by Osha Neumann
The rhetoric of the Southern civil rights movement combined, in peculiar amalgam, biblical images of release—release of the soul from its mortal coils, release of the children of Israel from bondage in Egypt—with a passionate argument for equal rights under the law. The movement demanded the familiar rights of liberal democracy, with a fervor born of the conviction that “there’s a better world awaiting.” This world—with its lynchings and bombings, with its “Bull” Conners and all their clubs and snarling dogs and fire hoses—will fade in the light of freedom, and give way under the weight of its injustice. The present is a chain upon a future ready to be born. The “better world awaiting” will be more real and true and good than this one.
The Southern civil rights movement demanded equality and clothed that demand in the rhetoric of revelation. As resistance to this simple demand hardened it became clear that the achievement of real equality would require the structural transformation of society. The link the Southern Civil rights movement forged between the fulfillment of the simple promises of reason, the larger systemic transformation of society, and a dream of liberation, set the pattern for the movements that have followed.
In their own way, all the various, disparate and contradictory strands of Sixties movements were fueled by the imagination of a “better world awaiting.” Dropouts voyaging to another reality through doors of perception unlocked by LSD; students demanding the end to the war; Motherfuckers railing at Bill Graham; Black Panthers in black berets demanding Black Power; each, in their own and overlapping ways, endeavored to “break on through to the other side.” Each had a vision of transcendence, of a comprehensive and all-inclusive reversal of fortune. The systemic transformation they envisaged would be a double unveiling. First the System’s mask of benevolence would be torn away, its hidden violence exposed, the nakedness of power revealed, rampant beneath the skirts of civility. Then the naked reality behind the mask would be shown, in turn, to be another untruth, hiding the reality of deferred possibilities. This double unveiling could take place only through struggle.
The truth, we were clear, does not emerge in thought alone, but only in the process by which the world is changed into a more truthful state, a world in which truth no longer hides, appearances reflect reality, and surfaces reveal the depths beneath them.
Reality is revealed in the effort to realize an idea. Fight for freedom and justice and you’ll see what the world is really like. Conversely, the truth of the idea is revealed in the process of its realization. Until we speak our thoughts or write them down, they shape-shift in our head. The thought of a beautiful painting is a ghost until the artist picks up her brushes and puts forms and colors on the canvas. The idea of the Cuban revolution was merely an untested dream until the voyage of the Granma and the trek into the Sierra Maestra.
If the truth of an idea is revealed in the process of its realization, then reason, whose goal is truth, must have a part in that process of realization. “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” Marx’s admonishment is not a summons to retreat from interpretation and understanding, but a reminder that the process of discovering the truth and changing the world are intimately related and inseparable.
Philosophical issues are political. If we live inside a lie, if self and not-self, appearance and reality, universal and particular fall apart, that falling apart reflects a particular historical condition. Ultimately the restoration of the contradictory unity/disunity that defines the relation of consciousness to reality awaits the revolution. Revolution alone will bring thought home to the world. Till then, any image reason has of itself, will be incomplete, provisional, and subject to radical revision, for it will be the product of mere thought, locked within itself, untried and untested. And if the revolution must be permanent and will never be completed once and for all, then it would seem also that reason will never fully know itself.
Ariadne’s thread was a guideline that Theseus unspooled behind him when he entered the labyrinth, and which he followed out when he left. But in the maze of time we can not leave the way we came. The path in is never the path out. The way to liberation is unexplored territory. The labyrinth and the path to freedom arise in time, moment by historical moment. Only what is past is fixed, and we can not tell by looking backwards where we should go, and therefore whether the thread we have followed does in fact lead out of the maze or deeper into it. And the thread that leads out now, may, in the future, become a chain holding us back. It may weave us into the wall of the labyrinth from which we seek to escape.
From this complexity, reason tells me, there is no escape. Except in dreams.
