Subverting the System

In asking the question, how did young people who started with the nonviolent civil disobedience ideals of Thoreau and Gandhi get to the point of street fighting and making bombs, I’ve been reading a bunch of memoirs about the later Sixties. Fascinating people pass through these memoirs, people you may not have heard about, but whose influence or leadership was strong at the time. And because these books are reflective, looking back on a time almost fifty years ago, it is a question many of the writers ask themselves.

Tom Hayden and Dick Flacks, SDS organizers who wrote the Port Huron statement in 1962, were inspired by courageous civil rights fighters and philosophers such as A.J. Muste, to seek social justice using participatory democracy and non-violent civil disobedience. A broad-based student group, by 1965 it had begun to dawn on SDS members that, as Todd Gitlin says in The Sixties, “Suppose the New Left were only apparently small? Suppose it were actually the thoughtful, active vanguard of a swelling social force?”

Frustrated by Johnson’s escalation of the war in Vietnam, by 1966 the draft and the complicity of universities in the military-industrial complex began to take top priority on the SDS list. Greg Calvert, elected national secretary, gave a speech in early 1967 describing the difference between being liberal and being radical. Liberal reformists were always “fighting someone else’s battles.” In contrast, “radical or revolutionary consciousness is the perception of oneself as unfree, as oppressed. It leads to the struggle for one’s own freedom in unity with others who share the burden of oppression.”

“From protest to resistance,” became the rallying cry of 1967. Later that year, at the Oakland Induction Center, a demonstration against the draft led to the first heady feeling that demonstrators could take on the police and control the streets, even if only for a few hours. In the same month, October 1967, demonstrators at the Pentagon were narrowly prevented from a suicide charge by Greg Calvert and Dave Dellinger, who had intended nonviolent confrontation.

By 1968, the more radical members of the left were reading Franz Fanon, who found that in colonial settings, those who acted on their anger were more emotionally healthy and whole; and Regis Debray, who described small guerilla fighting foco groups. Some members of SDS organized themselves into guerilla fighting cadres, which were in action during the confrontations at the Democratic Convention in Chicago.

After the convention, impatience and anger led away from open-ended problem solving to ideological commitment, as described by both Bill Ayers in Fugitive Days and Cathy Wilkerson in Flying Close to the Sun. SDS split into several factions including the Weathermen, who aimed to be the most militant, aggressive, outspoken voice in the area, thereby attracting alienated young people. “This confrontational strategy seemed like it might move our aims much faster,” said Cathy Wilkerson. The group also wanted to divert police attention from black activists, who were being brutally harassed and threatened. The “Days of Rage” demonstration in Chicago in October 1969 directly confronted police but turnout was very low.

Fred Hampton, the bright, young Chicago chairman of the Black Panthers, told the Weathermen they were provoking confrontation with law enforcement in a way that was dangerous to themselves and the community around them. Hampton was killed in 1969. That same year, Dick Flacks, the least militant radical, was almost killed by an unknown attacker. Dick and his wife Mickey moved to UC Santa Barbara, where through his classes on social movements and his work with student groups, Flacks inspired young people to go into the world and “make history” for the next 37 years.

Though many people took up street fighting, the fascination with bombs can be traced to only a few. The secrecy and tight hierarchical organization of the cadres the Weathermen developed also kept many of its members from knowing what was going on.

From participatory democracy to ideology, protest to resistance, surrounded by a women’s movement which grew out of the highly-charged political atmosphere, the ongoing struggle for civil rights by blacks, and changes everywhere induced by experiments in new lifestyles, the political left did succeed in “bringing the war home,” until April 1975, when the U.S. finally left Vietnam.

My characters, Line and Marty, are driven by the necessity of finding their ways in life and earning their livings. Though Line does fall in love with a “Movement heavy” and lives in Chicago where heated political action echoes around her, her own activism turns to health and healing. Marty arrives in Berkeley in 1967, where she embraces new aesthetics and the fact that the Left Coast looks across the Pacific Rim to Asia. They both become part of the yeasty process of cultural change and its implications for the future.

