of these arts. Ferrero:

1 had found in that self-enclosed world view a source of creativity, but at the same

time I saw it was also a world of great pain. I wanted to go back in time, to see through the eyes of children before there was... Peters: Excessive pain— beyond the inescapable pain children suffer as they acquire “normal” taboos and restrictions? Ferrero: Exactly. And so I went from looking at psychotic art to the art of children, looking at the same thing from a fresh beginning. That work was beautiful, direct, and full of a strange balance expressing the relationship between the body and the emergence of form. One of the most startling things to me, in observing very young children working with materials, was that the first forms emerged out of the breath— the most basic rhythm of life— breathing. Children of two, three, four years old would begin to work with both hands, picking up brushes spontaneously, making forms bilaterally. They worked with all the integrated movement and balance of crawling and learning to walk. Today we'd say left and right brain still in balance. Peters: It's awesome to observe human infants already attempting to seize the essence of things—to make visible the perceptions that precede the codified world. I see you put your hands up to demonstrate a naturally symmetrical way of working. An instinct for harmony, symmetry, has given us surprising diversity. Not only in traditions like Navajo sand paintings or women’s quilts, but in super-individualist works too—from Joseph Crepin to Marie Wilson here in Oakland. It’s a primary impulse. Ferrero: Well, you see it in the body to begin with... Peters: In the body, of course, our binary apparatus of perception, cell division. . . Ferrero: Even in the chemistry of cells...

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the symmetry of the ultimate electron split— one particle radiatPeters: Cosmic chemistry— ing off into space, the other sucked into a black hole, the link to the Big Bang. But... Ferrero: Ah, I wanted to understand the connection between the symmetry of the body and its physical influence on working with material right at the beginning. What is the connection between

breath, heart, hands, and then the mind? Sometimes

children’s drawings

look fascinatingly like structural diagrams of the chakras. At their best, some of the hundreds of children’s drawings I have collected have the gestural quality of the most exquisite zen paintings. Prelogical to postlogical— one has to make the complete journey, and as an adult come full circle back to that childlike origin, to a kind of purity. Peters: Kandinsky says naives and children are those who alone can reach the Great Reality. Ferrero: Whatastonishes me is how very young children come to symbolize, to make what may be a uniquely human leap. Peters: Isn't it curious, even before the mastery of language, a child gives symbolic clues to preOedipal life, how we begin to conceive ourselves through all the mirrors of otherness. The gazing eye, queen of the senses. Ferrero: The child’s first drawing is The Human Being Out of the Void.

Samuel Herzberg

Pamela

Pons

Peters: That immediacy and wholeness of perception continue to attract. A fundamental impulse of poetry is to center the mind at that point before the split in the original unity of our being. Children reveal that. Ferrero: We need to shift our attitudes. If, for instance, we believed as some other cultures do, that there is a great creative potentiality that children are close to, and that it could be observed as it unfolds in the child, not only could we foster it, but learn from and be renewed by it. We should care for children for our own enlightenment and inspiration. The Hopi care for children and corn in much the same way. They nurture, and tend here and there, and nature turns out a mature crop soon enough. Away with the unpleasant notion that children must be civilized!

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Peters: Exactly. Asa storyteller and director of children’s theater, I was frequently dazzled by the excellent “uncivilized” ideas and insights children expressed. No adult definities for them. And their optimism about what is possible gives them a liberty of thought worthy of emulation. Much too irrepressible to listen very long to Alice in Wonderland, they must get up and make their own wonderland. Children remind us how to transform the objects of daily life into something else, how to act on the world and not be content as spectators.

Pamela

Pons

Ferrero:

Wouldn’t it be tremendous if every person could experience the power that comes

through using every kind of material at hand— words, movements, clay,

wood— whatever's

there. It’s saying meaning can come out of the objects of daily life. To me that’s the point. Peters: As soon as people become conscious of their capacity to make meaning, a higher reality is possible. It seems to me that naive artists extend an ingenuous invitation to proceed in that direction; to invent life and live it on one’s own terms.

Ferrero: Yes, the visionary artist takes that immediate and fresh perception of things and extends this idea outward to make his or her mental fantasy actually exist. Peters: The film Possom Trot touches on that kind of choice. Calvin Black’s wind-merry-goround theater of over 100 life-sized dolls was a world made visible, made real.

Ferrero: The most important thing about Calvin Black was that as a poor, self-taught jack-of-all-trades, he had a vision and he realized it— constructed it out of nothing— on the Mojave Desert. Here was a man who had worked the carnivals in the 1930s, a PopulistChristian; he was half carnival barker, half preacher, and a complete master-of-ceremonies in the Fantasy Theatre that he created and lived in. Peters:

Such an individualist eccentric who doesn’t fit into society’s mold, but has escaped

being locked up, shows us we really can imagine the world we want and to go outand make it! No putting up with sham satisfactions. Conventional oppositions— between academic and self-taught artists, for instance, or Western and primal— have meant a devaluation of

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the latters’ work. Yet it speaks to what’s most essential, closest to real needs. Since the Romantics, the creative artist has been the great challenger of Western civilization, which pays tribute to the singular Promethean genius, (while undermining that artist's actual power and autonomy). One result has been to lose sight of intersubjective connectedness. Traditional arts, despite their apparent conservatism, move in their own way toward “poetry made by all,” poetry that catches and permeates every facet of life. Ferrero: A wonderful goal! And related to my desire to look at a tradition and to see how its boundaries were pushed by individual lives. Quilts offered that; and I began to work on the film Quilts in Women’s Lives. Because of its place on the bed, the quilt is connected to all the key moments

in life— birth, lovemaking,

illness, marriage,

death. The bed is

where intimacy occurs at many different levels. It gives the quilt a special kind of impact. Peters: As an emblem of Eros, of the whole life cycle. I liked the way you presented quilts in the exhibit American Quilts: A Handmade Legacy, not as aesthetic objects, but accompanied by artifacts of people’s lives— photos, letters, announcements, poems, souvenirs, toys. You made it clear that the quilt is a kind of mythology in itself— personal and communal—in which human activities are captured in fabric, in matter. Ferrero: There are many levels at which the quilt is such a device. To begin with, it isa material activity that provides a space to record a certain kind of experience. A mourning quilt for working through grief, a celebratory quilt for a marriage—all the occasions of sorrow or joy inseparable from the hand and mind. The emotion lived through. My interest was not in the quilts alone as objects. They offered me, and co-curators Linda Reuther and Julie Silber, a way to look at the social history of women’s lives through a tradition that cut across Class, race, and regional lines. Women have been making quilts in America for over two hundred and fifty years and quilting continues up to the present. The intriguing thing to me was, here were two and a half centuries of women who were able to create a magnificent tradition and body of work that is one of the profoundest of any time, any place. And it developed, ironically, in spite of great restraints and limitations on their lives. Peters: In fact, they’re the limitations of pre-industrial conditions. And so home-bound women have developed a basically non-alienated art. There’s something lyrically provocative in quilt themes: Hourglass, Blazing Star, Faceless Doll, Hearts and Hands, Alphabet, Postage Stamp, Ocean Waves, Birds in Air, Geometer’s Compass, Orphic Lyre, Log Cabin, Trip Around the World, Puss in the Corner, Staggering Drunkard’s Path, Red Oak, Capital T, The Rocky Road to California. As in other traditions, there are, beneath a formal surface, surprises and unexpected complexities— and not just in the madcap collage of crazy quilts. Ferrero: A brilliant woman I interviewed for the film, Radka Donnell-Vogt, gave me some incredible insights into quilts. In her memoir Lives and Works; Talks With Women Artists, she says, “The complex nature of the quilt as a sheltering object yielding warmth and cover for the body involves it in the history of shame about the body and its sexual parts, and the social

stigma peculiar to those. For what it is worth, Freud’s view that weaving was invented by women to cover their shame-provoking parts has a positive side.Itconfirms the production of cloth and covers as primary technology, We can surmise that human beings first took care to cover their bodies and then made architecture, one in the image of the other.”*

*Lynn F. Miller & Sally S. Swenson, Lives and Works; Talks with Women Artists. Metuchen, N.J., & London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1981.

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On the “Log Cabin” Quilt pattern: In my studies of art history I had seen the patterned swaddling of the Christ child in many renderings, the most striking being the medallions outside the famous Foundlings’ Hospital, by Brunelleschi in Florence. Later I saw many wooden doors in Engadin, Switzerland, also in this pattern. Adding this together and assuming that women did the swaddling of the dead just as they swaddle infants, I came to the following conclusions: The Log Cabin pattern, as built up by the continuous strips wrapped around mummies, produced on the two-dimensional surface an isomorphic projection of the pyramid shape. When this is read projecting up, as in the pyramids, then it has a phallic aspect; when it is read as a depression, it refers to the vaginal opening and the womb. It is a universal convertible bisexual pattern protecting the union of opposites in human beings and securing safe passage from one world into the other, from day to night, from life to death, from three-dimensional existence into the extension of infinity. — Radka Donnell-Vogt in Lives and Works

Detail from Log Cabin Quilt. Quilter unknown. From the collection of Mary Strickler’s Quilt.

Ferrero: The strictly traditional forms gave a place for everyone to start; but within that each individual quilt-maker could and does continually improvise. No two quilts are ever alike and so there is always a personal inventive factor at work. But the idea of originality here is different. As the architect Antonio Gaudi said, “originality is a return to origins.” I like that. It doesn’t always mean new, new, new.

Peters: Itis ridiculous to hold that there is progress in the arts, as though there were an ascending scale from neolithic cave paintings to contemporary minimalism. Now, originality asa return to origins suggests where the subtleties of tradition become worth reconsidering. How does a desirable society balance the claims of the individual and the community? The tension of that effort gives traditional arts a volcanic presence. I sense in quilts the compressed instinctual vitality, the same subliming, that’s in Native American arts, for instance. Ferrero: One of the things I find most moving, the most eloquent (and very frequently expressed in women’s writings and journals), is that quilts represent triumph over the total fragmentation of their time. They worked ina form that could be done in stolen moments. As these moments add up, we’re always looking at fragmentation and wholeness simul taneously. For an object to have that symbolic punch, it has got to have that tension of opposites. I think women totally understood that. Here’s a woman who writes in 1845, “The patchwork quilt looks to the uninterested observer like a misellaneous collection of odd bits and ends of calico, but to me it is a bound volume of hieroglyphics. How many

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passages of my life seem to be epitomized in this patchwork quilt!” And here’s another statement, written in 1820: “The true economy of housekeeping is simply the art of gathering up all the fragments so that nothing be lost. I mean fragments of time as well as material.” Peters:

Time and eternity, the hunger for the infinite and the fact of finitude. One can trace in

quilts the meaning of lives, of generations— they are genealogies. And a means of communication. As quilting bees were cooperative, didn’t they give otherwise isolated women a chance to speak their own truths?

Ferrero: Absolutely. Peters: The sexual division of labor universally gives men overt power; yet women

exercise (beyond the power of creating life itself) a lot of subliminal control over fundamental human relationships. Your films reveal that. Ferrero: As we are finding out, women have much more power than male ethnologists have wanted to look at. Peters: Did you find any connections between quilt-makers and the progressive movements women have been involved in? Ferrero: lamreally just beginning, myself, to do the primary research that a real answer to that question needs. There are some tantalizing beginnings, though. There is documentation that Susan B. Anthony, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Frances Willard quilted as young girls. We know that Anthony and other 19th-century feminists spoke to women in quilting bees, and in parlors. Further, there has been intriguing comparison between quilting bees and consciousness-raising groups of recent times. A thorough history of women’s transition from quilting frame to the public and political arena remains to be unraveled. You said to me once you had found some unexpected relations between women’s domestic and public lives when you were writing Literary San Francisco. Peters: Inthe West, women were much more aggressive and active in 19th-century public life than I ever suspected, though they loudly proclaimed their domesticity. Truly surprising numbers of them were writing and publishing; in fact, given the low ratio of women to men, it would seem that none of them stayed home. Though women are popularly thought to support reaction, we now know they were instrumental in abolishing slavery, extending rights to minorities, and getting rid of many labor inequities and religious prejudices. It’s perhaps unfair to generalize along lines of gender, but it does seem that historically men’s role has always been to abstract matter, spiritualize it. (Obviously, that’s gotten critical, having brought us to a lethal nuclear drama which threatens to spiritualize us out of existence.) Women

are the real materialists. Behind that conventional “feminine” rhetoric,

ordinary women forced a lot of concrete radical change. — Ferrero: Well, it's common knowledge that quilting bees, when they moved out of the rural homestead to churches and grange halls, were meeting places where political speeches were given. This was often a first step towards moving out of the domestic sphere to act in a larger public world. And moving beyond the constraints of a traditional art formas well. Peters: Because traditional arts are bound by rules and formalities, they appear irrelevant to the spontaneous discoveries of art brut, and also to the alienated vision of the modernist that’s supposed to speak for this time. I like to think that we are moving out of these tiresome categorical boxes toward a qualitatively new gestalt—one that gets beyond selfindulgent narcissism and the facilely eclectic “post-modern.” We could say that the iso-

Detail from a Crazy Album Quilt made by the More family children of Oakland, ca. 1893. Courtesy, The Oakland Museum.

lated poet or painter takes a vertical route— the psyche plunging deeper, soaring higher— to open a larger reality, whereas the traditional artist moves horizontally, away from the solitary self, to connect self with other people, objects, and events. By crystallizing the undercurrents of collective myths and aspirations then, a tradition redefines what’s real in another way. I am interested in exploring the point of convergence of these paths. Ferrero: | definitely believe that quilts do that traditional connecting you bring up. They are always meant to be bridges between people. They were often gifts— sometimes gifts of love, sometimes of obligation, but all the complexities of gifts as forms of exchange are present in quilts. Gifts have to do with power, whether as simply perpetuating values or reinforcing beliefs about appropriate paths for life. And gifts can be withheld as a punishment. The significant thing is that quilts were kept for use, normally not sold—and never ina traditional art market. Instead, their uses were connected to ritual. Women were perfectly cognizant of this. The overall quality of many quilts as meditation pieces is a reflection of the intensity of their symmetrical pattern. Everything women say about quilting leads to the conclusion that this activity was for them a source of psychic strength. The Black Mississippian quiltmaker, Nora Lee Condra, says in my film, “When you quilt, a lot of times you say, ‘Lord’ as you quilt, just the needle going through, ‘Lord.’ Well, it looks like the needle is saying that. And as you do it, the more you want to do it and it’s just like a prayer. By the help of God I can do it. And you can.” Peters: So many aspects combine here— practical uses on a daily basis, symbolic uses, spiritual uses. The quilt often resembles the work of trance and mediumistic work: flat surface, minute detail, symmetry,

obsessive decoration,

and even an architectonic sense of the

sacred. Many of them have a hypnotic presence. Isolation, poverty, oppression, the bearing and burying of endless children: enforced confinement is what quiltmakers have in common with the “mad.” Their very confinement spurs a delirious creativity.

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Ferrero: Women said if they hadn’t had their quilts they would have gone crazy. They said it over and over again. I think that this obsessiveness gives quilts their incredible impact. It is why they are so powerful a statement. Radka said it, “Quiltmaking is a prisoner’s art, a nomad’s art, a convalescent’s art...”

Peters: Crazy quilts indeed! Deprivation sometimes provokes a wild freedom of the imagination. Some of the most jubilant quilts for me are those with the theme of the Tree of Life. “On either side of the river were the trees of life, which bear twelve crops of fruit in one year, one in each month and the leaves of which are the cure for the pagans.” Doubtless the pagans used them fo cure! For everyone, the symbolic tree of life stands for the lunar, the fruitful, the restorative, the harmonic.