Tired of my doubts and questions, I fell asleep and dreamt that Ariadne and Theseus lay down in one of the corridors of the maze and made love. And the Minotaur mooed and produced milk, and the walls became transparent. Ariadne’s thread was no longer needed. It became a snake, and shed its skin. And reason was reborn as the logic of desire, and the form of feeling. As slaves cast off the names imposed upon them by their masters, so reason at that moment took another name. But when I awoke, I could not remember what it was.
And the Minotaur mooed.
NOTES
1 Letter from Karl Marx to Arnold Ruge, September 1843, http://www.marxists. org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm.
2 “The United Front Song,” Songs of the Spanish Civil War, words by Bertolt Brecht, music by Kurt Weill, The Socialist Songbook, p.31, http://hengstrom.net/songbook/31.html.
3 H. Stuart Hughes, The Sea Change: The Migration of Social Thought 1930-1965, Harper and Row, 1975.
4 Feodor Dostoevsky, “Notes from the Underground,” White Nights and Other Stories, The (New York: MacMillan Company, 1918) p. 54, Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library, http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ toccer-new2?id=Dos-Note. sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=publ ic&part=2&division=div2.
5 Joyce Milton, “The Times Are A-Changin’ at Swarthmore,” May 18, 2004, Front-PageMagazine. com, http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=13361; Elizabeth Weber, “The Crisis of 1969,” March 7, 1996, The Phoenix,
6 Leroi Jones and Amiri Baraka, “Black People!” The Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, edited by William J. Harris (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991), p. 224.
7 The poem was written by Rex Weiner, who went on to become a writer for movies and television, including Miami Vice. He writes in an email:Thirty-nine years ago an eighteen year old poet walked into the Tenth Street storefront office of Up Against The Wall Motherfucker and handed you his first poem. It began with the line: “When the angry body moves through battlefield streets…” The short poem was inspired by the processions that erupted spontaneously from the UAW/MF headquarters, street people banging garbage can lids, winos waving bottle of Thunderbird, snarling traffic, confounding the cops. The events kindled a glorious fever of rebellion in those who joined in and also a kind of apocalyptic fever . . . “Beep beep, bang bang, ungawa, fire power . . .”
I was the young poet. Drunk on Ginsberg and Mayakovsky, the Fugs and Woody Guthrie, I was thrilled to hang out in that place, listening to the endless and often hilarious meetings led by you and Ben Morea. It all seemed so smart and dangerous. I‘d come from a stifling small north Westchester town, escaping by finishing high school in three years and getting admitted to NYU. I’d hitchhiked to San Francisco the summer of 1967 and caught hepatitis on a Big Sur commune—had to postpone my entry to NYU to the second semester. Got a pad that winter on Avenue B between 12th and 13th and stumbled through the garbage strike into the UAW/MF office.
There was one march to the 10th precinct down on 5th Street where we were demanding the release of someone named Henry. Every kept chanting “Henry . . . Henry . . . Henry!” Someone scaled the façade of the precinct building even as Capt. Fink came out to try to calm the crowd. “Who is Henry?” he asked. “I’m Henry” replied everyone in the crowd. Suddenly Fink noticed t
he guy clinging to the wall about twenty feet up. “Hey—what are you doing? Come down from there!” he hollered. “It’s Henry!” someone yelled. “Henry . . . Henry . . . Henry!”
Adhering to revolutionary principles, I abandoned my ego and signed the poem Henry. It seemed like the right thing to do. When it came off the press in the back of the office on yellow paper superimposed ominously on a huge black fly, the poem was signed “Henry.” I was very pleased and proud. It was the first thing I’d ever had published that expressed something of what I was feeling, what I was about.
Actually Henry was not a person. “Henry,” is what we called our protests/demonstration/riots in the hope of confusing the police. We’d call for “a Henry tonight” and people knew that meant come to the corner of St. Mark’s Place and 2nd Avenue ready to rumble. As far as I know, there never was any particular Henry who inspired the name.
8 John McMillan, “Revolution by Theater” Remapping New Left History at the Battle of the Pentagon, unpublished thesis.
9 Jerry L. Avorn and members of the staff of the Columbia Daily Spectator, Up Against the Ivy Wall: A history of the Columbia crisis (New York: Atheneum, 1969), p. 25-27.