Constructive Language

One’s writing comes from some deep place which is non-negotiable. Certainly it comes from forces and influences you cannot name, but which can be traced to the place, culture and times into which you were born. Perhaps our conscious, educated mind guides us, refines and edits, but in the end our language reflects, embodies exactly who we are.

I have strong reactions to books because I feel their authors so intensely, particularly in the language they use, even in a very small piece. Novels which have become well-known in the last century, sometimes referred to as the “century of the self,” have dealt mostly with the inner lives of characters. As John Bayley says, “if the early novel saw the individual as part of the social whole, the post-Dostoevsky novel has come to represent his awareness of himself as a solitary being, who wishes to dream and to act ‘as he likes.’”

Writers ride the crest of a cultural wave. The wave throughout most of my life has raised up those who plumb the depths of their existence, who examine themselves and their struggles with the social world around them. A writer who found herself, somewhat to her surprise, surfing the wave of the Sixties is Edna O’Brien. Her characters wish to dream and act as they like!

The consequences for O’Brien’s characters are devastating. Set against an all-pervasive Irish Catholic church, which is more oppressive and dangerous than salutary, Edna O’Brien’s language is controlled, but underlaid with violence. The innocence of childhood foreshadows the scars of maturity, chronicling “unflinchingly the patterns of life for women, from the high spirits of youth to the chill of middle age, from hope to despair,” according to the cover material on The Country Girls Trilogy. “My novel,” O’Brien says of her first, “was completed in three weeks. It had written itself and I was merely the messenger . . . The words tumbled out, like the oats on threshing day that tumble down the shaft.”

Out of sync with the cultural wave for most of my life, I first felt it when I wrote a letter to my college newspaper in April, 1966. The letter expressed my belief that people were spending their energy criticizing what went on around them and not appreciating what they had been given. “Must the opinions we voice be so negative generally?” I plaintively ask. (Thanks to an amazing archive program, the letter exists on-line today!) In that year, when the political left was intent on naming and reforming “the system,” this was not a popular sentiment!

Seeing the glass as mostly full, rather than mostly empty, the social whole as invoking the individual, are suspect in literature. The naked inner self and its authenticity still rules. I credit my remarkable parents with giving me the strength of mind, as well as their iconoclasm, to buck the prevailing winds. And of course, my own journey includes a great deal of soul-searching, as well as youthful exploration and rebellion. I do wish to lay claim to language as constructive, however; its ability to build as well as critique. (I'm aware that skirting the edges of platitudes can be dangerous!)

Cultural winds and waves change. I feel it in my bones. Violence and despair are not the only fruits of experience. Language which reflects hard-won inner peace may, at some point, be valued. It depends on where the story stops.

Women

Anyone would think, and I am sure you are no exception, Gentle Reader, that the writer of this blog was only interested in men! It certainly appears that most of the people I cite are men. And among living writers, I have long located myself squarely between Gary Snyder and James Salter, two extremely diverse men whose writing enthralls me.

In fact, thought is androgynous. Shirley Chang, a gifted architect [http://changbenedesign.com/], and I once discussed our determination to be androgynous in our thinking, dedicated to great thought whoever might express it. We were even happy that our first names were, very occasionally, used by men! As in everything, there is a yin and yang to thought, the yang aspects those that catch the eye.

My interest, however, is in women. If a book doesn’t have female characters, I’m not going to read it. And when Don picks out a movie said to be good but more of a “guy flick,” I ask plaintively, “Are there any women in it?” I’ve been threatening for some time to start a blog about the women characters I have loved, who have been my teachers over the years. These characters were created by both men and women, running from Aksinia, in Sholokhov’s series Quiet Flows the Don, to Abalone in Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, to Antonia in Will Cather’s book My Antonia, and Komako in Snow Country by Kawabata.