I can well understand why those lines from the

Apocalypse inspired these joyful quilts. Ferrero: Yes, they are joyful. All of the quilts, with the exception of a few mourning pieces were that. An incredible embracing of love, of life. They are life-affirming. Peters: That brings to mind your film-in-progress, Hopi: Land and Life, about an extraordinary life-affirming culture. Ferrero: A Hopisaid something wonderful to me— in fact a number of Hopi have said it in different ways— in response to my question about why they continue to grow corn when they have nine-to-five jobs and don’t need it for survival. Again and again they express the idea: The cornare our children and growing corn imposes on us a special attitude, a certain way of caring for life. Through corn, we observe the processes of the natural world unfolding and can know and remember our particular relationship to nature and natural forces. Peters: The first time I visited Hopi I sensed that strongly and was deeply moved by it. It brought home to me how the absence of that awareness has impoverished our own culture, and how much we might learn from it. The more familiar

I become with Native

American attitudes, the more I realize the complexity, intricacy, and richness of that world view. For millennia, the highest practical and theoretical intelligence of which humans are capable elaborated these ideas fora... Ferrero: ...a totally livable and integrated world. Peters: You've spenta great deal of time there, making nearly annual trips— for how long now? Ferrero:

1 was born in Santa Fe, and I saw Indian ceremonials for the first time when I was a

child. I have vivid memories of the experience. Then I began going back in a more conscious way about twelve or thirteen years ago. Peters: And you made a film on Piki bread-making rather recently. Ferrero:

It’s a short film, about twelve minutes. I was interested in how the simplest activities

of a culture— planting and food preparation— can have a profound meaning. Piki-making is something all Hopi women know how to do. Its uses involve women in all the complex social networks of their culture. Piki is made from blue corn meal; it’s a batter applied by hand to a hot flat stone griddle, then rolled into paper-thin sheaves. It’s really a beautiful process, a beautiful and tasty food, and a wonderful matrix for looking at Hopi women’s lives, as they are affected by all the changes, and by pressures to acculturate as well. Then to focus on the role of corn in Hopi culture, I used the essential image of corn to look at the meaning and inspiration it provides in both secular and sacred spheres. Corn itself is very beautiful—its colors— red, blue, white, yellow, and mixed color refer to the five directions. Its form is reflected in all the Hopi arts: baskets, pottery, weaving, jewelry, and songs, poetry, and storytelling. And of course it is essential in all aspects of ceremonial

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life. There is nothing in the culture that has not been inspired by corn. Hopi people say that they are corn, that their bodies are made of corn. The Hopi can provide the rest of American society with a much-needed model and ideal of how to live daily life in harmony. There is no separation between the material and the spiritual; ideally they are one and the same. After practically extinguishing Native American cultures—and I believe we have not yet come to terms with the extent of that genocide— we are forced by the poverty of our own values to come to terms with the shadow of our actions. I hope my films help us move towards a new attitude of respect for the values embodied in Native American cultures. Peters: I hope so too. As to those values, Ibelieve the Hopi have evolved brilliant ways to deal with some thorny human dilemmas. For instance, greater administrative and economic power for women dilutes the intensity of the mother-child bond, while atavistic hierarchy and territorialism in men are diverted into extremely strenuous ritual and clan activities. We cannot reproduce their specific solution, but it could be a clue to an interim politic, until we achieve a human being that isn’t so strictly defined by gender. It also suggests how to fuse politics with the arts, and that’s a difficulty. Ferrero: It has never been more urgent for artists to become politicized and to do so without becoming propagandists. It’s the essential problem that I feel as a filmmaker. Peters: Given the admirable autonomy of the Hopi, did you run into restrictions in filming? Ferrero: Well, of course, it was very complex. The Hopi basically ban tourist photographs in the villages and all photography of ceremonials and for good reason. At the turn of the century, their sacred ceremonials, particularly the Snake Dance, were sensationalized by the misuse of photographic documentation. On the other hand, some turn-of-the-century records have been of interest and value to the Hopi—so it remains a complex issue.

Hopi home. Photo by Adam Clark Vroman. Courtesy, Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History

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The ban on photographing ceremonials has had, on the whole, a good effect on Anglos’ attitude and demeanor. It has fostered a healthy respect for religious observances that are not fodder for someone’s vacation snapshots. The ceremonial experience lives in the memory, and to the extent it is remembered, it is kept alive. Photographs at this time put one in a wrong relationship to the event. I agree with that and I respect that. However, individual Hopi may agree to be photographed or filmed and that is how I am working at Hopi— with individuals who know me, know my work and intentions, and who want to

speak with me of their lives and work. Peters: 1 would assume a greater difficulty lies in the pressures brought about now by the rapacious maneuvers of the energy consortiums and the shameless politics that sustain them. Ina way, Four Corners, and the Indian Southwest as a whole, has become

kind of

microcosm of what’s most wrong in this country. Exacerbating tensions between people, racism, hypocrisy, lies, greed, exploitation for short-range profit. Not to speak of the suicidal priority on nuclear weapons and nuclear development in general. And it’s all happening in one of the great mythic centers of America. Ferrero: It is sucha part of Hopi prophecy that they are the guardians; and it is no small irony that they are sitting on the uranium deposits needed for nuclear expansion. It is their destiny to protect and guard life on earth— not just for themselves, but for all. Peters: There lies our true moral leadership. Let the Hopi make those decisions for the nation! Instead of moving heaven and earth to compensate for criminal acts against Native Ameri cans in the past, government policy not only ignores Indian rights to self-determination but spurs ever more conflict. Ferrero: Those conflicts are truly tragic; and it is our responsibility to protect the sovereignty of those peoples. In making a film, one can become very fractured and find oneself trying to document the day-to-day controversies instead of the deeper underlying truths. There are pressing qustions and important ones; one begins to take sides here or there, supporting one argument or another. It is necessary to know something of the history and progression of events; and yet one cannot let it disrupt or prevent reaching the larger, underlying story. I don’t believe in objectivity as a documentary filmmaker. I believe only in showing the deepest truths. ’ve been inspired by Maya Deren, who said of myth, “Facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter.” Western minds need to rediscover the vitality and truth of mythic thinking— we seem to have lost it as a culture. Peters: Never has that elusive understanding been more urgent, if we are to find authentic new myths we can live by. It is natural, and appropriate too, for Americans to look to Europe, Asia, or Africa for their roots, and for metaphysical clarity. Like many people, I traveled to other continents— the great sources of Greece and Egypt. But in recent years, I’ve found Northwest and California Indian cosmologies that surpass Homer and the Bible in sheer poetic brilliance. It puts into relief a persistent prejudice. Classical or JudaeoChristian concepts are thought to have intrinsic value, whereas those of Indians are assumed to be outside our subjectivity and relegated to the positivist social sciences. (A pieta is “sculpture”; a totem pole is an “artifact.”) Ferrero: Fortunately that’s changing now to some extent. Peters: Yes, thanks in part to artists like you who open doors between cultures. Your films give visual evidence of how those concepts are actually practiced. We can begin to see how every feature of the American landscape is alive with meaning. Raven, Spider Woman, \

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Society Historical California ourtesy,

a

cae BA dt te te

by George Wharton James.

Coyote— these are just a few of the beings that shed their radiance over the places where we live and most of us were born. Last year when Lamantia was invited to read at European poetry festivals, he sent back the free air tickets. We decided we’d much rather go to Fort Bragg, California, to find the sites of the Pomo Obsidian Man’s birthplace and his agon with the Thunder brothers. I do think it’s deplorable to capitalize on Indians ways we have no claim to— like the counterfeit “shaman” poets— but we can honor the heritage of the land we share, and try to move others to support the /iving cultures that are its heirs. This is why your work as a visual anthropologist is so valuable. In recognizing the fiction of objectivity, you take anthropology in a salutary direction. Ferrero: | want to make films about the ideal of a culture. No one in any culture completely measures up to that all the time, but it is the inspiration and the guiding force. The first step in making such a film is finding people within the culture who have the perspective and the language to unravel its meaning. Not surprisingly, it is the artists who speak about it with great thoroughness, eloquence, and beauty. There’s not that separation between art and life for them. Peters: Some Hopiachievements might be germinal for our future too. How to live the ideal of peace, how to channel physical and psychic energy into arts of surpassing beauty, how to fuse poetry with everyday life. Ferrero: Well, you hit it on the head— my problem is how to make a film about something which is essentially invisible! Well, if John Cage could make music out of silence, it may not be an unsolvable problem! Peters:

At least the Hopi have succeeded, to a remarkable extent, in making the invisible visi-

ble. The unconscious is consciously illuminated by means of the Kachinas and ceremonial life; the internal is externalized, as you point out, in the way corn is grown and used. They have concretized their dream.

TZ

And that has been part of your own quest too. I recall that you were doing some fascinating experiments in the early 1970s with ceremonies, dreams, rituals, and chance encounters in the streets of San Francisco; along withsome scenarios using the wild coastal landscape. Your approach was in terms of contemporary urban experience. Ferrero: At the time, I enjoyed my performance work. Most of it was site specific, but a longing, really, for a landscape of the imagination. To create new values by focusing in a different way on objects and events in one’s immediate environment, and by conflating artistic expression with everyday life— this is still an exciting idea for me. Peters: Do you envision performance erasing the distinctions between artist and audience and shifting ground under the conventional pigeonholes for the arts? Ferrero: New syntheses are immensely exciting. I teach in the Center for Experimental and Interdisciplinary Art at San Francisco State University, and my experience there has led me to realize what a specialized and really limited audience performance addresses. While I personally still enjoy and value much performance work, I frankly find film a more appealing ground. I want my own films to reach a broader public audience. Peters: Hope in individual vision is the positive side of the “new decadence.” Nonetheless I see a lot in performance that’s irritatingly vacuous. Our hunger for wholeness is fed by dangerous totalizing social mechanisms that continue to fail. The response to that has been a lastditch focus on the solitary self: I feel, I speak, I perform. Ferrero: At its worst it’s totally autistic! Now my feeling about the work of visionaries, children, psychotics, and many traditional artists is that this work is essential to life. It would go on in spite of everything. It doesn’t even need an audience at all. In that sense you feel it is connected toa source of renewal. You touch upon it and it isa delight, a discovery, anda joy. But it does not need you to complete it. It is there for its own reason. I find these arts appealing too because they renew without totally destroying the past. It’s been difficult to break with the tyranny of the new. We need to free ourselves from the lure of creating a new “ism” every generation. Peters: Not even a generation. We lose the chance to deepen discoveries that lead to a higher reality, that exalt the human spirit. Ferrero: And then there is always the crucial question: how does one connect one’s inner discoveries to the larger social reality? Peters: Your films are an example of how viable political interventions by artists might be made. I see that Quilts in Women’s Lives is available from New Day Films, a cooperative that distributes Union Maids, Babes and Banners, and other films that reveal the hidden history and strength of political and cultural currents outside the mainstream. Ferrero:

Itisclear that as artists, we must know our history to make meaning and change in our

own culture. We are inspired by the insights and dreams of children, visionaries, folk and traditional artists and their many paths. They are the anarchists of the soul. They can provide exemplary models, but they cannot be our solution. There are no short cuts. However, if we keep their inspiration in mind, we can devise strategies for realizing change ona material level. Peters: The arts, not as commodities, but as living means of self-revelation and social transformation— inseparable from the mystery and magic of life. Ferrero: We wish and long for that.

MYTH

AND POETRY

VISIONS, CLOWNS, AND KACHINAS Jamake Highwater Contemporary dances of American Indians are the most visible aspects of an enduring tradition. Of a more complex and less visible nature is the Kachina world of the Southwest, a pantheon of spirits including more than two hundred and fifty individual iconographic forms that are best known to non-Indians in the form of Kachina dolls, small painted and decorated figures carved from wood. Many of the Kachinas represent the powers of entirely abstract ideas that are not easily conveyed to those not immediately involved in Pueblo culture. Others relate to the forces of plants, animals, birds, and beings from Pueblo history. The most organized Kachina mystique is found among the Hopiand Zuni, but individual forms, also called Kachinas, are the focus of the ceremonies of all the pueblos of New Mexico; for example, Ceremony of the Rain Powers of San Juan Pueblo. Kachina dolls are presented to children by the Kachina spirits so they may be displayed in homes to help the children learn to identify the various divinities. The dolls are learning tools and are not sacred objects. But the members of tribal societies who “impersonate” the Kachinas in ceremonial events are sacred. Once they don their costumes, paraphernalia, and masks, they become reflections of the powers of Kachinas and may not be touched or involved in conversation or any other human exchange. There are both male and female Kachinas; however, the masked impersonators in ceremonies are always male, impersonating both male and female divinities. The sacredness of Kachinas does not obstruct their potential for the grotesque, the outrageous, and the highly humorous. All such qualities are present in the great sacred dramas of Indians. The ceremonies are profoundly lucid in their seriousness and also in their ridiculousness—

elements that rarely share the same values in other cultures as they do among Indians. Representation is a complex relationship between reality and the symbols used to depict it. The mili, representing the breath-of-life given by Awonawilona, the supreme being of the Zuni, is envisioned as a perfect ear of corn, filled with seeds of sacred plants, wrapped in buckskin, set in a base of basketry, and covered with feathers from various birds. This mili is a fetish. It holds more significance than any of the physical objects that compose it. The fetish contains a living force which, if treated properly and with respect and if ceremonially fed, will give help to its owners. Such a fetish may be owned by an individual, clan, secret society, or by an entire tribe. The Corn Mother of the Hako Ceremony of the Pawnee is an example of a fetish that 1s owned by the tribe. The visionary images painted on a Blackfeet shield, however, are personal guardians. Because such fetishes are seen as living forces, they must be cared for and ceremonlally fed, usually with cornmeal in the Southwest and with tobacco smoke on the Plains. When not in use, fetishes are kept in special containers and in special dwellings. They must be protected. Such symbols and metaphoric images— which fill the silences between conventional meanings and supplement the overt significance that words can convey—are intriguing aspects of ceremony and are the core of Indian religious life. Nothing can adequately explain the meaning of a poetic metaphor. And nothing can make an “intelligible” experience out of an illogical but significant symbol, fetish, or ceremonial act. That is the reason for the inclusion in this book of actual ritual texts. They tell us nothing—but they suggest everything. Ignoring the world of objects that has been so excessively described to us in

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Western literature, the creative power of Indian rituals is their capacity to evoke, to produce images, to compound mystery with more mystery, and to illuminate the unknown without reducing it to the commonplace. Among Indians there is a predominant quest or a personal vision which, once attained, becomes a vehicle and an embodiment of one’s personal power. Indians are extremely observant, a result of childhood instruction among a people whose survival depended upon the most accurate and sensitive observations of nature and its subtle changes. But Indians also recognize the value of “the night,” when one learn to see with more than the eyes.

