The Zorba Method

In telling the stories of Line, Marty and Paul, I believe I’ve been quite brave, showing their sibling rivalry, their misery at being unusual as teenagers, their youthful passions and misconceptions. It seems now that as we go into their lives as adults, I must continue to be brave. Braver.

As the 1960’s became the 1970’s, the peaceful revolution went underground. People began to explore their inner selves, believing that if they raised their own consciousness, the world as a whole would benefit. A fair bit of self-indulgence went along with this!  Line, Marty and Paul are no exception. I am going to have to describe the part in their lives played by sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

We were certain that “the body was the unconscious” [Wilhelm Reich], that the body expressed one’s innermost self. Everything one did, how one dressed, how one moved, what one said, was revealing. We were certain we could start with a blank page, express exactly what we wanted to be, that the potentials for being human had scarcely been scratched, that we could move further toward investigating their limits. Desire was, for each of us, an earnest of truth.

From the movie Zorba, the Greek

We developed what I used to call the “Zorba method,” named for Nikos Kazentzakis’ character, Zorba the Greek. The philosophy was: act freely, fear nothing, live in the moment. Trust your desires to show you yourself. Know that you will come to end of them. Don’t avoid or go around trouble. Go through it! In those early days in San Francisco, it could be considerable.

Like the young English teacher in Kazentzakis’ book, I arrived in San Francisco full of book learning, shy, disciplined. As the eldest in a large family, I was not indulged. I was sure that the only way to become who I wanted was to do what I was told and work very hard. And only as I served others would they love me. I needed to let go, get into trouble, trust myself and learn to dance.

I did that. Delight, beauty and awe seemed to be around every corner. The intensity and variety of the music took us there, as did unexplainable, diverse friendships, and as many experiences as we could pack into a weekend and still get to work on Monday morning! Exploring a town Herb Caen extolled every day in the newspaper as Bagdad by the Bay (at the time meaning a place of unimaginable splendor!), we reached a shining coastline in three directions. We had enough money to eat interesting things, buy second-hand clothes and indulge ourselves in many and various arts. The flip of a thumb took you far from the city into natural wilderness preserved for all of us by diligent men and women.

The young people I know today could not read Zorba the Greek without commenting on his attitude toward women. But political correctness is a poor substitute for passion, I believe.  And one learns from neither literature nor life if his or her tea cup is so full there is no room for more.

In exploring our desires, I doubt that we were worse than many others. Certainly the culture as a whole has slid into a prurient interest in each other’s darkness, which everyone assumes is there. Self-indulgence does have its consequences and I don’t want to shy away from describing them. Line, Marty and Paul now tremble in that early and dangerous time of openness between the ages of 20 and 30. I want to emphasize the bright sides of my characters, the astonishing beauty of each upstanding person, flowering in so many and various ways. Brightness and shadow make up the whole, helping them grow into real people.

Poor People's Campaign

As a young, barely-politicized person, I ran across a notice inviting people to come to Washington, D.C., with a group studying non-violence. Leaving from Ann Arbor, the plan was to stay in churches and college dorms for a week, participating in marches and meetings in Resurrection City, built along the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. I signed up with the group of eight or so people.

The campaign had been Martin Luther King’s idea, but he was killed in April, 1968, and the campaign started in May. It was left to Ralph Abernathy to head up the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I recall how tired Abernathy appeared to me, sitting across from him in a poorly attended meeting. By contrast, Jesse Jackson was everywhere! He was only 27 and had been leading an SCLC operation in Chicago. His upstart, attention-getting ploys caused a rift with Abernathy later. But Jackson’s attempt to downplay race in the struggle against poverty and the grass-roots organizations he created were certainly affected by his experiences at the Poor People’s Campaign.

In addition to poor black people, Dr. King had reached out to Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and poor white Appalachians, all of whom came to Resurrection city. Multi-cultural experiences and classes for all were held in the “Soul Center” tent in the middle of the city. I’ve since learned that the Highlander Folk Center and the Smithsonian Institution assisted.

