by J. T. Marsh
Still the working man ventures beyond his own quarters, leaving the simple, staid, stout apartment blocks lined along the road and entering those quarters where once his kind had lived. After all that’s happened it might seem the working man lives a life filled with terror and lawlessness, but it’s not so. There are those little moments of peace even in a violent world. Overhead, a plane traces a white slash across the deep azure sky, a plane full of people headed somewhere, anywhere in the world but here. At the centre of a vast network of treaties, each backed by the full force of law, the working man seems lost, with none of these exigencies fitting in with one another but made to be compatible anyways. Still the working man ventures beyond his own quarters, the search for wages leading places he’d never thought he’d go. In an old industrial quarter, he looks to a small shut-down factory repurposed as a recycling centre. This isn’t the life he was promised. This isn’t the life he was sold on. As the working man returns home after another fruitless day, he withdraws into an isolation, a bottle of cheap liquor dulling his senses and fogging his mind. These thoughts, he knows, are subversive, even criminal. They should be pushed from his mind, but so long as he keeps them to himself then he can’t be implicated by them. As he shuts off the light and goes to bed, he spares himself the trauma of contemplating the consequences of these subversive thoughts, choosing instead to joy in surrender to the thought of a new tomorrow. Meanwhile, across the way an unemployed youth spray paints on the side of a bus, ‘NO SURRENDER,’ in black lettering, an act of defiance unchallenged in the night.
After what’s transpired here tonight, none of us will ever be able to forget the courses of our disparate histories joining together like all the little tributaries merging into a single river. But then none of us should ever want to forget, even as we all know we someday will. This might be the only reason I’m writing this, to give an account of these events so that, wherever this leads, we’ll have some way of thatching together some kind of narrative, even if all this turns out to be wrong. With the decaying hulks of industry long abandoned still littering the country like tombstones and with long lines for welfare cheques like a funeral procession reaching down crowded sidewalks along the city’s streets, we have seen what has happened to the working man’s livelihood, in this wondrous age of unprecedented freedoms and ever-fading lines on the map how yet the working man may find his deliverance in a new tomorrow. It’s strange, in a roundabout sort of way, that we arrive at the same place as if we’d gone right at it.
13. Nor the Traveller to the Path
Along the streets sometimes come gleaming white tour buses, filled with travellers from halfway across the world. These buses stop and unload their passengers who stand around in a gaggle and take pictures all at once; then the gaggle pile back into their bus and speed off to some restaurant where the servers speak only some language from halfway around the world. The working man rarely sees these travellers, working as he does in some dark little corner of the city, only occasionally permitted by happenstance to venture to parts beyond. Though the working man knows those very travellers may not know what they’re doing, he sees them and he has a visceral reaction to them, knowing as he does that the working man transcends all national boundaries but that so, too, do the working man’s enemies, the very people who would seek to take what rightfully belongs to him and hoard it all for themselves. If not building fortifications at police stations then it’s hastily assembling ad hoc jails on empty plots of land across England that Stanislaw Czerkawski’s been mustered into service for. In the hot and humid early summertime, he sweats to excess, returning home tired and sore. Though he’s never told the purpose given to his labour it becomes evident to him by way of his working class intuition, the instinctive sense he has that the fruits of his labour shall be used against people exactly like him. Though men like Stanislaw don’t know it, the wealthy man has learned the lessons of the failed revolution fifteen years ago, and puts those learnings to use not to ward off the next rising but to prepare himself to withstand it. Still Stanislaw sees it when ordered home at the end of the day, his wife there to welcome him back into the little sanctuary they call a home. For the migrant, Stanislaw, his is a place caught between two worlds, two identities, learning, over time, to bleed himself into the space between them, subsuming himself within the greater struggle, and in so subsuming making peace with the greater good.