must

Whereas white men are essentially trained to think scientifically, Indians are trained to think poetically. For instance, most white people deplore ambiguity and strive to clarify everything. Indians, however, strive for a faculty to create ambiguity in the form of metaphors and symbols. Indians thrive in the shadows. They can see the world out of the corner of theireye. There is so much in the world that slips past us when all we see is what is before us and is well defined. There are things that Indians learn not to look upon directly, because they either disappear or change when seen squarely and clearly. It is deplorable in Western culture to concede to the possibility that some things are unexplainable; surely that is one of the reasons art has had sucha low position in the West since the decline of its association with worship. Though the sacred clown and Kachina of the Southwest are not at once recognizable as universal figures in American Indian ceremonial life, they can be found in the rites of every tribe in various guises. Every initiated child of the Southwest villages knows that Kachinas are men of the pueblo dressed in kilts, paints, feathers, and masks but this does not detract from the fact that they nonetheless possess great and _ exceptional power. The credibility of Kachinas is not based on the belief in their actual physical reality any more than the power of a painting requires us to believe that it is something other than paint and

canvas. The men who impersonate Kachinas are somewhat like art—merely the physical material in which something nonphysical is implemented. Kachinas are like figures in our dreams— illogical, “unreal” as far as waking reality is concerned, but absolutely convincing and curiously significant. It is heretical and embarrassing for most white people to conceive of a “god” (though Kachinas are not “gods,” but forces) which does not speak in the studied manner of the King James version of the Bible. But it is entirely appropriate in the scheme of Indian religious eloquence for a Kachina to manifest itself in either the dignified gestures and sounds of Hastsheyalti (Talking Power) or the cavorting and ranting of aclown. Both divinities—serious and comic—are mythic powers having little relationship to commonplace reality, and both are magical in their impact and relationship to their initiates. There is paradox and duality in these irreconcilably “opposite” divinities only if one sees them as irreconcilable and opposite. The Indian does not do so, and this aspect of his holistic attitude is both unique to him as far as I can telland almost entirely beyond the comprehension of outsiders, including ethnologists who have spent several decades trying to resolve the rationale of the sacredness and the “obscenity” of the clowns which are the central figures in many tribal ceremonies. “How can you laugh when the clowns drink stall urine, and how can you admire them when they make obscene gestures at women?” the ethnologist asks repeatedly. “Yes.” The old Indian smiles. “But you didn’t answer my question... ” “Yes, | did,” the Indian assures him and walks

away. The same old man may provide a less mocking response to another Indian. “You must learn to

look at the world twice,” he murmurs as I sit on the floor in his immaculately swept adobe room. “First you must bring your eyes together in front so you can see each droplet of rain on the grass, so you can see the smoke rising from an ant hill in the sunshine. Nothing should escape your

75

notice. But you must learn to look again, with your eyes at the very edge of what is visible. Now you must see dimly if you wish to see things that are dim—visions, mist, and cloud people... animals which hurry past you in the dark. You must learn to look at the world twice if you wish to see all that there is to see.” The ability to envision a second world is a major source of an Indian knowledge so deeply felt, so primal that it is neither word nor outery, neither sign nor symbol—but the ineffable thing itself; that which precedes speech and thought, that which is the raw experience itself without evaluation and moralities. It is the ineffable structured into an event—that which we call Ritual. And what, after all, is this mysterious event that has eluded the Western world? It isan appearance—an apparition, if you like—that springs from what we do but not from what we are. It is something else. In watchinga ritual, you do not see what is physically before you. What you see is an interaction of forces by which something else arises. Those who see only what is before them are blind. Ritual requires us to really see. What we are able to see if we use our eyes without censorship and prejudgments is a virtual image. It is real, for when we are confronted by it, it really does exist but it is not actually there. The reflection ina mirror is sucha virtual image; so is a rainbow. It seems to stand on earth or in the clouds, but it really “stands” nowhere. It is only visible, but it is not tangible. It is the unspeakable, the ineffable made visible, made audible, made experiential.

“The American Indian’s sacred clown has for centuries epitomized the vitality of perversity, humor, sexuality, aggressiveness, and absurdity—an act possible only for those beyond duality and dichotomies of flesh and spirit, sacred and profane, individual and tribal.”

© Jamake Highwater From Ritual of the Wind: North American Indian Ceremonies, Music, and Dances.

(New York: Viking Press, 1977)

Hopi, Mudhead. Natural History

Courtesy, Los Angeles County Museum of

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DOORS TO THE BARBARIANS JAMAKE

HIGHWATER « Interviewed by J. Karl Bogartte

What do you see as the most hopeful signs in America at the present time? The worst signs?

This isn’t a good time to try to address yourself to American optimism, and I’m speaking now during the beginning of the Reagan administration and the unquestionable rise of the so-called Moral Majority. It doesn’t seem to me to bea time of optimism for those of us who have a poetic, rather than a highly rationalistic mentality. I must admit that I’m not as impressed by the moving spirit behind the 1980s as I was in the 1960s when I was in the San Francisco Bay Area. Then | thought something significant was finally beginning to happen to American students. I don’t think it’s news to anyone that we’ve taken one gigantic step backward in terms of the goals and world view of young people. And that concerns mea great deal. And yet, I am impressed, if not entirely pleased, by the recent booms in the fields of contemporary dance, and also, of course, in painting and sculpture. I have viewed these as a critic and commentator for a long time, although now I am less impressed by their potential than I was when I first became aware of this new tendency because now these have been turned into a kind of industry, as seems to be the case with everything that attains prominence. There is something in the way we have created “Dance” and “Painterly” and “Superstars” that is distressing. We’ve plasticized and commercialized the entire movement ofthe 1960s so quickly that its founders were gone before you could blink your eye, and we found ourselves surrounded by followers who didn’t know what the intent of the founders was—and before long, a whole industry was developed to satisfy these followers’ various needs. There is something sad about that, and I see it happening now in dance, the theatre, in painting, in sculpture. Just watching what’s happening in the New York Soho area has been a rather bracing experience. I guess one of the good things about living in the 1970s and 1980s has been the general demolition of Western society. For all the pain in this civilization’s lack of acommon system ofbeliefs, we have at last discovered a form of pluralism—a term that admittedly has become hackneyed, but which nonetheless remains significant. This excites me a great deal, because it opens the doors to the Barbarians, as they used to call them, and the “primitives,” and other so-called outsiders; and it opens some windows and doors through which there can be an exchange bétween the white male dominant members of our society and the values of others.

It’s exciting to be present during the final deconstruction of Western certitude, not only because of the fact that it’s nice to see an ugly giant fall, but also to see the inevitable reconstruction that takes place out of the ashes of a dying world. We are witnessing not the death ofa civilization, but a kind of new birth of a great many possible new societies and ideologies which are gradually making themselves known. It’s a lot like the period before Christianity had established itself, when all kinds of Eastern and Middle Eastern and European pagan and mystery cults were vying for attention. Although our day lacks centralization, lacks thrust, lacks a system of beliefs—it is nonetheless an exciting time because it is, in the most devastating sense, a truly creative time.

@

What I've been trying to say here is said, not only more formally but more in depth, in The Primal Mind: Vision and Reality in Indian America, a book of mine which has just been published. It has as its major premise the conception that we are witnessing in the 20th century a fusion of primal and western mentalities, which is potentially as great a flowering as the fusion of Oriental and Greek ideas that created the West at the outset of the Christian era. Do you see any relation between tribal ceremonies, tribal mythos, and surrealism? The word surrealism has no significance to tribal people, insofar as tribal people are already supernaturalists. Time and space are extra-ordinary for them, and so they have no need for terms like surrealism, realism, or naturalism—or any other terms the West uses in an effort to make some sense out of its peculiar and highly unworkable and self-destructive notion of reality as singular, eternal and fixed, as observable-provable fact. In my book Anpoa, | make apparent very quickly that the Native American cosmos is not a universe, but a multiverse, and that everything is possible in it, and therefore everything is acceptable.

To the Native American, everything that is thought of, or dreamed about, or intuited, imagined—everything that physically happens in sleep, or in so-called waking reality, is all part ofa continuum.

1 think that in the Western effort to escape its own framework—categorical and linear— concepts like surrealism are important. Artists are rather like sacred clowns, the contraries of Western society. It is only in artists and mystics that the West allows any deviation from its norm of realism. And no sooner did the West allow their existence, than it insisted on institutionalizing them. Mysticism gave rise to organized religion, and therefore became self-defeating; art became part ofthe academy, and ceased to be art. By the time dadaists and surrealists came on the scene, they were

obviously calling for a return to a non-institutionalized art which was pluralistic in its grasp of the real, and which declined to accept that tenuous and suicidal dualism of Plato, and especially Aristotle, in which human experience and the cosmos at large is divided arbitrarily into Logos and Eros. How important is poetry? What hope do you put in poetry for social change?

If we mean by poetry, a poetic sensibility, a sensibility that strives to make visible the invisible; that strives to make visible the ineffable, the unfathomable, and which fills the gaps between words and thoughts, then poetry is more important than just about anything I can think of—especially in this current moment of history. We are so tormented by the linear framework in which we exist in the dominant Western culture that we have to evolve terms like “poetic license” in order to excuse any kind ofcreative, imaginative thinking which breaches an outworn, rigid and medieval notion of reality. Not even contemporary physics upholds the notion of reality which we are expected to embrace in our everyday political, moral and ethical lives. Poetry, the capacity to create metaphor—in language or in visual imagery, the capacity to create alternatives to an outworn realism—these are the only bridges by which we can move through the enormous space which separates us. This is because the greatest distance between people is not space, but culture, and it’s only through poetry, in its most 20th century manifestations, that we have the slightest chance of making ourselves known to each other. In this way poetry is social change.

Philip Lamantia WILLOW

WAND

Juniper tree slashed by obsidian In my hand cupping sun assassins lines of mercury and unknown stars pure poetry of Pomo night shades of Mount Konocti giants the almost invisible mites of chiromancy among the tanoak vibes stream of lapping water-transportations in an oak grove the secret name immortal through the wind of a paranoid dream O supreme idol from a druid long ago to these puritan shores of the face to be sylvan presences seep with mist obsidian-flanged to Venus and deep within the boat on the five-fingered lake flight of fanged lights of gore beneath fingernail creations Coyote intersects beyond the ticky-tack gloss of sirens (computer-spent at contemporary pores) sweet williams on the cuspidors terrace to the graveyard of valleys of diehard hummingbirds ravens in their cups of sky descending horse is humankind more than the mite’s mandible of chance? Are you higher than the stony insects at the windows of thunder?

Take down veil of dim vision and find through acres of iridescent goblins perchance the meadowlark’s mimicry of all the tongues of space and there’s /ittle for Boulder Brother on a limb of tanoak with the grebe’s desire for mental grandeur beneath: a coot’s bill foraging the invisibles through the ancient water

79 MEADOWLARK

WEST

Choppers in the night husk the brilliants of thought Beyond the cities of patina grow caves of thought Coyote Hummingbird Owl are rivers of thought The lumens the pumpkins dance: pits of correspondence over the land Birds the dream tongues warble Iroquois Mojavé Ohlone Market Street of “The Mad Doctor” via the occult centers A gang of fox spirits at the crossroads Bandoleros set between the obliteration of grizzly bears painted by an Arcimboldist and the monstrance of bleeding chains Montezuma’s feathery headdress torn up in the boondocks of the Rosy Cross Coyote girls in myth-time At the central dream of edenic treasures The irrevocable annihilation of christian civilization is taking shape with carnivorous flowers of volcanic thought

SENTIMENT

FOR THE CORDIALS

OF SCORPIONS

The heart never grows old it grows stilettos, thorns, rays, it is the cup of knowledge it grows to the gnosis of becoming the gate of streamlets and jungles of power it contracts, growls, spits, scratches—eagle talons are its outcroppings The Divine de Sade is the heart’s dilation and the heart dies, never to grow old the heart lives and makes love to the brain

Yi

J;

Wp,

J,

i

Alice

Photo by Farley Tim

Farley. Land's End.

San

Francisco

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ALICE FARLEY: DANCING AT LAND’S END Philip Lamantia “And it is a dream at sea such as was never dreamt, and it is the Sea in us that will dream it: The Sea, woven in us, to the last weaving of its tangled night, the Sea, in us, weaving its great

hours of light and its great trails of darkness—” St.-John

Perse, Seamarks

I want a revolution in which the dream is realized in space. The revelation of this possibility took material shape in those exalting moments of poetic history when I watched Alice Farley draw forth, in broad daylight, those strands of becoming whose invisible sources lie within us, to be revealed on the oneiric screen of our lives. Lautreamont’s “Old ocean...” was evoked in a vibrant transmutation of space, bestowed by Alice in her ‘commingling’ with the fragile spirits of poetry at the extremes of convulsive desire through, in her own words, “...the subversion of the physical laws of gravity, momentum, inertia, by imagination and desire...” On the precipitous rocks of cliffs overlooking mineral excresences from who knows what depths of some primordial dialectics of sea and earth, mist and light, and in which inner rages were confounded with the turmoil of the breakers below—not far from Frisco’s ‘golden gates—a new being was born whose timelessness transcends all the miseries of the world. We have seen the ‘Woman in Tree’ and the ‘wheel of the lovers’ in the androgynies Farley has materialized in paths of flight and bathed in purifications of our senses made possible by the sublimity of The-Marvelous-In-Motion. At those origins in the mysterious waters in which we ourselves are conveyed, the living myth of the ultimate west has been danced in photonic revelation, along those threads uniting the double strands of sleep and waking, reality and dream, and within the core of poetry transmuting the physical world. Here in the oneiric matrix of ‘the waters of the west,’ where birth and death are one, and from the other side of the looking-glass, dance has been irrevocably raised forever to the power of poetry.

Alice Farley is one of today’s most innovative and brilliant young dancers and choreographers. Her originality lies in masterful kinesthetic fusions of the dancer’s grace and skill with a world-range of musics, costumes, and masks, through which she creates a domain of moving images like those in surrealist painting and poetry. Landscapes—from New York City streets during anti-nuclear demonstrations to Paolo Soleri’s model desert city to San Francisco’s ocean shore—can never be seen in the same way again, once touched by the enchantment of Alice Farley’s

dance. Among her major performances are: Fortunate

Light, San Francisco, 1974; The Brides of the Prism, San Francisco, 1975; Surrealist Dance, Chicago World Surrealist Exhibition, 1976; (In)Visible Woman, New York City, 1977; Land’s End, San Francisco, 1978; and The Atomic Thief in the Circus of Crime, New York City, 1981. Alice Farley is affiliated with the Theater for the New City and is a member artist of Dance Theater Workshop, 219 West 19th Street, New York City 10011.