Every night, under the Lincoln Memorial, with acres of people around the reflecting pool singing along and dancing, groups played pop music. It seemed to mostly be a Motown Sound. Marshall Tate, who became a friend that week, drew me instead to the tent nearby where the old blues and bluegrass people were playing and Pete Seeger moderated the evenings. Seeger had been blacklisted from being on television in the early years of the 1960’s when I was watching, so I’d never seen him though we were all singing his songs. I don’t remember exactly who we saw, but probably John Lee Hooker, Flatt and Scruggs, lots of banjo pickers.

An odd thing about the present, is that you don’t know the significance of what you are doing until later. It is only now, forty-five years later, that some of the pieces click into place. For instance, marching in a long, winding column throughout the capitol alongside a nondescript middle-aged white man, I heard the whispers, “That’s Dave Dellinger.” I knew he was a peace activist, but it is only now that I am aware of his power and significance. He was 53 at the time and had been a conscientious objector during the Second World War. All through the 1950’s and 60’s he participated in freedom marches in the South and hunger strikes in jail, eventually coming to apply the principles of nonviolence to the anti-Vietnam war movement. He was indicted later in 1968, along with the rest of the Chicago Eight.

June 18, 1968, Washington, D.C.

Marshall and I stayed on in Washington when the others left, marching, exploring and going to the Smithsonian. I recall the warm rains which left mud everywhere and getting arrested (actually taken to a police station!) because I was jaywalking, barefoot and looked like a hippie. Delicious bread was baked in coffee cans day after day by an older couple in blue denim. On June 6, hitchhiking back to Ann Arbor, we got into a car and heard that Robert Kennedy was dead. Marshall says that when speaking to groups as part of his work for the Pacific County Democrats, he always mentions this. “It was a life-defining moment for me,” he says.

The Poor People’s Campaign is generally seen as a failure because it did not produce anti-poverty legislation, it didn’t get much press coverage and the campaign died out in the middle of June. Residents were divided about whether they wanted to share in America’s “culture of abundance” or revolt against it. One of the mule trains, however, did travel to both the Republican and Democratic conventions that year. And the campaign’s legacy lives on in the indelible experiences of those who were there.

None of my characters attends the Poor People’s Campaign. Marty is in California in 1968, Line is pregnant and working, and Paul is in Minnesota. But my own involvement informs the writing and everything that happens in With One Hand Waving Free.

"What's Happening, Man?"

In the process of finishing the book With One Hand Waving Free, the task I set for myself this year, I can report that I just finished Chapter 14 and thus am half way through the book. The part I’m working on, set in 1968, is intense for Line because she finds herself accidentally pregnant and is not at all sure her politically-active boyfriend Stephen wants to become an involved parent. Marty meets Erik, a student of architecture at the University of California, who will mystify her for years. And Paul moves further north, into a larger Minnesota college to finish his B.A.

Line, Marty and Paul do not know that it is “1968”. Their own awakening lives absorb them. Paul does not know that when he plays the guitar and sings “Take my hand, Precious Lord,” that it will be sung at Martin Luther King’s funeral in April. Line does not know when she sees Tom Hayden, his sad, charismatic face all broken out from living on peanut butter and coffee, sitting on a stairway in a hall where Democratic convention tactics are being discussed, that he is the poster child for the year. Marty does not know that watching Janis Joplin perform with a boozy passion, accompanied by her band Big Brother and the Holding Company at the Carousel ballroom above an auto showroom in San Francisco, is a historic event.

June 24, 1968 Washington, D.C.

1968 “rocked the world” according to those looking back. As a student in a Master’s program, I spent most of the year on the active University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor. I marched in Washington, D.C. during the Poor People’s Campaign, traveling with a group studying non-violent action. In August I took a job in Chicago just as the Democratic convention was getting underway. The urgency behind me was more directed toward earning a living than working toward social justice, but I did what I could. Nevertheless, by the end of the year, having moved far from my origins, I was too sick to work and landed back in the bosom of my family. I was grateful they took me in and took care of me until my next foray into the great world.

The world is very large. In 1968 it was knit together by television, which provided nightly news almost raw, lifting events into a visibility upon which people could place their own value. At the time we did not know that the tide was turning, that there would never be another 1968. It was just what was happening. A question which we began to ask each other frequently! “What’s happening, man?” Because something surely was.