10 Mark Rudd “Symbols of the Revolution,” Up Against the Ivy Wall: A history of the Columbia crisis, Ibid., p. 291.
11 Mark Motherfucker recalls helping to fight off some football players who tried to invade Hamilton late the first night and being told afterwards by one of the men he had been helping: “I’ve got the Black Panthers, and I’ve got SNCC and we’re upstairs and we’ve got M1’s. Are you ready for this? You look like you’re ready.” He spent the rest of the night pondering the question and deciding he was. But apparently the black students decided they weren’t. The next day the guns got taken out. About ten young black men, dressed like members of a band in green pants and red shirts, came to the building. They were carrying saxophone cases, guitar cases, trombone cases, base cases, and guitar cases. They were in the building for about an hour. When they left, the guns left with them, concealed in the instrument cases (Author’s interview with Mark, December, 2003). Tom Hurwitz on the other hand remember someone carrying the rifles out in a duffle bag and Julius Lester walking out “with a suitcase full of gray metal.”
12 Up Against the Ivy Wall: a History of the Columbia Crisis, Ibid., p. 64-65.
13 From the author’s Interview with Mark Motherfucker, recorded December 3, 2003.
14 John Motherfucker, “Math’s Final Battle.” Unpublished reminiscence emailed to the author April 8, 2008.
15 See http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/SDS_Port_Huron.html.
16 Quoted in Marilyn Bardsley, “Confession,” Charles Manson, http://www.crimelibrary. com/serial_killers/notorious/manson/confess_4.html.
17 Document disclosed pursuant to a settlement in Handschu v. Special Services, a class action law suit against the New York Police Department spying on political groups. The case was filed in 1971 and settled in 1985.
18 Graham may have had more reason for seeing us as Nazi’s than I recall. According to John Glatt “The fuse [for Graham’s conflict with the Motherfuckers] was lit by the underground community newspaper the East Village Other, which became his tenants when he bought the Fillmore East. Soon afterward, the paper attacked Graham cruelly, saying it was a pity that he hadn’t followed his parents into the Nazi concentration camps. Graham unexploded and stormed into the paper’s office, tipped [?] over the editor’s desk and threw him out into the street.” (John Glatt, Rage and Roll, Bill Graham and the Selling of Rock Birch Lane Press Book, Published by Carol Publishing Group, pp 110-11; see also Bill Graham and Robert Greenfield, Bill Graham Presents, My Life in Rock and Roll, Doubleday 1992, pp. 253-254). Bill incorrectly implies it was the Motherfuckers who wrote an article in which we said it was “a shame” he didn’t go with his parents into the camps.(Id. at 254.) Bill’s description of our initial contact is far more benign than any of us recall:Some people came in Tuesday night and asked they could speak to me about a project involving the street merchants and representatives of all the different Lower at East Side organizations. One of them was called the Motherfuckers, a sociopolitical street gang. They wanted their own night at the Fillmore to “express themselves.” They said “You know, Bill, you always say you are part of the community, man. Prove it.”
I said, “Fine. Every Wednesday night is yours. You respect the building and will operate in. You can use it that night but only under our jurisdiction.”
19 Richard Goldstein, “The Theater of Cruelty comes to Second Avenue,” The Village Voice, October 31, 1968, p. 46-47; Lita Elisen, “Up Against the Wall, Bill Graham,” East Village Other, October 25, 1968, p. 9; Paul Nelson, “The Motherfuckers, Fillmore East vs. The East Village: The Full Report,” Rolling Stone, February 15, 1969, p. 6.Glatt’s version is that when one of the actors announced the people were going to liberate the Fillmore it “immediately provoked Graham to leap from his seat and dashed on stage to defend his Fillmore against attack. Quickly overpowered, Graham was tied to a chair on the stage, where he remained for nearly six hours, arguing and screaming at the rioters” (Glatt, Rage and Roll, 111). I am quite sure he was not tied to a chair.