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Voodoo, Trance, Poetry and Dance Wilson Harris Haitian vodun or voodoo is a highly condensed feature of inspiration and hallucination within which “space” itself becomes the sole expression and recollection of the dance—as if “space” is the character of the dance—since the celebrants themselves are soon turned into ‘“objects”—into an architecture of movement like “deathless” flesh, wood or stone. And such deathless flesh, wood or stone (symbolic

of the dance of creation) subsists— in the very protean reality of space—on its own losses (symbolic decapitation of wood, symbolic truncation of stone) so that the very void of sensation in which the dancer begins to move, like an authentic specter or structure of fiction, makes him or her insensible to all conventional props of habit and responsive only to a grain of frailty or light support. Remember at the outset the dancer regards himself or herself as one in full command of two legs, a pair of arms, etc., until, possessed by the muse of contraction, he or she dances into a posture wherein one leg is drawn up into the womb of space. He stands like a rising pole upheld by earth and sky or like a tree which walks in its own shadow or like a one-legged bird which joins itself to its sleeping reflection in a pool. All conventional memory is erased and yet in this trance of overlapping spheres of reflection a primordial or deeper function of memory begins to exercise itself within the bloodstream of space. Haitian vodun is one of the surviving primitive dances of ancient sacrifice, which, in courting a subconscious community, sees its own performance in literal terms—that is, with and through the eyes of “space”: with and through the sculpture of sleeping things which the dancer himself actually expresses and becomes. For in fact the dancer moves in a trance and the interior mode of the drama is exteriorized into a medium inseparable from his trance and invocation. He is a dramatic agent of subconsciousness. The life from within and the life from without now truly overlap. That is the intention of the dance, the riddle of the dancer. The importance which resides in all this, I suggest, is very remarkable. For if the trance were a purely subjective thing—without action or move-

ment—some would label it fantasy. But since in fact it exteriorizes itself, it becomes an intense drama of images in space, which may assume elastic limbs and proportions or shrink into a dense current of shrunken reflection on the floor. For what emerges are the relics of a primordial fiction where the images of space are seen as in an abstract painting. That such a drama has indeed a close bearing on the language of fiction, on the language of art, seems to me incontestable. The community the writer shares with the primordial dancer is, as it were, the complementary halves of a broken stage. For the territory upon which the poet visualizes a drama of consciousness is a slow revelation or unraveling of obscurity—revelation or illumination within oneself; whereas the territory of the dancer remains actually obscure to him within his trance whatever revelation or illumination his limbs may articulate in their involuntary theme. The “vision” of the poet (when one comprehends it from the opposite pole of “dance”) possesses a “spatial” logic or “convertible” property of imagination. Herein lies the essential humility of a certain kind of selfconsciousness within which occurs the partial erasure, if nothing more, of the habitual boundaries of prejudice. From Tradition, the Writer and Society: Critical Essays. (London/ Port of Spain: New Beacon Publs., 1967)

Veve of Brise

»

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Nelly Kaplan

Nelly Kaplan You have been quoted as saying that there is no difference between you explain?

women filmmakers and men. Can

If Icut off the credits from my films, people wouldn't be able to tell if they were made bya woman or by a man. Films are made by filmmakers, period. That’s all there is to it. If the woman has a cinematographic eye, a film made by a woman is no different than a film made by a man. And what about the content?

Women have been oppressed for 40,000 years; therefore, from an atavistic or cerebral point of view we see some of the problems a different way. I think all creation is androgynous. I insist that technically and formally there is no difference between men and women’s films. When people tell me they could tell my films were made by a woman (without the credit), I say it’s only because my films are not misogynous. But men can make non-misogynist films, once in a million, or twice, when they touch the androgynic state of grace required. Of course, my films are a little misandronous. We live under patriarchal oppression. We have to combat the “enemy” until he understands that it is not in his interest to put us down.

84 There is always a lot of humor in your films. Do you think humor has ceased to be an exclusively male domain? Humor is an essential element of revolt. When the women’s movements are dull and take themselves too seriously they offer mena pretext for criticizing them. The only thing that interests me is not to take myself seriously. Life may be tragic, but never serious... Do you think the woman’s position in society has changed over the last few years?

The problems are still the same, that is: to fight against prejudice, stupidity and misogyny. As Einstein said, “A prejudice is harder to split than an atom.” The day women realize they can go out to buy a pack of cigarettes and never come back, things will have changed. And the women

who resist this change?

Of course there are always “collaborators.” I cannot oblige women to change if they don’t want to. We were born females, we must earn the status of women. At the risk of being shot at, I’d say that when a woman is narrow-minded she is often more so than a man. The women who resist change—for differing reasons of security, atavism, and servility—are ten times harder to convince than a man. In the past, when women filmmakers were rare, you used to call yourself an alibi for the males of the film world. Nowadays there are more women filmmakers. What do you think of this? In the world, there are as many men as women, but there are many more men filmmakers than women. In France, we are how many? 20 or 30 at the most. It’s a drop in the ocean. But I don’t think it’s all the men’s fault. Women always havea guilt complex. They should make up their minds and get on with it. Will your next script cover the same ground as “Fiancee”?

It is not at all the same subject, but it no doubt deals with my principal obsessions: the hatred of all forms of prejudice, the love of humor, and the love of love. Do you like to shock people? Baudelaire spoke of“the aristocratic pleasure of displeasing.” Perhaps I am like that. Perhaps I do have a tendency to provoke. I hate everything which is dormant so when I see sleepiness around me I feel like giving it a prod, provoking a change. This attitude has often brought me trouble. People either love me or hate me, but if I tell you the truth and nothing but the truth, that doesn’t exactly displease me.

And what about the sex in your films? Is that done deliberately to shock? No, I write my films the way I feel them. If people are shocked that is their affair. It is true that some people have gone to see my films for the wrong reasons, but that doesn’t matter. In that case, the sex becomes a sort of Trojan horse which breaks through opposition. As long as people are exposed to what I have to say I don’t care why they came in. It is the intention which counts. All images are incantations: you call up a spirit and that is the spirit which appears. You give your heroines flamboyant appetites: for food and wine, for the sun ana the sea, for love and pleasure. Are these your appetites?

Yes. I love good wines; I like strange dishes; I adore the sun and the sea. I have many appetites. That’s all right.

85

Don't you think that in general women’s education tends to curb these appetites? Of course! For example, I am sure that if we did not have a sense of sin we would not put on weight. We get fat from all those repressed desires. When Iam unhappy, I get fatter. But as soonas I begin to notice it, I say to myself, “you are depriving yourself of something and that is harming you.” As soon as | get my serenity back, I can eat and drink without putting on an inch.

You have said in the past that you refuse to have children, is that right?

Yes. Maternity doesn’t interest me in the world as it is today. And as maternity doesn’t interest me, I don’t see why | should have children just because somewhere a lot of silly things are written about a woman’s “biological destiny”! But isn't it because you prefer to keep yourself for your professional activities? No. I think one can do both, but it just doesn’t interest me. On the other hand, one can also examine the problem from the ecological point of view. There are many women who want to have children. Our planet is overcrowded already, so if a woman doesn’t feel like it, it is infinitely preferable that she abstain. A lynx needs 400 kilometers of territory, otherwise it dies. People need space and they haven’t got enough. Have you seen the expressions of people in the street? Have you seen how uptight they are? They really frighten me, because when things are like that, anything can happen, they are in such a state of despair. They feel that life is a dead-end. I feel less despair because I am lucid. I know that life has positive aspects and that “on the other side” there is neither paradise nor hell, and that it is now that one must live. My motto is: “We are not two-legged for nothing. If we walk on two legs instead of four, it is so that we are closer to the stars. But we must also be worthy ofthat.”

200

Penelope Rosemont

RISING ASLEEP in celebration of Toyen

The wind today is full of fish The branches of the trees are full of mirrors

Whirlpool woven of wilderness your knife is an octopus your lips are a dance your two hands are revolving doors you are the North Pole

Jayne Cortez FOR THE BRAVE YOUNG

STUDENTS

IN SOWETO

Soweto when i hear your name I think about you like the fifth ward in Houston Texas one roof of crushed oil drums on the other two black hunters in buckets of blood walking into the fire of Sharpeville into the sweat and stink of gold mines into your childrens eyes suffering from mainutrition while pellets of uranium are loaded onto boats headed for France for Israel for Japan away from the river so full of skulls and Robben Island so swollen with warriors and the townships that used to overflow with such apathy and dreams and i think about the old mau mau grieving in beer halls and the corrupt black leaders singing into police whistles and i think about the assembly line of dead “Hottentots” and the jugular veins of Allende and once again how the coffin is divided into dry ink how the factory moves like a white cane like a volley of bullets in the head of Lumumba and death is a death-life held together by shacks by widows who cry with their nipples pulled out by men who shake with electrodes on the tongue and Soweto when i hear your name and look at you on the reservation a Xhosa in the humid wrinkles of Shreveport Louisiana walking down fannin street into the bottom hole in the wall of endurance i smell the odor of our lives together made of tar paper the memories opening like stomachs in saw mills the faces growing old in cigarette burns and i think about the sacrifices made in Capetown the sisters being mauled by police dogs while the minister of justice rides the tall ship of torture

87

down the hudson river in New York while vigilantes under zulu mask strike through the heartland like robots in military boots with hatchets made of apartheid lips and Soweto when 1 look at this ugliness and see once again how we’re divided and forced into fighting each other over a funky job in the sewers of Johannesburg divided into labor camps fighting over damaged meat and stale bread in Harlem divided into factions fighting to keep from fighting the ferocious men who are shooting into the heads of our small children When i look at this ugliness and think about the Native Americans pushed into the famine of tribal reserves think about the concentration camps full of sad Palestinians and the slave quarters still existing in Miami the diamond factories still operating in Amsterdam in Belgium the gold market still functioning on wall street and the scar tissues around our necks swelling with tumors of dead leaves our bodies exploding like whiskey bottles as the land shrinks into the bones of ancestor “Bushmen” and 1 tell you Soweto when i see you stand up in the middle of all this stand up to the exotic white racists in their armoured churches stand up to these landstealers, infant killers, rapists and rats to see you stand among the pangas the stones the war clubs the armadillos dying along this roadside to see you stand with the ocean the desert the birthright of red cliffs to see you stand with your brave young warriors courageous and strong hearted looking so confident in battle marks coated in grief and gunmetal tears to see you stand up to this epidemic of expansion and flame passbooks into ashes fling stones into the mouths of computers to see you stand on the national bank of america like monumental sculpture made of stained bullets to see you stand empty handed your shoulders open to the world

88

to see you stand in the armed struggle next to Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe Soweto i tell you Soweto when 1 see you standing up like this 1 think about all the forces in the world confronted by the terrifying rhythms of young students by their sacrifices and the revelation that it won’t be long now before everything in this world changes

SK WSS ee”

Melvin

BLOOD

SUCKERS

In Miami the blood suckers came sucking in full speed twisting and sucking into a urethra of decapitated shrimp heads tongue slashing and sucking into a matrix of turtle shells rising up and sucking through a perforated sac of southern crosses drawing blood and resucking the dried mutilated scalps of a Seminole nation moaning and groaning and sucking on mucus from nipples of tropical storm troopers grunting and chewing and pissing on the artificial hides

Edwards

89

of stuffed alligators Corrupted suckers dropping down and sucking all the way through Brownsville to Coconut Grove Blood Suckers sucking on the joints of steel horses and trembling sucking gopher meat from the plastic womb of St. Mary on the dixie highway and hallucinating sucking on the moon over Miami muck fire in the everglades sucked Florida folks sunbathing on the swanee river sucked telephoto lens sucked deposits of uranium sucked veins of manganese sucked dry lizards jelly sucked chrome nickel mercury sucked tax payers money sucked

A sucking extravaganza in the brown coral coop of peruvian breasts in the spanish moss wings of moorish armpits tobacco ensemble fantasia Blood suckers sucking slow motions sucks on the ends of throbbing hoodoo spikes sucking on the cracked heels of ancient bolito winners sucking through the rotten banana farts of a jesuit priest sucking through the contracting pupils of vicious watch dogs then fabricating sucks with the Dupont suckers at the test site Blood Suckers sucking on high powered rifle butts and splattered glass sucking on a column of smoking mickey mouse dolls sucking on a sea sick refugee in the gulf stream sucking on the panama canal treaty sucking on sixty bars of gold sucking on a thousand tons of rubble and disfigurations sucking at the Mr. Universe pageant sucking with the firestone tire company executive suckers sucking with a security force of forced suckers sucking with a conglomerate of born again christian suckers sucking with the general dynamic suckers of blood suckers Blood Suckers sucking and sweating and hooting and balling themselves into knots on the red tide slime of Miami beach A casino full of suckers turning tricks of justice and vomiting into a palmetto of fluoridated snake ash

90

Addicted suckers fucking and pecking and choking themselves to death in the weasel stink of little Pretoria Blood Suckers sucking with an asshole full of radio active rust and exploding way down in the dumps of Love Canal expanding themselves and vigorously sucking on a medley of birth defects stealing land and sucking into a grand jury of broken cow teeth yelping and belching and collapsing in the dark blue quick sand of Liberty City screaming and squabbling and wallowing and suck suck suck suck suck sucking all the way down in buzzard shit

Zulu Jumblies, representing zombies at the West Indian Day Parade on Easter Parkway in Brooklyn,

New York

Oi

THE WEST INDIES » MICROCOSM C. L. R. JAMES e Interviewed by Paul Buhle and Jim Murray

When Bob Marley died, there was a worldwide reaction. A tremendous outpouring of sentiment. What are your reactions? For the first time, a West Indian made an international contribution which was not based onan intellectual understanding. For the first time this had come from below, and I want to make it clear that nobody could understand the Rastas unless they understood mass life. That was an astonishing business not only for the world but for West Indians themselves. The Rastas were saying things that, although sometimes absurd, had value in that they were opposed to the European attitudes, European power that had dominated West Indian life for so long. That the music could become an international movement was not in the mind of the Caribbean people. Not only did it come from them, but it was accepted by the mass of the population in Britain. There of all places! They are not a people who have a tradition ofjazz. What about the Mighty Sparrow?

The Sparrow is now recognized, unfortunately in some ways, as a leader in music. He has gone into business in a great way, is accepted as such. He was very effective when the Victorian moral standards of the Colonial were being challenged, but he did not take any prominent part in the political upheaval. So he remains a fine musician. He is part of the domestic, not foreign establishment. But he is not the man he was before the breakup of the old system.

Other Calypsonians? Many others have made clear that they are against the political system. In individual songs especially. They are there, amidst the political revolts. The government, of course, organizes them now and seeks to moderate them to some extent. But individual singers still come out and say what needs to be said. There was one very comic episode when | was in Trinidad at a Calypsonian festival. A Calypsonian fellow sang, “The Time has Come for Change and Doctor Williams to Take a Rest.” He won the prize. And the Education Minister of the PNM had to go down and give him the prize. It was very comic.

How was the reception in Trinidad of The Black Jacobins, produced as a play? It was tremendous. So much so that the Trinidad Guardian, sniping at me, wrote a sneering review. But such was the public response that they had to come back at the end and say it was a wonderful play. It said something about the Revolution. And it played on the BBC. An attempt is now being made to make my novel Minty Alley into a public performance. It is said that it has a natural dramatic quality. You wrote an essay about

Wilson Harris’ conception of Phenomenology...

We have recommended him for the Nobel Prize, and I know that others in Europe are now taking him up for it. The French have translated him. And he is now accepted in the U.S. The time will come when he will be an international figure, as he is today in literary circles.

92 Is it inevitable that the modern novel be written outside the classic narrative?

Harris himself says so. In his criticism he says, the way a traditional novel presents characters and events—this is not for me. Harris expresses the interlocking between Caribbean experience, which is not traditional, and the most modern forms of literature and philosophy. It is astonishing to me that a West Indian not educated in a German university, spending his days for twenty years working in the forests of Guyana, should have so modern and philosophical a vision. He has the clarity to move from chapters of philosophical discussion to the narrative of the novel. A most unique, distinguished person. And Naipaul? I wrote a very savage review about Naipaul. The West Indian novelist could not continue writing about the West Indian people from the European standpoint. The proof is George Lamming who, when he was thirty-five, stopped writing for ten years. He is full of literature, but he did not know what to do. He finally decided to write Natives ofMy Person, which describes the slavers. And now | hear that he is working on the great upheaval of 1937 to 1938. Not to write about revolution symbolically, but actually.