I’ve toyed with the idea of calling it Women and Mountains, because of the associations between mountains and thought, especially aspiration. Also because of the Tibetan Tara’s vow. As Gary Snyder translates it in Mountains and Rivers Without End, Tara says, “Those who wish to attain supreme enlightenment in a man’s body are many … therefore may I, until this world is emptied out, serve the needs of beings with my body of a woman.”

As a thinker, I’m interested in women, and I take Tara’s vow very willingly. The yin position is often in the background, dedicated to service, but in our fractured, corporate, robotic, arbitrary world, what catches the eye is yang energy. Many women have given themselves over to yang pretension. Service is often seen as martyrdom. It is precisely the ageless problem of understanding the less visible yin power which I wish to address in Women and Mountains.

Now, Gentle Reader, I am not promising to begin this blog just yet. I only tell you this because I am afraid you will think I give my attention solely to men. It’s not true.

Turning Over the Compost

Gary Snyder writes that sifting memories should be seen as turning over the compost. “When we deepen ourselves, looking within, understanding ourselves, we come closer to being like a mature ecosystem. Turning away from grazing on the ‘immediate biomass’ of perception, sensation and thrill; and reviewing memory … blocks of stored inner energies, the flux of dreams, the detritus of day-to-day consciousness, liberates the energy of our own mind-compost. Art is an assimilator of unfelt experience, perception, sensation and memory for the whole society.” [from “Poetry, Community and Climax,” in The Real Work: Interviews and Talks, 1964-1979, p. 173]

I like this metaphor for working with memory. Getting in there with your pitchfork, turning, aerating and sifting through the past to see what comes to light. I use a lot of plant metaphors for mental flowering. The drive to bloom is universal and the uniqueness and variety of our blooms is constantly surprising. Snyder’s way of looking at things has been an inspiration for me for many years. In the same essay, he says, “All of evolution may have been as much shaped by the pull toward climax as it has by simple competition between individuals or species.” Introducing the notion of ecological climax (the height of one’s blooming) holds implications for how to look at one’s maturity.

In sifting through my generally very sharp memories for the sake of Line, Marty and Paul, I’ve several times been surprised by the new understanding that comes up. Brought into the light, perceptions change, connections are made and ordinary things take on new shapes and meanings. Such as realizing that a relationship upon which I lavished a couple of years of attention, was probably more a mental construct of one of my friends than mine! That my mother was probably less calm and powerful than I generally found her to be. That, after 50 years, the high school girls basketball state championship I was so excited about has lost nothing of its poignancy and heroism. That the come-uppance the character most like me often got was totally deserved!

Nonetheless, memory doesn’t really work to write from. One must be wholly in the moment, the numinous, everyday present, in order to make story. As noted here in a previous blog post, Gertrude Stein states, “The business of art is to live in the actual present, that is the complete actual present, and to express that complete actual present." The present might be seen as “vertical time” as opposed to “horizontal time.” In the present, or in vertical time, the bloom we might become is wholly present as possibility, if not yet visible. But loosening the soil around those memories, giving them some compost, giving the rootlets nourishment, is bound to allow fuller bloom!

Teach-in 1965

One of the most interesting of the many forms of protest during the Vietnam war era was known as a “teach-in”. It was started at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in March, 1965. Faculty members were angered that Lyndon Johnson had ordered the bombing of North Vietnam, when many of them had helped him get elected. They thought he would be less apt than the hawkish Barry Goldwater to escalate the war.

But when Johnson went ahead, faculty members decided it was time to act. They planned a strike, but as some state retaliation was certain, a brilliant compromise was reached. Faculty decided instead to teach their classes as usual, but focus on Vietnam, its history, culture and the current US intervention. Once this was agreed upon, many more faculty joined the group and the University administration supported the event, allowing the use of auditoriums and public address equipment.

Student support for the event was overwhelming. Three thousand students attended, packing auditoriums. After evening sessions on March 25, and a midnight rally, faculty and students broke up into discussion groups and 600 students were still there at 8 a.m. the next morning. US policymakers both for and against the war spoke.  Discussion continued throughout the weekend, including information not provided by news media.