Balcony Seat

When I first began to live in cities in the late 1960’s, the heady feeling of intellectual freedom I found there was very much associated with coffee shops. Coffee was delicious, especially dosed with lots of cream and sugar, and the accompanying toasted bagel or pastry was inexpensive, my love of sweet buttery wheat a tie to home. Most of all, I was purchasing a seat at the endless street carnival of the city while connecting it to the extravagant life I lived in my head and put down in the notebook in front of me.

Caffe Mediterraneum, Berkeley, CA

I usually had a favorite cafe, associated with the places and times I worked, though they often changed. If it disappeared it was like losing a friend. For writing, one of the best was on Sutter Street in San Francisco, on the second floor above an art supply store. The tables were not so close together that you couldn’t overhear others if you wanted to, but far enough apart that you could hear yourself think. Best of all, you could sit at a window and look down into Sutter Street, watching people. The light at a particular time of day, the shape of the room, the demeanor of the server, all made up the atmosphere which acquired an almost religious significance. The mystique had to do with the brioche they served, the people I had seen from the windows walking up the street, the friends I met there.

Not least, were the words I read and sometimes wrote in these hallowed spaces. Writing was an evocation of the senses. As in drawing, the more detail you noticed, the more evocative the piece became. I was addicted to writing, to putting on paper words connecting mind and world. Not so much as a letter written to the world, but to my growing self. It turned out I wasn’t alone!

By the time Natalie Goldberg made writing in restaurants almost a cliché, I was done. Not with journaling, of course, but with sitting in public places to do it. These days, while bookstores close, Moleskine, whose revived notebooks are world-famous, is opening its own stores! In their words, they represent, “around the world, a symbol of contemporary nomadism.” It turns out your notebook can tie your whole, roaming life together!

For Marty, the middle sister who has always loved books and whose horizons widen to California in about 1967, coffee shops are thrilling. She lives with a Jewish family, the members of which enlighten her about politics. She is homesick, but family life eases the difficulty of crossing yet another cultural divide.

Having found a life I love and no longer so much in need of intellectual refuge, I nevertheless still enjoy the balcony seat at a wonderful coffee shop on occasion. No laptop sits in front of me, separating me from the world. The cup of coffee, the buttery croissant, my pen rather connect me to it, my hands moving between them with delight.

Hitchhiking

In the late 1960’s I did a lot of hitchhiking with friends. We did get into trouble sometimes, but nothing we couldn’t get out of. And the stories of the astonishing variety of people who picked us up and took care of us would make a novel in itself. I note that it is still common in Europe.

In the spring of 1967 we didn’t have backpacks. My friend Jean Olson and I, just 21, left Oxford, England in April for a few open-ended weeks, planning to visit friends stationed in the Army in Germany, and hoping to get as far south as Greece. We each carried a train case, with a change of clothes, a student hostel membership, and the Let’s Go: Europe guidebook. What I can’t remember is whether we actually wore nylon stockings! Skirts, flats, for sure, but nylons? Maybe.

Although, With One Hand Waving Free is something of a Bildungsroman, it doesn’t have a lot of space for a three-week trip on the continent of Europe. Marty hitchhikes with a friend down to Greece and the openness she gains from it definitely goes in the book. With little experience of the world, what unfolds in front of her is full of terror and delight. But here is one story from my trip with Jean which won’t make it into the book:

After a few days on Corfu and in Athens, we got rides with truckers on the long haul up through what was then Yugoslavia. One of them deposited us at the Hotel International in Zagreb (now Croatia), where we rested. We had been up all night in the cab of a truck, regaled with a big slab of chocolate and Turkish coffee for breakfast!

The next day we made it to Ljubljana (now in Slovenia), but as we stood that afternoon on a busy street, thumbing, we were approached by two girls, one of whom spoke excellent English. “You’re not going to get a ride there,” she said. “It’s Sunday! Come with us to a coffee house and stay with us tonight. Tomorrow we’ll show you where we usually hitchhike from.” They liked to go up into the mountains to the north to ski.