Naipaul reached the stage Lamming reached but he went to the Right. And today Naipaul is the special darling of the right wing intellectuals, and even of the left wingers, who want to say the things he is saying about the Third World that they are not saying themselves because they would be accused of racism. But Naipaul says it for them. The place is England—he doesn’t really attack it: here is the place to live. He never grasps the West Indian attack upon Western Civilization. That failure to understand something contrary to Western Civilization seems at the root ofintellectual error, even by the greatest of modern intellectuals, the Frankfurt School... Yes, I knew them very well in New York City in the 1940s. Adorno especially, who was very profound in many ways, but wholly lacking in any principle ofpolitical organization. They gave mea lot of knowledge, but never convinced me of anything. And they were very curious about me—a Black man and a Trotskyist—they didn’t know what to think. I am not surprised that their great endeavor came to so little. At the extreme opposite of European intellectual life we have what Gregory Rigsby, in his essay on your work, calls the West Indian struggle “to improve the material well-being of these back-yard people—the ordinary people of the islands—and still retain the communal relationship which charges their work and actions and keeps them vitally alive.” This is culture in a different sense...

It has been my purpose from the beginning of my literary work to point it out. A lot of people in the U.S. have now read my “triumph,” Minty Alley, and other stories. They are not disturbed by the “immorality.” What impresses them is the solidarity among the people, the sense of community which has been and remains very strong. Commercialization cannot destroy that, the place is too small. I keep saying—although I ama little wild about this perhaps—that the sun, the sea, and the small island recreates a Classic scene. The glimmer of the planes rising and descending, the whole atmosphere suggests something Greek about the individual and his relation to society, the past and the future.

93 Gregory Rigsby also says that your work embraces a “Law of Relationship” in the Universe. In violating that Law, Western Civilization has brought upon itself the madness of the Captain Ahabs and their nuclear weapons. Wouldn't critics reject this suggestion as non-rational, as mystical? Hegel says that when people move from a universal to a new principle of organization, they are always called mystics. And we are moving to something new. The work of three Black American women writers—Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Ntozake Shange—proves it absolutely.

What is the special role of the West Indies in that? I have believed for years that the West Indies is a microcosm of world civilization. The great problems are posed in such a way that everything can be seen. And apart from that, we have no past. Everything began in the seventeenth century. Everything depended formally upon European literature, European institutions. And yet we are a distinctly Caribbean, Third World people; we are not

dominated by the past civilizations. We are in a most unique situation. Looking back a half-century, what can you say about the pioneering activities of such figures as Aime Cesaire and yourself? We laid the foundations. Culture we put forward early, forcefully, because we had no choice. The West Indies has now shown that Culture will be in the forefront in every revolutionary struggle ahead.

C. L. R. James The work of C.L.R. James is now gaining in the United States a measure of its deserved renown. Long hailed as author of The Black Jacobins, the action-packed biography of Toussaint L’Ouverture, James also distinguished himself before 1940 as author of the novel Minty Alley, as an early West Indian literary-nationalist, an outstanding figure in the international struggle for African liberation, and as the author of World Revolution, an anti-Stalinist history of the Third International. Over the next decade he and a group of American workers broke with the Trotskyist movement to establish a theory of mass self-activity, a recuperation of Hegelian philosophy, and a practice embodied in the Detroit newspaper Correspondence. More recently he returned to the West Indies to become editor of the Progressive National Movement’s organ, The Nation, until deprived ofhis position and confined to house arrest by his one-time

student and then leader of Trinidad,

Dr. Eric Williams.

James

has also written a study of

Herman Melville, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways; an autobiographical history of cricket, Beyonda Boundary, among other books; and has taught Black Studies. There has been welcome re-publication of his essays and long-obscured works in Britain and the U.S. C.L.R. James: His Life and Work (1981) recounts the activities of his career and their importance for Black revolution, labor movement, cultural,

and historical study.

P.B.

94

LYNCH

FRAGMENTS

MELVIN

EDWARDS

i:

aS See qo

Melvin

Edwards.

Afro Phoenix,

#2, 1963

Echo Soweto,

1980

A lynching is a murder, a group murder. You take all of the energy of a lynching, all the hate and all the fear, and pile it on one human being. You tie that person toa tree and you slowly or fastly kill him. The Lynch Fragment series is a series of sculpture ideas. What I’m doing is taking fragments of the intensity of a lynching, turning it around, changing it into an object, and making that object something creative and positive. So the thing itself is not to look like its been lynched, but to have that scale of intensity, and that kind of power.

95

I have developed suspended environmental works made of barbwire and of chains. I also make larger pieces, public sculpture meant to have a relationship with architecture and the general public. You can say that the Lynch Fragments are a private conversation.

A one on one

situation. The public works are meant to affect masses of people at once. The material used for the Lynch Fragments is steel. Sometimes a piece of brass or bronze or chrome is added but for the most part they are welded steel. Each Lynch Fragment is different from the other and each has an individual title. In that respect they are like traditional African sculpture. The idea of a lynching was bad luck, or bad fate, or a bad situation for African-American people in the United States. But the Lynch Fragment, the sculpture, is really a positive work. They are powerful and they are ours, and they are mine, and they are not made by our oppressor. They are made by us as acontinuance ofthe resistance against oppression. I started making them in 1963 during the period when the civil rights movement was in full force. It was my first experience with collective resistance. At that time I was teaching myself how to make sculpture and trying to find my own unique way of working. The Lynch Fragments come from family stories about lynchings. They come from my experiences of growing up in Houston, Texas, the black community in the fifth ward, the five years I lived in Dayton, Ohio in the all-black Desoto-Bass housing project, and in the black neighborhoods in Los Angeles, California. If you go by individual titles, that should tell you what the specific pieces are about. For example: the piece “Afro Phoenix.” Afro means African and Phoenix is the bird rising from the ashes in an old Egyptian story. It’s coming out ofdifficulty and producing something new. “Some Bright Morning” is a piece dedicated to a black family in Florida who had been warned by white people to not be so militant. The family continued to be militant until the white people said that some bright morning they were coming to

get them, and when they came, the black people were armed and ready. They fought and then

took to the swamp in guerrilla warfare against those whites and they didn’t lose. The fragment dedicated to Soweto is dedicated to the continental African struggle against colonialism and oppression. I also made a fragment, “Geminas,” dedicated to my twin daughters. The idea of having families and of continuing to have families. To have children, to

reproduce, that’s a creative act. Birth is continuity. What I learned from making the pieces was that under the “title” of oppression, we could do everything. In other words it’s not the actual oppression that allows us to do everything, but since we're really stronger than that oppression, we do everything anyway. The actual forms produced within the pieces have a lot of variety and they fill me with many ideas for other kinds of pieces. The other pieces may not have the same look. The best way to view the Lynch Fragments is the way I intended, specifically in a ritual situation. This is visual art and the visual aspect of ritual. You take a limited amount of space, a square room, with nothing else in it but the Lynch Fragments. The room is maybe sixteen feet square and every two feet along the wall about eye level is a Lynch Fragment. I will guarantee anybody that they will have a strong feeling regardless of their interpretations. The works have no intention whatsoever of

being masks. I’m interested in human physical intensity and humans tend to read that at the level of the head for some reason. The head is the most expressive part of the human anatomy because it contains so many ofthe centers of the senses. The sighter is there, the smeller is there, the taster is there and the hearer is there. The other thing that tends to make people think of masks is that the fragments are about the size of the human head. I place them on the wall at my eye level so it’s about the same place that you run into a human head. I did that because I wanted the same confrontation level, the level of confronting another head.

96

As a sculptor you spend time inventing something new. Your own language. So the language of the sculpture is not something that the uninitiated can walk up to and say I know what thatis. You spend time trying to make things that people haven’t put together before. I’m not inventing a sixteen-letter alphabet. I’m not making mathematics. I’m making something that’s more open and more creative than that. Or, if it is mathematics it’s at the level of creative mathematics and it’s not a segment of mathematics like addition, subtraction, multiplication or geometry. It’s at the creative level so it can be anything that I want it to be. It’s like logic, it starts with the subjective and I’m in charge of the subject. For example a railroad spike. To some people spikes are threatening. A railroad spike’s job is to hold a rail onto a railroad cross-tie. It’s a big nail. Well if you’rea Christian and you think of Christian symbolism and the nails in the feet of Christ as the epitome of symbolism for spikes, you may be going the wrong direction from where I’m thinking and doing. Not that they didn’t nail somebody to a tree, but I don’t give spikes a single meaning. A spike is a big nail. It has a shape and a look. I take it and change it or I may leave the material with its look of spikeness, or | may change it so much, nobody would ever know it was a spike. I may use four spikes to make a diamond shape and what is important to me will not be the spike, but the diamond shape. So it varies. It’s like putting words together. The Lynch Fragments are on the feeling side of

art more than on the intellectual side. I don’t mean that they’re not intelligent because | happen to think that they’re very intelligent. They have that kind of power which is physical. They’re not the art of the professor. They’re the art of the worker in the physical sense. They’re the art of the process where they get hammered; they get cut, parts of them have been machined and they get machined by me ina different way. You can see that these works have the look of having been through something in order to be what they are and in that way they’re ritualistic.

I intended for the Lynch Fragments to remind black people of what we have come out of. That’s important because in the United States we’re the only people to actually come out of the lynching experience. They lynched a few other people, but basically being lynched belonged to us. We were the only ones brought here to be slaves, and after slavery we were a people without rights. We were the only people who could be lynched with impunity. It’s documented and it’s not over yet. Making the Lynch Fragments is a strong way to work. I’m a physical person. I believe in strong statements. I believe ina certain amount of significant directness. Within the visual arts, the abstract work is very much in the area of fiction and poetry. They’re imaginary. You can put things together and in real life there would be no reason for them to be together, except in the reality of their being works of art. Once | had named them Lynch Fragments, it literally meant I could almost do anything within that title. As specific as the term lynching is, the situation is so dynamic. If somebody is going to discuss something that violent—murder, sexual abuse, kidnapping, the destruction of all human rights, the destruction of life, snatching pieces off of a dead body for souvenirs, all the things done to men, women and children—then that subject is so powerful, I can use the strongest language | want. It’s not like I chose to make sculpture about hearts and flowers or strolling through the park. Once I have decided that my subject is lynching and Lynch Fragments, that calls into question the whole ‘society. The whole of art, the whole of everything.

oF

THEIR HANDS ON THE PULSE Testimony Before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians Lawson Inada

Seattle, September 9, 1981

Honored Members of the Commission:

My name is Lawson Fusao Inada, Professor of English at Southern Oregon State College, author of Before the War, the first poetry volume by a Japanese-American to be published by a major firm, and author of several scholarly works on the Asian-American experience. I come to you today not as Citizen 19228 but as an American

citizen, a husband

and

father, and an educator of our young. In the course of my research as a literary historian, particularly in the field of JapaneseAmerican literature, I have encountered materials and been struck by insights that will be of value to this Commission and will serve to shed new light on the Camp experience in general. An examination of literature is not as remotely-related to the task at hand as may at first seem: as with any major event involving masses of people, the insights arising from experience naturally follow and manifest themselves in the writing of the time— expressing for the record, setting the experience in perspective, and rendering it accessible to others. Such is the way of culture and education— for our future generations. Thus it was, then, that from the Camp ex-

perience came some of the most important Japanese-American writing of our time and also a substantial body of work by non-Jap-

anese-Americans alike— for the Camps, after all, were an American experience.

No doubt you have heard testimony in a number of vital areas, delivered ina wide range of emotions. Much of this bespeaks to the strength and courage of the Japanese-American people; the cause is justice, to exonerate America. It occurs

to me, however,

as it must have

occurred to you, that because of the very nature of the Camp experience, much of the important testimony from former internees has not, and perhaps will not, be heard.

I speak here of those, in the majority, who could not or would not testify. These are those who cannot or will not articulate the effects of the experience. These are those unable or unwilling to recount their “war stories,” as it were, in succinct manner, with fluency.

These are not those who are dead. These are those who are alive, who have had to sublimate the effects of the experience to survive, who have swallowed the barbed wire, so to speak, so that it eats the interior, stops the throat, and strangles the heart.

Surely, by now, the statistics are in and the debate has been ample; in all good conscience, before time takes its toll, let us look to the

heart of the matter.

98 And that, I submit, is to be found in the lit-

erature, written by those with their hands on the pulse. And the very reason for the existence of literature is because it just couldn’t be said any other way. Not with such force and power. And I need only cite The Diary of Anne Frank as one compelling example. Before examining a particular work, however, allow me to set the context in which it

functions. Now, apart from the actual evacuation itself,

and apart from all the individual and separate tragedies that occurred as a result, my findings indicate that the singlemost source of widespread damage was incurred by the instituting, in 1943, of the “Application for Leave Clearance”— otherwise known as the “Loyalty Oath.” All publications purporting to explore the Camp experience after 1943, in all genres and by writers of any descent, serve to substantiate this fact. Thus, for your purposes, the “Loyalty Oath” can be a point of focus and a means of access to the entire

experience.

And

in this area,

expert testimony is also in order from the professional psychologists and social scientists stationed in the Camps, who observed and recorded the damage inflicted by the “Loyalty Oath.” The Camps irrevocably altered the course of Japanese-America; the “Loyalty Oath” practically destroyed it. For a summary of the incidences surrounding the “Loyalty Oath,” let me refer you to the popular history by Bill Hosokawa, Nisei: The Quiet Americans. The “Loyalty Oath” is at the heart of Michi Nishiura Weglyn’s widelyacclaimed study, Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps; the “Loyalty Oath” is at the heart of Dr. Kazuo Miyamoto’s epic novel, Hawaii: End of the Rainbow; the “Loyalty Oath” is at the heart of Jeanne and Jim Houston’s autobiographical Farewell

to Manzanar,

sanctioned

National Education Association.

by the

On the surface,

this “Loyalty

Oath,”

this

innocuous-looking questionnaire resulted in the transfer of 18,711 evacuees between cen-

ters, for purposes of segregation and, in many cases, eventual repatriation. Impressive statistics, certainly, but there is more to the story.

In actuality, the “Loyalty Oath” —a bad idea in a bad situation, made worse by governmental mishandling— served to segregate generation against generation, religion against religion, family against family, and wreaked havoc within households and individuals—a veritable civil war, with no winners.

The common term for this condition, of course, is “blaming the victim.” The people had been set upon themselves, and when they emerged from the experience, they were not to be whole again. The damage was irrevocable, and would ex-

tend into the lives of future generations; and for this there can be no real redress. Thus it was, then, as has been noted and

documented, that thousands upon thousands of the released people deliberately chose not to return to their former homes, taking the separate ways, instead, of exiles in this country.

The compulsion was to disperse and, as much as possible, to “disappear.” For above and beyond the despair asso ciated with “home,” above and beyond the stigmata to bear— the “when did you stop being a Jap” attitude to confront— there was now an additional element, perpetrated and compounded by the “Loyalty Oath,” to live with or try to avoid: and this was nothing less than a distrust of, even a loathing for, one’s very own kind. And for those that did return, the effects of the “Loyalty Oath” were there to confront on a day-to-day basis, with the Japanese-Americans themselves,

in effect, accusing one an-

other of being “Japs,” or even “Americans.” And these were the communities that, contrary to post-War plaudits of “success,” despite all the post-War praises for “out-whiting the whites” —as the pundits put it in national pub\.