Arthur Waskow of the Institute for Policy Studies said, “This teach-in is in the true spirit of a university where students and faculty learn from each other and not from the calendar.” The teach-in was quickly adopted as a model for sharing information and ideas at other universities, and on May 15, university professors from across the country staged a national teach-in in Washington DC that included members of Congress and State Department officials.

The March 1965 teach-in helped focus the energies of young people. Bob Moses, the courageous black leader of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, said “Justice and peace are twins, just as war is the twin of racism. To win peace, you’ve got to fight for justice.” When Students for a Democratic Society president Paul Potter asked, “How will you live your life so that it doesn’t make a mockery of your values?” 20-year-old Bill Ayers found the question “rattled in my heart and my head for years to come.” [Quotes are from Fugitive Days: a Memoir, by Bill Ayers, 2001]

Universities played a vital part in opposition to the Vietnam war, giving the movement a respectability that previous anti-war protests lacked. This broadened mainstream opposition, leading eventually to the denouement of an “unwinnable” war. In 1965, Line is also 20, Marty 19. Line is attracted to many forms of activism, and in moving to Chicago, finds herself in the thick of it. Protest of any kind is slower to foment in Marty, but she too is inexorably swept into a decade of discussions of rights, racism, imperialism, education and quality of life.

Fit Company for Oneself

I finished a first draft of Fit Company for Oneself, the second book in my series. The title comes from the proverb: Education makes one fit company for oneself. The book is set from about 1960 through 1966, a time of growing ferment in the external world. Major breaks with their cultural traditions affect each of our protagonists too, as they struggle to match inner and outer selves.

Line finishes as much secondary education as she can handle and goes on to work in Chicago, meeting her match in Stephen Cohen, a young sociologist caught up in SDS and anti-war work, and getting a little closer to what her own life’s work might be. Marty graduates from Wittenberg College and plans to go to Oxford, England, the following year as an au pair girl for an American family. Paul finishes high school and wants to pursue his education somewhere no Mikkelson has gone before. For each of them, the pressure of becoming a unique individual mounts as they come of age.

Celebration, as with many people, was expressed in food and drink! A fire in the fireplace with its crackling warmth and companionship. (Don wasn’t home that evening.) A perfect Bartlett pear, blushed with salmon and orange tints, a delicate floral smell and tasting as cool and fresh as, well, a pear! A glass of crisp, tangy Kenwood Sauvignon Blanc from the nearby Sonoma County appellation. And chestnuts. I tried boiling them, but they were just as hard to peel as when I roast them! (Hint: They must be really hot when peeled.) It was worth it, though. I love the earthy, sweet taste of chestnuts with butter, salt and pepper.

The rest of the year, I’ll be working on editing this book, so I can hand it over to others to go over with a finer tooth comb than I have. And by about this time next year, it will probably be ready to go out. It is good to let a book sit, I find, gestating, gathering time and further thought.

And next year? Next year’s book is called With One Hand Waving Free. In which our protagonists begin to turn up in California and Alaska. I know what happens in it, in a general way, but working out chapters and incidents, making up the book, is some of the most fun a writer can have! Virginia Woolf writes in her diaries about wandering over the downs in the afternoons, making up her books in all weathers. It’s an image I love. With me, it happens everywhere, doing the dishes, walking to the market, waking in the morning. One is never not writing.

The Pastor's Kids

Gentle Readers, it is time to send The Pastor’s Kids out into the world. I am hoping to find a commercial publisher or independent press which will love them. By way of introduction, my wonderful husband Don Starnes helped me make a video. It isn’t quite what Don would have liked. He wanted to use actors to play the kids, but I didn’t feel I had the time that would take. So we made a two-minute video using black and white photos of the period to suggest the kids and their world. Should I be successful in finding a home for The Pastor’s Kids, you may be sure I will let you know.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hS4MU47EWFM&feature=plcp