Despite an excess the wealthy men continue to order production, then withhold the things produced from us by way of elaborate schemes to drive prices higher still. Valeri is confronted every day with the wealthy man’s apparatchiks on the screens gleefully declaring the rise in prices of fuel, food, and homes; a sea of green arrows pointing up represent, to Valeri, an act of thievery long escalating. “If I’d only gone over when she’d called,” he says, half-mindedly thinking of Sydney. “If you do this, you’ll be dead to me,” says Murray, the man responsible for organizing their shop’s role in the coming general strike. His voice had never sounded so cold and forbidding. But cloaked within Murray’s sudden distance, Valeri detects the slightest hint of concern. He stares hard at the table as he tries to recall his attacker, but can recall only the lifting of his head and the darkness of the alley in the dead of night. “Now,” says Murray, “it’s time to go to work.” Despite this excess in production, morale among the troops at Private Craig Thompson’s brigade is something of a valley, gently sloping downwards but forever on the verge of plummeting into an abyss. But whenever the troops muster on the armoury’s parade grounds the guns can be seen, barrels stabbing at the sky proudly. No longer have they been standing in formation for an hour when the officers arrive, Colonel Cooke not among them. In the address to the troops, the mounting unrest in the streets isn’t mentioned, instead much time devoted to praising loyalty and faithfulness to the rich and illustrious tradition which these troops are said to have inherited when once they enlisted. The thought offers Private Thompson no comfort, and he succeeds only in forcing a blank, straight-faced look. But no prepared speech can obscure the fires of liberation burning in the distance, the columns of still-invisible smoke rising from the city in the distance. These streets, they’re engulfed in chaos, but they have yet to see through their purpose. In the life of the soldier, we’ve yet to broach his true purpose, his reason for being, but the time is almost at hand when men like Private Craig Thompson will be called upon to make the choice to serve a higher purpose or to live down to the ideals of men laid out before them. The guns arrayed on the parade ground, they’re old, they’re obsolete, and they’re worth nothing on the battlefields of some distant nation against the guns of a foreign power. But this is not their true purpose. The guns, they’re made to be turned against they who would seek to oppress. And that night, as Private Thompson lies in his bunk and thinks on all that’s happened not only on this day but on all the days since he can remember he accomplishes with the passing of the day at least some small part of his own personal journey towards joining the working class struggle. His day is almost come.
Along the streets sometimes come those gleaming white tour buses, and as the working man finds himself embroiled in a steadily worsening crisis, it becomes readily apparent that he has so little to be lost in sacrifice to the struggle, that his life can only but improve in lashing out at these instruments of oppression. It’s a tempting fantasy. Until there rises something that can harness this essence of resistance and channel it into an effective fighting force, the working man stockpiles his energies for the coming war, not by his conscious actions but by some vague yet powerful instinct coming from a place somewhere near the centre of his chest. As foreign travellers come to be an increasingly common sight, so, too, does the foreign visitor come to spend increasingly more time in those glass and steel towers built where once the working man had lived, the foreign visitor in his suit and tie and with his sleek luxury car so unlike the working man in his dirty, ratty clothes and in his bus running the same route every day for years. The worki
ng man has become unwelcome in his own home. And so it is that Garrett Walker is among those evicted in waves, not by force of arms but by fiat of law, prices raised beyond what he can afford with the pittance meted out to him by his wealthy paymasters. His wife, his two daughters are steadfast in their commitment to him, just as he is steadfast in his commitment to them. They recognize theirs as values alien, hostile to the wealthy man, who seeks to manipulate them with unemployment, hunger, and fear, but they recognize this only in the basic, primal way they can. Nevermore can we look back and declare ourselves as having left for the next generation more than what we’ve had; this is Garrett’s shame. But as he looks ahead to the future he sees the promise of the coming revolution, at the dining table with his family only half-listening to his wife’s voice, half-listening still to the sounds of simmering disorder fading in through the open window.
As sirens wail to mark the latest round of protests rapidly spiralling out of control, the working man looks ahead to the coming storm with a mounting anticipation, some part of him surely wise to the vengeance soon to be meted out on his behalf. While Valeri follows Murray to the union hall, there’re others taking to work as well. Three people, Eve Hanley, Amanda Conners, and Peter Tanaka arrive at the nearest shelter, taking refuge from the coming attack. “Are you here to spend the night?” asks the lady at the counter. “I don’t know,” says Peter, the others nodding their assent. They’ve only arrived by coincidence at the same time; they don’t know each other. “We’re over-capacity as it is,” says the woman, “but if you can find a space to sit then you’re welcome to stay as long as you like.” The three enter the shelter’s assembly, only to find a sea of people with hardly any open floor space anywhere. It’s a wretched, dishevelled mass of humanity, and now Eve, Amanda, and Peter are among them. At the underground church there is not a dark essence but the essence of the light, in the shadows a hidden spirit thriving on the collective consciousness of the awakening parishioners gathered here. For Darren Wright this hidden spirit manifests itself not only in the shiver running the length of his spine whenever he receives the forbidden gospel but in his own gradual awakening to the gospel’s truth. At his side, Sheila Roberts looks on, herself growing into a spiritual accommodation with the path laid out for them. But not all is as it seems. In the night, as the rogue priest disseminates this forbidden gospel, there invades the secret presence of the dark essence expanding to fill all available space like a noxious gas. Though Darren and his young friend Sheila have come to see this place as the home of their renewed faith, Darren can’t help but feel doubt lingering in the back of his mind. He feels all the more guilty for this doubt when looking at Sheila, seeing in the light behind her eyes not the slightest doubt at all. They have hardly begun their studies of the forbidden gospel and soon enough they will be made by act of God to put what they’ve learned to good use.