99

lications— these were the communities that had achieved their greatest success long before the destruction of the Camps, a hard-won suc-

cess by a whole and healthy people of great pride and cultural integrity who, as with all other American nationalities, firmly believed

in the American American

way,

way, who exemplified the and

who

went

on

to prove

their “American-ness” with blood. But in the meantime, the Camps had intervened, the communities had been fragmented, and any “success” was to be a qualified one, founded on the failure of justice. If anything, the Camps made “successful” victims, at im-

measurable expense. And if there had been a magical pill to eradicate one’s “Jap-ness,” I shudder to think how many would have taken it. This is the context and atmosphere, then, in

which one of the major American works of our time, and certainly the greatest single achievement by a Japanese-American, takes place. | am speaking, of course, of the novel No-No Boy, by the late John Okada, Seattle’s

As a matter of fact, the entire plot and sub-

ject matter of No-No Boy is devoted to the subsequent ramifications of the Camps and the “Loyalty Oath” in particular. It is the story of just one Japanese-American family in Seattle immediately after the War. Ichiro Yamada, the protagonist, is a “no-no boy,” just home from imprisonment, and immediately accosted and spat upon by a former friend, an Army veteran,

who

is also, of all

things, a fellow Japanese-American. Ichiro’s father is now a broken man, a drunk,

absent-mindedly tending the shambles of a tiny grocery. Ichiro’s mother is going insane, a victim of both the Camps and the War. Ichiro’s brother, consumed

by the shame of having a

“no-no boy” in the family, has only one goal in mind—to be old enough to join the Army and “prove” his “loyalty,” his true “American-ness.” The family, the community, is fragmented. Some of the Japanese-Americans have been repatriated; some have died in battle, for America; some refuse to return to Seattle, out

of bitterness and shame.

own, an internee of the Camps, and a distin-

Ichori’s best friend, Kenji Kanno, an Army

guished veteran of the United States Army. To look to this work of art as a chronicle of

veteran dying from the lingering effects of a wound incurred in Germany, has this to say to him:

a people, place, and time, is in keeping with

the way we look to the work of our Nobel Laureates like Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck for chronicles of their own peoples, places, and times. No less an authority than the eminent historian, Bill Hosokawa,

has this to say about

the novel: “Nisei will recognize the authenticity of the idioms Okada’s characters use, as well as his descriptions of the familiar Issei and Nisei mannerisms that make them come aliver cs And I daresay that, having lived the depth of the novel, one cannot walk the streets of Seattle, America, for very long without en-

countering the living substance of the book itself— the effects of Camp and the “Loyalty Oath” on the Japanese-American people.

“”.. Stick it through. Let them call you names. They don’t mean it. What I meanis, they don’t know what they’re doing. The way I see it, they pick on you because they’re vulnerable. They think just because they went and packed a rifle they’re different but they aren't and they know it. They’re still Japs. ... “... After that, head out. Go someplace where there isn’t another Jap within a thousand miles. Marry a white girl or a Negro or an Italian or even a Chinese. Anything but a Japanese... .”

In the course of the novel, Kenji dies, Ichiro’s mother dies, but Ichiro remains undaunted in

his quest, the quest of his people, to be whole again. In closing, then, allow me to have John Okada testify on my behalf. Here are just a few words from the final chapter of his book, his

100

legacy to us all, which is not so much an end but a beginning—a continuing testament to the strength and courage of the Japanese-A merican people, and the hope that is America: He walked along, thinking, searching, thinking and probing, and, in the darkness of the alley of the community that was a tiny bit of America, he chased that faint and elusive insinuation of promise as it continued to take shape in mind and in heart.

Thank you.

ONI GAKU:

Today,

however,

the situation is radically

different. There has been a resurgence ofjazz among Asian-Americans. This started in the 1960s, sparked by the political and cultural struggles of the times. Responding toa need to create a visible and distinct Asian-American presence in the arts, as well as politics, many

young musicians turned back to the sounds of their childhood. If Black music was an inseparable part of their lives, it had not, however,

been the totality of their experience. They had also grown up on the music of traditional Asian societies. For the immigrant generation, this music linked them to a life they had left behind and sustained them in their struggle to survive here. For the American-born, the tradi-

Unholy Ghosts & Insurrectionary Spirits Paul Yamazaki In the African-American musical tradition,

the musician is much more than an interpreter of formally organized sounds. He is a musical alchemist, fusing desire, spirit and intellect into a creation of the most subversive beauty. At his best, he is an insurrectionary who plays in a tradition that has its inspiration in a people’s dream of freedom; and he creates in an aesthetic that challenges him to improvise, to seize, in performance, the moment of his own liberation. Among Asian-Americans, it is this freedom,

implicit in African-American music, which has inspired several generations to play jazz. Before the Second World War, there were many bands active in the Japanese-American community. They played in the style of Ellington, Lunceford, Webb and Basie. But in 1942,

these bands broke up when Japanese-Americans were forced into concentration camps. Although musicians formed new bands behind the barbed wire, these soon disappeared, casualties of the war. They never re-emerged.

Mark Izu, Paul Yamazaki, Ray Collins. Photo by JimDong

101

tional music was the sound of earliest childhood, of family and community functions. As the American-born grew older, this music became submerged and, for the time being, forgotten. But starting in the 1960s and 1970s, many musicians returned to these sounds, taking up serious study of traditional Asian musics. Those who played jazz were impelled in this direction, in the way that the art Rahsaan Roland Kirk

has called Black Classical Music demands the improvisor explore every facet of himself. It has been this process, this imperative, that has led now to the re-emergence of traditional Asian music as an integral part of the AsianAmerican Jazz Musician. The music of Gerald Oshita, Russel Baba or

Mark Izu— to name a few of the extremely talented Asian-American players— has a sound that is distinctly within the traditions of jazz, but with a clearly definable otherness. For many years now, Oshita, a virtuoso on the

tenor and soprano saxophones, flutes, conn-o-

sax, and contrabass-sarrusaphone, has been acclaimed in Japan and Europe. To enter his musical world is to enter a realm of dangerous enchantment. Oshita’s music can be likened to Cecil Taylor’s in that it demands the listener open all the gates of perception to comprehend the magnitude and beauty of the music. With Russel Baba (alto and soprano sax, flutes, musette, and Tibetan horn) and Mark Izu (bass, sheng, nam-wu), two distinctive voices

emerge, which share such intensity and insurrectionary force that one feels the spirit of Kronstadt in this new music. While it is too early to say whether the music of Asian-Americans will coalesce into a clearly defined movement, even at this emergent period, there are important creators whose music is inseparable from their own heritage and from the spirit and traditions of AfricanAmerican music.

Amina Baraka

HIP SONGS (for Larry Neal) did you ask me who was the hippist singer in the world well, I'd go so far

as to say it was the first slave that gave a field holler & a shout in the field i mean thats what 1 would say i'd say the hippist singer must have been the local gospel group over yonder there down the country road while pickin cotton & they tell me little willie james father was the hippist blues singer in town & they say his mama got her freedom once the master heard her screaming a crying song

but you know the hippist singer i heard was a dude in new orleans playing a piano & singing a kinda different tune although... in chicago there was this fast singing woman w/a blues bottom & a lotta rhythms behind her she was hip now i’ve heard some hip singers i know a hip song when 1 hear one you know w/hip lyrics & all but, let me say this one of the hippist singers i ever heard was a poet

singing “Don’t Say Goodbye to the PorkPie Hat”

102

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The International Humor Movement’s first exhibition opened in April at New York University, in conjunction with the Radical Humor Festival, sponsored by Cultural Correspondence, the Center for Marxist Studies, and Political Art Documentation/ Distribution. Responding to the Humor Movement’s Manifesto, artists from a dozen countries are contributing to the exhibition which will be shown in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and other cities during 1982—1983. Catalogues, manifestos, and proceedings of the Humor Festival are available from Cultural Correspondence (New Series), edited by Jim Murray, 505 West End Ave., New York, N.Y. 10024.

Rick Griffin. Radical American Komics.

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THE ORAL TRADITION IMPROVISATION

IN MUSIC—A

BLACK’S VIEW

Bill Cole It is a fact that one can improvise and have very little knowledge of the vehicle or medium he or she is using. That is not the kind of improvisation I am talking about. The improvisation I mean begins when individuals have mastered the voice they wish to use. This takes not only an intense study of the instrument, but also a tremendous amount of industry in a practicing discipline. For me, investigation of music began when I was about eleven, and even up to that time I had had a keen interest in how sounds produce music. I was exposed as a very young person to European classical music. Immediately music seemed to ring a wonderful chord within my being. However, it was not until I was about eleven that I began to really listen, investigate, and study the improvisational music known as jazz. It took twenty-plus years before I mastered an instrument to try to make my mark in the music black people have evolved. It represents countless hours, and I mean literally countless hours of listening to music, on the radio, from a record player, and live. Now it seems that while I was doing all this I was never consciously aware of how my study of the music was taking place, but I always had an insatiable desire to listen, and listen, and listen. An individual takes in a tremendous amount of information when he or she is young, and if the desire is as great as mine was to listen to the music of black people, then this consumption of sound is almost maniacal. The first person of whom I had a real, conscious awareness, and to whose records I listened very intently, was Paul Chambers, a bass player of the 1950s. He had such a long— probably the longest — tenure of any of the individuals who played in one of Miles Davis’ bands. At an extremely early age he had effectively mastered his instrument, and moved so fluently across it, that he sounded like a constant hum. So in tune with this man’s hum, so intently had I listened to Chambers, that once, when for fifteen years I hadn’t heard a particular piece recorded by Miles Davis when Chambers was in the

band, I could still totally remember his playing, as both accompanist and soloist.

Bill Cole. Photo by Amoo

When I think about Paul Chambers, I also recognize the sacrifices that players like him have to make in order to play this amazingly energized music called jazz. Not only was he a gifted and flexible artist on his instrument, but he had to endure the whole counterculture represented by the people who make the music and those who follow it. Jazz, unlike other musical art forms, has always had an

104

unanalyzed format. Many jazz musicians have had influence more often because of their political sense than their artistic ability. Jazz is also an “outlawed” music and brings together many people who wouldn't naturally congregate, including those who follow the music for reasons other than participating or wanting to be around the musicians. These people are sometimes bar owners, drug dealers, pimps, prostitutes, and others looking for a good time. Because Chambers had entered the music professionally at such a young age, he was an easy pawn forall the insidious elements which pimp off the music. That is another article and maybe I'll write about that sometime.

Bop and Playing Free As the music has evolved from the early 1940s, two specific styles have been created. Both of these styles, that is, Bop and playing free, have had a whole host of practitioners, aimost all of whom I have seen or heard at one time or another. Bop, the music primarily invented by Charlie Parker and his associates, is a style of improvising which is based on an established tempo and melodic or harmonic material in constant repetition. Playing in the free style is essentially without any information except thematic material, with all of the styles that have evolved through the history of jazz incorporated. This entire dimension of energy and creativity forms the basis of how I approach my own improvisation. I also choose to play ina free style, though often in my music rhythmic material plays an essential part. However, always present is the language of music that I have realized through my examination of the Oral Tradition. An example is the playing of John Coltrane. Trane, for all the complexity in his music, was one of the foremost sequence players. He was quick to play one thing, and then play it, if sometimes with slight variation, always in another place. It.seems now almost ludicrous that the critics could have complained that it was repetitive. That was John Coltrane’s style, and there was no way he could have ever been a different player than the player he in fact was. Those who would try to understand the music of John Coltrane have to be accepting of his artistry, and start from that very point. Suddenly the individual will realize that his music flows because it is so strongly rooted in a melodic design, as African music is firmly rooted in a melodic, rhythmic

consciousness communicated through a language system which one can begin to understand only when one has mastered his or her instrument. That last idea is profoundly embedded in the playing of John Coltrane. His recorded playing is a textbook on how to play the jazz soprano and tenor saxes.

The Music I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and that certainly has to do with the improvisation that comes out of me. Pittsburgh is out of the way, and is a very difficult place to realize the immenseness of the national culture. It is a city almost totally made up of working class people, with a very small percentage of the population having a tremendous amount of wealth. When I was young, there were only a few places to hear music. I was fortunate though to have had the opportunity to hear all who came through Pittsburgh: Bud Powell, Oscar Pettiford, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Carmen McRae, Sarah Vaughn, Billy Eckstein, Chico Hamilton, Miles Davis, Jim Smith, Modern

Jazz Quartet,

Terry

Gibbs,

Lee Konitz,

Lenny Tristano, Clifford Brown, Jackie McLean, Hank Mobley, Donald Byrd, Horace Parlan, Errol Garner, Red Garland, Charles Mingus, Elvin Jones, John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Ted Curson, Doug Watkins, and on, and on, and on. I also knew and hung out with a lot of people who also were interested in what we simply called The Music. And I had the opportunity to sing and play with some of my friends which was very fruitful, very stimulating for my musical intellect. Listening to Chambers as intently as I did, I learned the many different forms that existed— that is, the different forms of the blues, the constant repetition in a chorus, and how an instrumentalist would build an improvisation from this. However, my interpretation was always very vague, especially when I was young. I just loved the sounds. Between the ages of eleven and twenty-five, I memorized all of Miles Davis’ solos on record, but what that meant would not become clear until years later. It is only at this moment that through my playing I am beginning to realize the fruits of that examination. I hadn't realized that this was my long labor through the Oral Tradition, and that the validity of the Oral

Tradition is the thing that makes jazz what it's.

105 During this time, I learned to play several different western instruments. Very early I studied the violin, then off and on fora period of maybe twenty years, the piano. In between there was a short period with the cello, but I never really became serious about playing any of these instruments except the cello, mostly because of instruction. I was a listening junky, spending more time on listening to music than any other endeavor, including work. I was able to complete my Bachelor’s and my Master’s degrees without really knowing how to play an instrument. However, the 1960s propelled Jazz at such an alarming pace that the contradiction of loving music so much and not being able to play really became critical.

Muzette, Shenai, Nagaswarm My life then took me to Wesleyan University, where I studied in the World Music Department. There I came across instruments such as the double reed wind instrument from China called the muzette, and two other horns from India, the shenai and the nagaswarm. I was immediately struck with the sound these instruments create. Even though their range is more limited than the western wind instruments, the fact that they are untempered allows for a tremendous amount of melodic flexibility and tonal colors. It was the sound of the instruments that compelled me, and as I learned how to play them I gained a more constructive sense of how all the years of listening to music created a style inside my own playing. I became aware of the meaning of the constant reservoir of sound that was always in me, because now I was able to meaningfully express it through these newly acquired instruments. For whatever reasons, I was emphatically ready to give music all the time it needed to mature inside me. I felt extremely confident that if an individual played with artists who had mastered their instruments, and who could hear and respond immediately to sound, that a successful musical event could happen, irrespective of whether there was literate material present. I experimented with this concept, and after much trial and error, became successful in developing a flow just explaining or simply beginning a piece of music. At once, I recognized that when one is in a capitalist system, it seems folly to want to be working on collective compositions. My endeavors however have always been to complement

my formal education, which has meant a greater mind and awareness of the root of my music which, I believe conclusively, stems from Africa. I have come to the conclusion that African people, as the people native to this country, believe in the consciousness of a collective community, so I knew that basing a composition on collective input would have to be recognized for what it is.

Collective Experiments My first group experience was with students at Whitman College, a small liberal arts school in the southeast corner of Washington State. I taught there for one term and developed a group of students who were unshackled enough in terms of their own playing to be able to respond to a piece that was collectively improvised. From several practice situations, in which we simply played together without any established sequence of events, and after fumbling and bumbling for a while, we finally created a situation where we could collectively play and it would be one thing. At the end of the term, we presented a concert which was fairly successful, really because the students I worked with were very receptive to the idea of what we were doing. This was not however the end of the doubts I had about this medium, so I continued to experiment, but using professional players. After refining the idea in my head for a couple of years, I finally produced a date with two other performers, which gave me total confidence in collectively responding to sound. This trio endeavor, which was with Warren Smith, percussionist, and Sam Rivers, began a sequence of pieces which I call Cycles. At first even though I had thought about the meaning of the Cycles, I had no real sense of how far I wanted it to go, or in what direction it should be headed.