The two blonde girls took us to a large room open to the air where, at round tables, with many small glasses in front of each of them, people sat talking. Musicians played in a corner, accordion and fiddles, and often people got up to dance. Rounds of liqueurs began to be set in front of us, astonishing me. I had never had these small brandies and spirits, flavored with all kinds of fruits and herbal infusions. “Try this one, try this one,” we were asked. Exotic Americans as we were at the time, many wanted to talk to us. Places at the table kept shifting and the light settled into evening in the festive, open cafe.

When it grew dark, we were taken to dinner at the younger girl’s apartment. She spoke less English and it was a little hard to understand who lived there, but certainly her father and siblings. Fed meat (though our pale girlfriend didn’t eat any) and given beds with embroidered linen coverlets in the guest room, we felt we were getting the royal treatment in this odd, socialist country.

The next day, the girls indeed found a better place for us to hitchhike. Their only request was that we send them sunglasses. We did try, but we never heard whether the sunglasses arrived at their destination. All through the Bosnian War, I wondered about these girls whose faces I haven’t forgotten. Where were they and what happened to them when Yugoslavia split up into so many countries?

I no longer have any documentation for this trip, but many of the faces, the smells, the places, our fears and our delights are as vivid as anything that happened recently.

Choral Music

“I have an affinity with Arctic places. Mediterranean passion has been documented very well, it has been fashionable for centuries. But the Artic brand of passion is different. Not more or less passion, but it lies differently. It’s a lot deeper. So it’s more a sort of submarine passion and it won’t burst out easily to the open.” Bjork, 2003 interview on “Inside Bjork.”

One of the ways in which northern passion is channeled and expressed, I believe, is in choral music. While Line comes to terms with politics and life in Chicago and Marty attends lectures at Oxford University in England, Paul goes on choir tour. Though I was never in a touring choir myself, my brother and sister (and nephews!) have been. In at least one case, the easy camaraderie of choir tour had a lasting influence in the form of a spouse!

The great American Lutheran church schools across the Midwest were blessed with extraordinary choir directors. Weston Noble at Luther College led the music department for 57 years and was guest director for over 800 music festivals on four continents. F. Melius Christiansen, Norwegian-born but trained in Leipzig, Germany, led the St. Olaf College choir for 30 years, a pioneer in the art of a cappella, or unaccompanied, choral music. His son Olaf led the St. Olaf choir after him, and his son Paul J. Christiansen led the Concordia College choir. The Christiansen choral tradition was spread throughout American Lutheranism, partly through hundreds of choral compositions and arrangements.

Here is the Augustana College choir singing a Paul J. Christiansen arrangement of one of my favorite hymns:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIBNWZmb6y8

Choral music developed out of the mass, of course. In the Anglican tradition, choral masses are sung regularly. Marty, in Oxford, England, is blessed to be able to hear Evensong sung by wonderful boys’ choirs at Magdalen, Christ Church or St. John’s almost any evening of the week. Several of the ancient colleges which make up Oxford University were founded with a provision for a choral foundation and school, with scholarships for the boys who attend.

It has been said that the Lutheran chorale hymn tune was the basis of much of the work of J. S. Bach, born 140 years after Luther. His music cannot be overrated for its intellectual and artistic depth. Among countless choral works, cantatas, concertos and masses, he set music to Luther’s famous hymn based on the 46^th Psalm, “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.” His “All Breathing Life Sing and Praise Ye the Lord,” a complex fugue moving from one voice to another, was frequently presented by Lutheran college choirs.

When I sang in choirs, one of our directors worked with us on the extraordinary Benjamin Britten compositions which began coming out after World War II. Britten was a leading 20^th century composer from England. I particularly was fascinated with the odd Rejoice in the Lamb, in which Britten took words from the 18^th century poet Christopher Smart, written while in an insane asylum. Set to electrifying music, the strange accents and rhythms of the words point out that cats and mice and other creatures all praise the Lord in their own forms. Here is one of many versions on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY4L72dSLDU

Even for those who were not formally music students, these rich musical traditions underlay our northern sensibility. I frequently find my characters breaking into songs both sacred and secular with which they channel their young passions!

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.