Along the streets sometimes come working men to put up gleaming, glass and steel monoliths to be owned but not lived in by those travellers. It’s a rising struggle, a long, slow climb toward the end of the beginning, toward the next step into a shared history for all. The working man puts his head down and presses through the day, each smooth, rhythmic expansion and contraction of his body’s muscles moving him forward, moving him toward some unseen and unknown goal, towards his future’s end. The day is long and hard, yet it’s over almost as soon as it began. A pattern emerges. As the fires of unrest burn in the streets, the working man makes through his days, each seeing his head fill with fantasies of rebellion, impassioned and romantic scenarios playing themselves out of fists raised and scowls muscled onto faces and of crowds advancing on armed troopers with only their strength of will to muster against rifles.
In the midsummer’s sweltering heat, the working man imagines himself among a small but growing number of rebels brave enough to stand for something more than their own selves, as the cracks in the façade of the way of things begin to widen each of their number learning to provide for each other a cover for their own other way forward into the dawning of each and every new day. For Valeri, at the union hall this day there’s a rousing call to action, Murray taking to the stage with all the passion and intensity of a firebrand. “…and still they demand more,” he says, “still the wealthy demand more cuts to our wages, more of our funds diverted to fill their coffers, still higher prices at which they will sell our homes and our lives to their investors so they may fill their coffers until overflowing with their ill-gotten wealth.” At the front of the crowd, Valeri cheers and roars with every pause in Murray’s speech. When Murray fires up the crowd, Valeri can’t help but let his doubts evaporate and his confidence surge like electricity coursing through his veins. After Murray’s spoken, Valeri seizes the moment and shouts at the top of his lungs, “all power to the people!” It’s enough to make them all forget who they are and where they live, the momentary passion obscuring the harsh realities of the life waiting for them as soon as they should leave the hall. At the shelter, Eve, Amanda, and Peter sit together, afraid as they are of venturing too far from what little they know to be true. Each finishes a bowl of thin, watery stew quickly, then avoids each other’s eyes. But once Peter dares to look Eve in the eye, he sees a sadness in her face, the loose, tattered clothes she wears and the bruises on her face betray the life she’s fleeing. But Amanda has only a blank look.
It’s the way of things; even as the working man is under eviction, never should he be so evicted. The wealthy man will forever force him from his own home, and so shall he forever resist, in the way that he does, but never should he be so forced. It’s like a dream you can only half-remember, like a rebirth that allows only the vaguest memories of the past to return, each successive rebirth allowing a little more, still yet a little more until the working man can cobble together enough knowledge to rise above and break the cycle once and for all. As we watch this drama unfold, I want to tell you the truth, that it’ll take no small effort to break the cycle and make good into the future. Still the working man faces the challenge imposed on him by artificial means. Still the working man forges ahead, pressing through this latest hardship the only way he knows how, by putting his head down and turning into the wind. Still the working man returns to his little box of an apartment in the evening, his hands dirty, his clothes tattered and worn, his shoes falling apart and his back sore, with no relief in sight the working man falling asleep to the sound of thunder cracking across the darkness of the night. In the morning, the working man rouses, sore and still-tired, overcoming his lingering fear as he takes to the streets and makes his way quickly and quietly through this latest crisis, the anthems of the working class running shivers the length of his spine whenever a spare moment presents itself for him to wonder on where his loyalties should lie. And still the foreign tourist, the foreign investor is there, looking over him, conspiring with his enemies as part of the current order to take what rightfully belongs to him. Elsewhere, at the union hall, much transpires but all of it behind closed doors. “We will strike,” Murray says, “all at once.” Seated next to him is a woman named Rose Powell, a counterpart of Miguel Figueroa’s from the popular front so recently formed. “And we shall support you,” says Rose, “in the weeks ahead we will mount our attacks with every available man and woman. We will march alongside you in full support for all our brothers and sisters in union.” And so it comes to be. But not everyone in the room’s loyal to their cause. Outside, Valeri’s still caught up in the passion of the crowd, unaware of the subterfuge unfolding in the building. “All power to the people!” he shouts. “All power to the people!” His voice blends in with a hundred others’, and all anyone can hear is noise.
At the union hall, there’s a palpable tension in the air. “We’ll have them right where they need to be,” says one of Rose’s colleagues from the popular front, a man named Kim Dae-Jung. “Perhaps,” says Rose, “but we still have much work to do.” It’s later now, and the small contingent from the popular front have completed the
ir subterfuge, Murray having left the room to inform the crowd on their agreement. But Rose and Kim are only one contingent, others making contact with unionists, students, and parishioners, the same agreement reached a hundred times over. Although the rebels in the popular front will not take part in the demonstration, it’s critical that all involved believe they will. To this end, Rose and Kim leave the union hall that evening having made a firm commitment neither have any intention of making good on.