I only knew that with each Cycle, the

level of communication, whether in the numbers of participants or in energy, should be more dynamic, that each Cycle should include the poet Jayne Cortez, along with artists in other media, to give the Cycles much more impact. Even though the number of performers has increased from three to thirty-five, I recognize that the sheer numbers of people does not necessarily mean that the Cycles have matured, or that this is the essence of the Cycles. As they have developed, I have learned how to play more instruments and to play those I started on much

106 more dynamically. Because they were all created in another culture, these instruments give another layer of material to work with in terms of the overall shape of the Cycles. I have from time to time used different traditional material, but this material is always translated orally to the people participating in my pieces. As an example, in my Third Cycle, presented on May 15, 1977, I taught several students a traditional flute piece from Ghana, and even though it had been written out I taught it to them orally. The material used for my Fifth Cycle was all oral material taught to me by percussionist Farel Johnson, and we both related this to the other performers in the Cycle.

Perpetuating the Oral Tradition Farel, who is an excellent drummer, and I have been producing educational projects called Music of Five Continents, in which we play duets on the different instruments we play, and talk about cultures from around the world. As all things do, this

E. F. Granell.

The

Transmission

of the Flowers

article is coming back around to its beginning. I have a primary interest in education, largely due to the fact that the music of my people, black people, is so systematically kept out of both public and private school systems. The Oral Tradition as a valid tradition for passing on information, knowledge, and wisdom is equally castigated and shunned. Farel and I feel that these projects we perform, even in a small way, help to perpetuate the Oral Tradition and an improvised language style. What I do in the pieces I organize for larger groups, we do, stylistically, in the duets we play together. There was of course at one time a question regarding the way I have chosen to communicate through music. I know now that there is a language in music, and if you can speak that language you can communicate successfully with other musicians from your culture. Learning a language isa lifetime endeavor, and learning how to successfully communicate in a language is an art. Peace.

from the Autumnal Horse. Oil on canvas

.

107

ALL THINGS, ALL MEN AND ALL ANIMALS Franklin Rosemont

Joel Williams.

Elephants are contagious. — Surrealist proverb

The last decade of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth were years of unprecedentedly swift and convulsive transformation for the whole of Western culture.

linotype machines and x-rays, the first phono-

As capitalist accumulation entered its imperialist phase, the rising frenzy of universal competition left very little unmoved. A new epoch began, an epoch of international loans, accelerated technological development, extensive growth of transportation and expanded

graph records and radios, the first films, comic

militarism—an

strips and jazz gave a series of shocks to the human sensibility that changed forever ageold relationships of men and things. Freud’s psychoanalysis opened to scientific inquiry the domain of dreams and the unconscious previously explored almost exclusively by poets. Einstein’s theories altered the physicists’ model of the universe. Hallowed esthetic

lutions. Traditional notions of politics were shattered by the great battles of the the IWW, the world struggle for woman suffrage, the

The first automobiles and airplanes, the first

epoch, too, of wars and revo-

Marcus Garvey movement and, most decisively, the emergence of workers’ councils in the

tecture, while Isadora Duncan and others chal-

Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917. Into this arena of catastrophe and change leaped Arthur Cravan—“‘poet and boxer,” “nephew of Oscar Wilde,” “deserter of seventeen nations,” “the poet with the shortest hair in the world,” one of the most uproarious figures of the last two thousand years.

lenged the musty conventions of ballet and invented modern dance.

do not want to be civilized.”

values were overthrown by Art Nouveau, the Ashcan School, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism,

Dadaism

and several new

schools of archi-

“T wish to state once and for all,” said he, “I

108

Of Irish and English ancestry, Cravan was born

Fabian

Avenarius

Lloyd

in Lausanne,

Switzerland, on 22 May 1887. Notwithstanding the genteel literary ambiance in which he was brought up, or perhaps in revolt against it, he very early resolved to become a prizefighter. “Crazy about being a boxer,” as he wrote later, he did in fact attain some distinction in

the ring, holding for a time the middleweight championship of France (later he fought in the heavier divisions). Boxing journals of the day praised the “remarkable qualities” of this “formidable athlete.”’ It so happens that the period in which Cravan was active in the ring is frequently regarded as boxing’s Golden Age. Never before or since have so many outstanding inno vators contended simultaneously for high honors with gloved fists. The Sullivan-Corbett bout of 1892 had marked the end of the old order, and a whole generation of gifted fighters had come along to definitively change the “noble art’”— among them heavyweights Jack Johnson (widely regarded as the greatest of all time), Sam Langford, (credited by a vociferous few as even greater than Johnson), Bob Fitzsimmons, James J. Jeffries, Joe Jeanette; the

bizarre middleweight Kid McCoy, inventor of the corkscrew punch; welterweights Joe Walcott and Dixie Kid; lightweights Joe Gans and

Benny Leonard; and flyweight Jimmy Wilde, “the ghost with a hammer in his hand.” “Footwork worthy of ballet dancers, a skill in slipping, ducking, side-stepping, weaving out of range, riding blows when pinned: These,” a boxing historian has noted, “became the features of the modern style.” It is wholly characteristic of Cravan that he began his war on European culture in the boxing ring. He cannot, however, be counted among the great boxers, and his influence on ring history has been negligible. His sole important fight was with the aging Jack Johnson in Barcelona,

1916. “A

large crowd

was

at-

tracted by the contest,” Johnson recalled in

his autobiography, adding that it “lasted but a short time, for I knocked him out in the first round.” (Cravan is said to have entered the

ring “reeling drunk.”)* It must be emphasized nonetheless that the truly enormous influence he has exerted on poetry and the arts has been largely incidental to—almost a by-product of—his pugilistic passion. Till the end he was “prouder of his athletic performances than of his literary works.” He is still a force today not so much because he was a poet ora boxer, but precisely because he was a poet and boxer. He was preceded by several poets who boxed—including Charles Churchill, Lord Byron and Benjamin Paul Blood— and at least one boxer who wrote poems: Bob Gregson, “Poet Laureate of the heroic race of pugilists.”* But Cravan was the first for whom poetry and boxing were essentially and indissolubly one. It was his great originality and positive virtue that he recognized— from within—that the new developments in boxing had profound implications for the practice of poetry, and that he realized these implications in the elaboration of a unique and revolutionary way of life. Affirming that “every great artist has the sense of provocation,” he developed this sense to a degree undreamed of before him. Himself the product of a good classical education (he “possessed a British culture of the best type,” according to Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, and spoke three languages fluently) he was ferociously anti-academic, and made a point of insulting the prominent bourgeois intellectuals of his day. Acquainted with many leading poets and artists, he remained aloof from the prevailing artistic coteries, preferring the company of boxers, wrestlers, thieves, drug addicts, sexual deviates, prostitutes and lunaHGS: Cravan argued that ‘the brutalized see beauty only in beautiful things,” and looked elsewhere for a beauty worthy of what he called his “audacious modernity.” Why did he

109

write? “To infuriate.” During the period 191215 his vituperative lyricism filled the pages of a small “literary review” titled Maintenant (Now), which he edited, published and peddled

(at 25 centimes a copy) from a pushcart that he wheeled through the Paris streets. The fourth issue featured his hilariously scathing critique of the Paris Independents’ Exhibition, which André Breton hailed as “the masterpiece of humor applied to art criticism.” Its libelous statements cost Cravan eight days in jail. Scornful of “good breeding” and conventional behavior, he perpetrated scandals wherever he went. He liked to boast that he had committed the “perfect burglary” in a Swiss jewelry store. In cafes and night-clubs he delivered outrageous lectures, and gave demonstrations of his boxing and dancing, always to the consternation of his audience. At one lecture he also fired several rounds of a revolver.

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In New

York,

1917, in the early days of

Dada, Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp

invited him to speak at the opening of the American Independents’ Exhibition, hoping for a scandal. reported,

The

result, as an eye-witness

went beyond all their expectations. Cravan arrived very late, pushing his way through the large crowd of very smart listeners. Obviously drunk, he had difficulty in reaching the lecture platform, his expression and gait showing the decided effects of alcohol. He gesticulated wildly and began to take off his waistcoat. [Then] he began to undo his suspenders. The first surprise of the public at his extravagant entrance was soon replaced by murmurs of indignation. Doubtless the authorities had already been notified for, at that moment, as he leaned over the table and started hurling one of the most insulting epithets in the English language at his audience, several policemen attacked him suddenly from behind, and handcuffed him with professional skill. He was manhandled [and] dragged out ... while the protesting crowd

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Jack Johnson and Arthur Cravan, Barcelona

1916

110

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made a tumultuous exit. If we add that it was a very smart audience, that the most beautiful Fifth Avenue hostesses had been urged to be present—all those who professed interest in painting and had come to be initiated into the new formulae of “futurist” art—it will be seen that the scandal was complete. “What a wonderful lecture,” said Marcel Duchamp, beaming, when we all met that evening. . .°

As a notoriously impulsive boxer, over six feet talland weighing 231 pounds, Cravan must have appeared to many as a menacing figure. (Consciousness of his size and strength may have helped determine the totemic sign he seems to have chosen for himself: the elephant, which recurs so frequently in his imagery.) But those who knew him best knew he was no bully. Gabrielle Buffet-Picaba found him “a devoted friend, anxious to help and to be counted on.” That he was no stranger to tenderness is further suggested by his wife, the poet Mina Loy. To the question, “What has been the happiest moment of your life?” she replied simply, “Every moment I spent with Arthur Cravan.” Taking risks as casually as most people take their meals, Cravan early abandoned all hope for a “normal” life. He was a man outside the law, against the law, living by his wits from one escapade to another. On 7 March 1914 he signed himself “Arthur Cravan, confidenceman, sailor on the Pacific, muleteer, orangepicker in California, snake-charmer, hotel thief, logger in the great forests, former boxing champion of France, grandson of the queen’s chancellor, chauffeur in Berlin, burglar, etc., étc:, eter Throughout World War I, to avoid conscription, he kept on the move, traveling with forged passports all over Europe and then to the U.S. One of his fellow passengers crossing the Atlantic was Leon Trotsky, who briefly recorded their encounter in his autobiography. The future author of Their Morals and Ours clearly was impressed by the bold draft-evader who “confesses openly that he prefers crashing Yankee jaws in a noble sport to letting some German stab him in the midriff.”

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In New York, Cravan spent most of his nights sleeping in Central Park. He told Picabia that “the squirrels have become my friends; they sleep in my pockets. But like all my friends, I must leave them.” When the U.S.

entered the war, he went to Canada and hitchhiked to the Far North. Later he went to Newfoundland. Finally he arrived in Mexico where he toyed with a silver-mining venture, prepared a lecture on Egyptian art, opened a boxing academy and then suddenly disappeared. One rumor had it that he was murdered in a Mexican dancehall, stabbed in the heart. But the truth seems to be that he took off ina boat along the coast and never returned. Mina Loy sought him for years in countless Central and South American

prisons, but to no avail. His

veloped a rigorously physical expression that transgressed all conventional limits of the poetic art. His last years were an uninterrupted demonstration of the fact that nothing can be closed off to poetic intervention. “I am all things, all men and all animals,” he proclaimed. In our own forebodingly stupid days, when true poets are almost extinct, when 999 out of 1000 of those who pass for poets are really college professors in disguise, and when virtually all of these false poets openly confess to their servile reliance on government subsidies, his exemplary recklessness and insolence are especially worth recalling. For this much is certain:

The cause

of poetry,

love and free-

dom cannot advance and conquer without a vigorous renewal of Arthur Cravan’s two-fisted assault on our whole civilization.

death was never proved; his body never found. All we know is that he set sail in the Gulf of Mexico and has never been seen again. NOTES

Cravan has generally been treated lightly by historians and critics, as a “precursor of

Dadaism.” But he was far more subversive than Dada—more passionate, more adventurous, more relentless, more daring. True, he

was a prankster and something of a roughneck, always ready for a good brawl. But he was above all a dreamer, a seeker,

a champion of

true poetic action who did all he could to demoralize the bourgeoisie and to mobilize the forces of inspired demystification. If he prefigured Dada, he also and more importantly prefigured a way of life as far beyond Dada as Dada was beyond the art of the academies. With an imperialist war raging on all sides, Cravan helped alter—decisively— the balance of forces between writing and living, between literature and poetry, in favor of everything defiantly alive. His own was a life ever on the brink, but he lived it to the hilt. One of the first

to exemplify Lautréamont’s program of generalized poetry (“poetry made by all”), he de-

1. For biographical data on Cravan see Gabrielle BuffetPicabia, “Arthur Cravan and American Dada,” in Robert Motherwell, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets (New York: Wittenborn, 1951), pp. 13-17; “Arthur Cravan,” Maintenant, with an introduction by Bernard Delvaille (Paris: Losfeld, 1957); and Maintenant, facsimile edition, with an introduction by Maria Lluisa Borras (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1977). 2. Denzil Batchelor, British Boxing (London: Collins, 1948), p. 32. 3. Jack Johnson, Jack Johnson—In the Ring and Out (Chicago: National Sports Publishing Company, 1927), p. 105. Cravan’s admiration for Johnson was boundless; see his interview in The Soil (New York, April 1917) in which he praised the great fighter as “a man of scandal” —‘“‘anything that has to do with Johnson has to do with a crowd of policemen” — and included him along with Poe, Emerson and Whitman among the “most glorious” Americans. . Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, op. cit., p. 15. . Ibid., p. 14. . Pierce Egan, Boxiana—Sketches of Ancient and Aunt Modern

Pugilism,

facsimile

of the

1812

edition

(Leicester: Vance Harvey, 1971), p. 346. 7. André

Breton, Anthologie

de (humor

noir (Paris:

Pauvert, 1966), pp. 428-429. 8. Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, op. cit., p. 15. 9. Response to an inquiry in The Little Review (May 1929). 10. Leon Trotsky, My Life (New York, Pathfinder Press,

1970), p. 268.

i

Poet and Boxer or, The Soul in the Twentieth Century Arthur Cravan Translated by Lorna Scott-Fox

Houiaiaia! | was off to America in 32 hours. Just back from Bucharest two days ago, I was in London and I ran into the man I needed: He was to pay me all expenses for a 6-month tour, no strings, get that! but really I didn’t give a damn. And then I wasn’t about to deceive my wife!!! So shit! And then you won’t guess what I had to do—lI had to fight under the pseudonym of Mysterious Sir Arthur Cravan, the poet with the shortest hair in the world, grandson of the Queen’s Chancellor, naturally, nephew of Oscar Wilde, renaturally, and Lord Alfred Tennyson's great-nephew, rerenaturally (I’m getting smart). My fighting was something completely new: Tibetan style, the most scientific known to man,

a whole lot worse than jujitsu: one finger on a nerve or a tendon and ffft! your opponent (who hasn’t been bribed, or only a little bit) keels over, thunderstruck. It’s enough to make you die laughing: houiaiaiaia! not to mention the weight of the trip in gold bars, since I’d reckoned that if all went well I would be palming 50,000 francs, nothing to be sniffed at. Anyhow, it was a lot better than the spiritualist hype I’d begun to set up. I was 17 years old and I was a house and I was going back to announce the good news to my other half who had stayed in the hotel, hoping to get something out of it, with a couple of pissed-off meatheads, a kind of painter and a poet (let’s rhyme, write a verse: your nose in my arse), two of my admirers (you don’t say!) who had bored me for close to an hour with their tales of Rimbaud, free verse, Cezanne, Van Gogh, oh la la la la! Renan I think it was, and then I don’t remember what. I found Mrs Cravan alone, and I told her what had come up as I was packing, because I had to get a move on. In two beats, in three

movements I folded up my silk socks—12 francs a pair—which put me in the same league as Raoul