20 See http://www.luminist.org/archives/wpp.htm.
21 Again, Glatt gives a more lurid account. He claims that “the more militant Motherfuckers went on a rampage after the show, breaking an usher’s arm with a metal bar and stabbing a young Puerto Rican boy. The asbestos stage curtain was slashed with a knife, and there were hundreds of dollars worth of damage to equipment” (Glatt, Rage and Roll, 113).
22 Wayne Kramer, “Riots I Have Known and Loved,” Originally published in “Left of the Dial” online music magazine, No. 4, http://makemyday.free.fr/wk1.htm.
23 Paul Nelson, “The Motherfuckers: Fillmore East vs. The East Village: The Full Report,” Rolling Stone, February 15, 1969.
24 Was I, as Eric Erikson might say, trapped in unresolved conflicts of the anal stage of development wherein the child masters control of his or her bowls? In this stage:The matter of mutual regulation faces its severest test. If outer control is too rigid or two early training insists on robbing the child of his attempt gradually to control his bowels . . . he will again be faced with a double rebellion and a double defeat. Powerless in his own body (and often fearing his feces as if they were hostile monsters inhabiting his insides) and powerless outside, he will again be forced to seek satisfaction and control either by regression or by false progression. In other words he will return to an earlier, oral control—i.e., by sucking his thumb and becoming whiny and demanding; or he will become hostile and intrusive, using his feces as ammunition and pretending autonomy, an ability to do without anybody to lean on, which he has by no means really gained.[emphasis added] (Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society, Norton, 1993, p. 82)
25 Nicholas Black Elk as told to John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks: The Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1961).
26 “Our purpose is to abolish the system (call it the Greed Machine, capitalism, the Great Hamburger Grinder, Babylon, Do-Your-Job-ism) and learn to live cooperatively, intelligently, gracefully (call it the New Awareness, anarchism, The Aquarian Age, communism, whatever you wish),” Marvin Garson, “The System Does Not Work,” San Francisco Express-Times, January 1969, http://www.hippy.com/article-115.html.
27 Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Flower in the Crannied Wall,” A Little Treasury of Great Poetry, edited by Oscar Williams (New York: Scribner, 1947).
28 Abbie Hoffman, “TWA Never Gets You There on Time,” Revolution for the Hell of It, The Dial Press, 1968, p. 40.
29 Feminism has had its own critique of the rational/irrational polarity:If we listen well to the connotations of “irrational” they are highly charged: we hear overtones of “hysteria” (that disease once supposed to arise in the womb), of “madness” (the absence of form.) Thus no attempt need be made to disc
over a form or a language or a pattern foreign to those which technological reason has already recognized. Moreover, the term “rational” relegates to its opposite term all that it refuses to deal with, and thus ends by assuming itself to be purified of the nonrational, rather than searching to identify and assimilate its own surreal or nonlinear elements. This single error may have mutilated patriarchal thinking—especially scientific and philosophical thinking—more than we yet understand. (Adrienne Rich Of Women Born, W.W. Norton & Company: New York, p. 62)
30 “Beauty is “une promesse de Bonheur,” Stendhal, De l’Amour, enotes.com/famous quotes, http://history.enotes.com/famous-quotes/beauty-is-only-the-promise-of-happiness quoted in Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Beacon, 1964), p. 210. Herbert cited the quotation often. It encapsulates his views about the significance of art. (See Douglas Kellner, “Introduction” to Art and Liberation,Volume 4 of Herbert Marcuse’s Collected Papers, Routledge, 2007, p. 48.)
31 The Black Bloc rhetoric and tactics were very similar to those of the Motherfuckers. The following is a description of one of their actions: On November 30, several groups of individuals in black bloc attacked various corporate targets in downtown Seattle. Among them were (to name just a few):—Fidelity Investment (major investor in Occidental Petroleum, the bane of the U’wa tribe in Columbia)
—Bank of America, US Bancorp, Key Bank and Washington Mutual Bank (financial institutions key in the expansion of corporate repression)