Le Boucher,

and my shirts, with a few

scraps of dawn still clinging to them. In the morning I gave my lawfully wedded wife my dappled willow and stuffed five crispy-fresh 1 00franc abstractions into her hand and went off to piss like a horse. In the evening, I accomplished one or two twangawangs on my fiddle, kissed my baby on his little prick, and cooed over my lovely kids. Then, when I was waiting to go, and dreaming about my stamp collection, I paced the floor with my elephant gait, swinging my magnificent lemon and breathing in the endearing, ubiquitous fragrance of farts. Quarter after six. Ffft! down the stairs. I leap into a taxi. It was cocktail time. The big million-weight moon beamed down parallels witha digested blue lumbago pill. I was 34 years old and I wasa cigar. I'd folded all two meters of me into the car where my knees deployed two entire glazed worlds and I could see purple cartilage swerving over green beefsteaks on the rainbow-spattered pavement. Golden specimens brushing the iridescent beams of the trees, the solar plexi of bipeds draw up short; and then, with pink fringes and buttocks extending sentimental landscapes, passers-by of the adorable sex; and now and again I could still spot a dazzling phoenix or two appear among the defecators going up in flames. My impresario was waiting for me, as we’d fixed, on platform 8, and right away I renewed my delighted acquaintance with his vulgarity, his cheeks like veal and carrots, which I knew were tasty, his hair manufacturing yellow and vermillion, his coleopteroid

intelligence,

and by his

right temple, a uniquely charming spot, and the pores of his skin, spun outward from his golden time-piece. :

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I picked a corner ina first-class carriage, and made myself comfortable. I mean I positioned my tenderizers and stretched my legs with the utmost simplicity And under my lobster skull I rolled my World’s Champion eyeballs Seeing the crowd assembled, and half at random when I spotted a gentleman, a chemist or a clerk, And smelling like a concierge or a pelican. Hnnf, hnnf! I liked that: his feelings Unfolded herbivorously And his look did just remind me Of the time I used to sleep in the intimacy of my big dumb-bell and, to be sure! in a kind of very genuine adoration and other stuff quite hard to express in front of the motherofpearl egoist, Drawn and corked by me in my Atlantic eyes, I sized up his forearm like a sacred relic And likened his stomach to the glare of supermarkets. Tickets, please! Doggone! I’m sure, certain, that 999 people out of 1000 would have had their taste-buds absolutely knocked out by the ticket-collector’s voice. Yes, I’m sure, and yet, to be quite frank, it didn’t bother

me at all, quite the contrary; in the homogeneous compartment, its timbre had the same sweetness as the tweet tweet of little birds. The beauty of the seats looked the better for it, if that’s possible, so that I wondered if I weren’t suffering from incipient ataxia, still staring over at the little bourgeois gent, tucked lovingly inside his arsehole, and wondered what could be so special about this slab of heavyweight in front of me dozing several fathoms down. I thought: Never have I seen a moustache give off such intense body, and more than that, in God’s name, I love you:

And as all other-eating* In the love of your heating, Our waistcoats Wire each other violets, As, cherished and cauliflower, I run your scales Splash your hue

As in a mixed pail Of Johnson, walrus and wardrobe Our shit refires its moires, Fff! the racket

Of the jacket. In the abdominal Finale! All landlords are termites, I said suddenly, to rouse the little gent—I was fed up with him—and to scandalize him. Then, fixing him in the whites of his eyes, I said again: Yes, quite so, sir, I’m not afraid to repeat it, whatever the consequences—over my dead body and by the dearmossyfriend of my foodster, all landlords are term---mites. By his highly riled expression I could see that he took me fora madman or a terrible thug, but he made as if he didn’t understand, so scared was he that I’d plant one

of my tenderizers on his mouth. *other-eating: in French, allophage, a neologism of Cravan’s, defined by him as “one who ideally eats others.”

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It was stupid of me, though, especially with a mind like mine, not to have noticed earlier an American woman and her daughter sitting practically in front of me. It took the mother going off to the can for me to realize, and then I escorted her there in spirit Dreaming of her deposits, her entire purse, And when she took her seat again I was jealous of her earrings and | fancied that she was beautiful with all her money and never mind her wrinkles and her old crackling: Really she’s got charm for a heart led by its nose which doesn’t give a damn about anything that doesn’t pay and I yelled into my own ear: Grrr! to jerk you off, dragging you off to the can! I'll give you kittens, old bitch! Funnier still, and typical of me: Having turned my attentions to the younger one and dreamed of squeezing money out of her mummy by any means whatever, I was soon at the point, in my devilish way, where I| longed for a bourgeois existence in her company—it’s true, and I couldn’t stop thinking, what an arsehole you look. And as for you, honeypie, you could change my life. Oh, if only you’d marry me. I’ll be kind to you and we’ll go everywhere buying up happiness but we'll live in a flashy hotel in San Francisco. My impresario can get stuffed (wait till he gets the news, the pig!). We'll spend whole afternoons making love astride the sofas of the livingroom, with our heads in a nose-dive and our lucid bellies. We'll ring for room service at your slightest whim. Look, the rugs will be flaming

Priceless pictures, furniture that fattens Into rolled chests and dressers framing A reddening plexus, That'll plug our golden organs to the nexus, The paralytic walls Eliminating sapphires Will do gymnastics Of ibex and of tapir; On the charmed seats, With our webbed feet, We'll rest our heavy breasts,

In the purring We'll be savoring Oysters with our tongues And imprinting the satin with velvet farts Like noodles, and indifferent thoughts Can stuff us like geese While our two groins Tougher than two shoes, and joined While radiating liver-warmth Shall soak in their intestinal dawns. I say, boy! Here we are: Liverpool—it was my manager’s voice. Allllright. Arthur Cravan

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THE INTERSTELLAR JAMES

CONNECTOR

G. SPADY

J. Soaring through the air. Clipping the Bird’s wings. Amazing Grace. Clipping. Lines encircling the court. He is the legist. The Dr. J. Wayward seeking. A multi-million product. An engaged player. It is he who circles the squares.

4]

Photo Leandre by Jackson

“The Doctor.” “I betcha he’s going to be in surgery after meeting the Bird” said a stray phantom. Night signature. The Court. Feet above

the floor.

The Float.

Seering,

seeking, curving, pouncing, bouncing. Grace. Amazing J. Amazing Grace. Defensive opponent posture—J Block. TheDr.’scell. His drive is molecular, miraculous, marvelous.

Enchanting, Skillfully studying his opponent. He’s got his black bag. Case history. He’s always on the case. The Case Dr. The gooddoctor. The Jaybird flees the entrapment.

Never. Games. Never seen a doctor with more slick tricks, more maneuvering than that Doctor. Dra

Whose life connects the migratory sea the sky serene the restless mind the quiet being the light that sees the black that shines the voice that speaks the unutterable mystery — Toomer

116 The Doctor

The double I The cleft sky The parted ocean The fissured land Healed over by the passing hand — Toomer

The Doctor’s hands ever-moving. Leaping legs. Skewing, moving always near the edge of life. What spirit drives this mortal whose life connects the migratory sea? Seel told you that the 90-minute trip from New York to Phillytown would forever emblazon the blood’s blood across the red sea. The Camdencorridor. Theseal. The Academy House. Healed over by the passing hand 6ers. The 76ers. Origins. Deep passages. Middle passage. Evenings sealed. Last Quarter. J still searing. The Miraculous Doctor. The Powerhouse. He whose melanin dictates style. The melanoid. The Subway. The Rolls. Underground. Music. Breeze. Movement. Goal. Let It Flow. His isa restless mind. One who is touched by the black that shines. Controlled energy. Motionless motions. Groupconceptor. Feels his aides. Learned the awesome responsibility of leadership. Soulmates/ Teammates. Shares the communion with Cunningham. Grewiup ina vacuous environment. Healed over by the passing hand. Therein lies the Dr.’s strength. Secrets. Dark spaces. Aries-born woman. Enflamer. Consumer. Space-settler. Language arbiter. Plays it safe but keen observer of the world. Seldom voices rank actions encircling him. Slides out. Lets it flow all over the court. An Astro Profiler. J. The Quiet being. Had not his elder in the Primitive Baptist Church foreseen this man of his fathers? He’s ever-focusing on the light that sees. The Passing Hand. And when he speaks. Silence. Style. Substance never existed as an entity unto it-

self. serene.

Where

lives connect the sky remains

Timeless, tumultuous,

clairvoyant.

Disciplined. He is the Court Doctor. J is to Basketball what Stevie is to music. The establisher. The wave length. The hushed Stadium/ 6,000. Blinders keep them away. Melanocytes absent. He speaks in clipped tongue. Hisreacha grasp. Silent migratory leaps. Symbolism enmeshed in the structuralist perspective. The Double Joy. Joy Jump. J encircling the space. Peacefully, serenely, moving to the music of ages. Tunedin. Coppertoned doctor. She enters the stadium. Turquoise. Green light suggesting life itself. Equation fulfilled. The other half of Jay's strength. The humidifier. Perplexing. Querying. Sensitive. Perceptive. Ever-watching the insectuous objects within arm’s distance. Stylist. Theinternalcohesion. Hers is the voice that speaks the unutterable mystery. Game time. Light dinner. Drinks. Fruit juice freak. Ebony. Interstellar connector. Visionary. Whose life connects the migratory sea? How does he see the very bottom of the sea? Skindiver. Sky driver. Commutes to space each game. Loves to pay ball like so many bloods. Descended from a long line of basketball chiefs. It is not only his ability to score points. Itis the Amazing Grace. How sweet itsounds. To arrest the restless mind. To quiet the being. To unshackle the mind; sight restored to the irrevocable blind. So wonderful is the flow that time paces merely steps ahead. On his shoulder lies the ever-present weight of melanocytes and sights/ sounds. A voice tobeheard. A passing hand. Sepia Frére. Another game. Legend restores memories. The Dr. restores energy. At3:00 a.m. bloods can be found in mid-July on many a Philly court. The midsummer night breeze pushes the ball slightly, slowly, curvaceously in the basket. “The Doctor.” The Voice that speaks— ' The Unutterable Mystery. J.

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HARMOLODIC — HIGHEST INSTINCT SOMETHING

TO THINK ABOUT Ornette Coleman

I use the term imagination like I use the terms religion and gospel. Imagination becomes something you wish to bring into existence. I don’t think a healthy imagination can dominate people. You have to share imagination so that youll appreciate it and those in your environment will appreciate it. Imagination has quite a bit to do with what we call life style. But the style isn’t as free as the social style that we have in life. For example, life style doesn’t tell you that if you dress in ancestral clothes, or if you dress in western clothes, that people will

see you as such. If I dress up in African clothes and walk the streets of the United States no one is going to say there’s an African. They will say, “Oh there goes a guy dressed up like an African.” If I put on western clothes they'll say, “There’s a black guy with a three-piece suit on.” Therefore the costume that you wear doesn’t tell anybody what you are. So that’s what I mean by the imagination. When I speak of rhythm I’m speaking about the oxygen for the notes. The beat or the time is the constant format. It’s the mechanical part of motion. Rhythm is the freest part of that motion. The beat is the cement for the road. It’s the road that you’re traveling on. The road doesn’t necessarily ever change. Rhythm can be harmonic or melodic. Most listeners and players think of rhythm as the drums and think of non-rhythm as sound or words. To me they’re the same. You can be moved rhythmically or non-rhythmically. Improvising is a word used to express music that is not being written and calculated at the moment. Once I heard Eubie Blake say that when he was playing in black bands for white audiences, during the time when segregation

Ornette Coleman.

Photo by Amoo

was strong, that the musicians had to go on stage without any written music. The musicians would go backstage,

look at the music, then

leave the music there and go out and play it. He was saying that they had a more saleable appeal if they pretended to not know what they were doing. The white audience felt safer. If they had music in front of them, the audience would think that they were trying to be white. So that’s what I think about the word improvis-

118

The same paint and canvas. What I’ve tried to ing. It’s outdated. The term doesn’t describe the musician’s individual struggle for expres- do is find out why a particular western form of sion. Usually the person improvising has to music has to always be designed for only a use some sort of vehicle to let you know he’s certain age group, or for a certain class of doing that. It’s a limited term. Memory has a people, in order for it to become successful. lot to do with improvisation. People enjoy the I’m designing my music for humanity. I realize music they’ve heard before, much more than that we (the human society) have been through the music they haven’t heard. To me that’s like education, etc. We have all made judgements memory. The same sensations that made them based upon class. I want to get to the essence enjoy what they liked in the past, when it was of what it is, in order to be free of design. In the present, wasn’t memory. That was an ex- other words, I don’t write or design a particular piece of music for a specific person or a perience. In this society the present is called pop specific audience, although what I’m doing is music. Lately I’ve been reading in the paper for human consumption. I think of my music that that kind of stimulation for the senses is at as having some sort of healing quality, like a very low ebb. The pop scene is intensely flat. religion or medicine. There’s a lot of emo I mean there’s nothing exciting going on. Pop tional love that’s closer to religion in music. music is based upon songs with lyrics. Mostly 9, eo oe, oe Me on oe Cn oe oa, on on 2 e Se, Me On, the lyrics are in English, but pop music is LOU UL US OO OSLO UO UD US OO OSU OU OCS UDO SO really any song that has a lyric regardless of Ancestral Links what language is used whether it’s African pop, American pop, etc. Without a catchable melody or an emotional experience, pop music Sound and music have the attributes of sound doesn’t have the depth of other music. medicine and the emotional depth ofa religious connotation. I have always thought of expressO, Me Me Me Me Mo Me Ho a se es oe He Oe Cn re LOOPS OS OPC O US UO USCS VOTO VOU OUD ing music with those qualities even when I was in California trying to get out of bebop. I still Music for Humanity have this same feeling. Instrumental music, the music usually labeled There is no real North American system. classical music and jazz music, doesn’t depend White people in North America are still reon past memory as much as it depends on the stricted to their own ancestral culture. North present memory. People seem to use their memAmerican culture is an inversion of European ory for the past instead of allowing themselves culture. The non-European people in North to enjoy what their present memory would America are forced to relate to the same Euromean to them in the future. What I’m saying pean ancestors that white Americans relate to about memory is that the formats, or the because that has been the standard here. Howingredients that go into making what is called ever, there are some young white people today soul music, pop music, country and western who are trying to create for themselves another and rhythm and blues is the same identical concept of what they call culture. Most nonwords, the same identical notes, the same identiwhite people in the United States feel they’re cal time. It’s like a puzzle. If you want a doing this naturally because they’re Americans. puzzle that looks like a car, you put the pieces It's very hard for ethnic groups in a society together to look like a car, but it’s still a puzzle. that has designed the life style to be a certain So basically, we— including jazz, classical and way, for a certain race of people, to see themthe music I play— all use the same ingredients. selves as part of the design without having.the

119

tools to enjoy what that design has meant for others. In the life style of America the pop song is extremely limited. If we could turn on the radio and hear any language in a pop sound, then pop music might be very exciting. But most people who don’t speak English in the United States are cast out of that expression. English is spoken to the masses, but it is not the only language that is spoken in the country. In years to come maybe all ethnic groups in the U.S. will be able to express their own origins, their own ancestral links and birthrights. LOLA o, o, o, &, , So «50sfe-9: ee o-«fo-0% S0-