Home from the Dark Side of Utopia

by Clifton Ross

  Only later would I discover the essentially apocalyptic, utopian and millenarian nature of di Fiore’s idea and learn that Hegel, Marx, and Comte had all adapted this three-stage model of historical development to their purposes. Hitler, also, had based his idea of the Third Reich on di Fiore’s conception.16 In fact, this Joachimite conception pervades movements of the Left and Right all the way down to the present time, given the enormous foundational role millenarian thinking has in Western thought.17

  Bill Everson and I became friends and engaged in a correspondence that lasted for a number of months as we both read through Berdyaev. I also spent many weekends at his cabin in Kingfisher Flat drinking wine and talking about poetry, theology, philosophy, Carl Jung and, of course, Nicolas Berdyaev.

  I was brought out of this cosmic millenarian reverie one morning as I talked with Steve Scott, a Christian poet who had been part of both the Third Epoch poetry reading and the anthology I’d produced from it. As I babbled on about the theurgical and synergistic mysticism of creativity in Nicolas Berdyaev over a cup of coffee in a small café on University Avenue in Berkeley, Steve smiled indulgently. When I finished my spiel he said, “yes, good. And while you’re at recreating the world, you might want to come up with a few fields of wheat to feed the poor.” I felt my racing mind come to a complete stop as the words slowly entered my ears and dripped into my sinking heart. Yes. Of course. There are things poetry and art cannot resolve.

  Scott’s down-to-earth counsel roughly coincided with Daniel Berrigan’s visit to Berkeley. He was to teach a course at the Graduate Theological Union and I decided I’d see if I could arrange to interview him for Radix Magazine. When I heard the class would deal with his exegesis of the Book of Revelation, I was determined to audit, no matter what. As it turned out, it wasn’t that difficult to audit, since there were no police or bouncers at the door: all one had to do was go into the class, sit down, and imbibe the clear teachings of a great man.

  Diminutive and quiet, peaceful and gentle, Daniel Berrigan was a lion in the sheep’s clothing of priestly vestments. He spoke in a soft, matter-of-fact voice, and yet somehow projected to the back of the class where I sat. But most impressive was his understanding and insight into the book that had long fascinated and perplexed me. He started off talking about the need to take responsibility for the arms race. “If no one is responsible, no one is human,” he said. “How will Babylon (and by this, he clearly was referring to the USA) be saved if that which is most human, that is, freedom and responsibility, is not invoked?” Faith, he said, is an unfinished drama in the Book of Revelation, and that Book cannot be closed as long as we’re here.

  “In the light of the Lord’s coming, the end is not in the hands of the nuclear bomb tinkers, but in the hands of Christ.” Babylon was an image of John’s time, but it must be translated into our own time. The Book is unsealed, Berrigan told us, and that indicated that there are no sealed facts. We must keep the “book” open and use it to unseal the present.

  “Cold, rational means lead only to a cold, rational utopia. Technique,” Berrigan said, “is a spiritual invasion, a demonic, inhuman, a ‘disposal’ sense of time, a way of getting rid of problems, of ‘resolving’ problems, because you get rid of human activity. War is the dispose all (disposal), the way to get rid of problems because you get rid of humans.”

  Berrigan embodied the prophetic voice of the apocalyptic vision. While Hal Lindsey and the Evangelicals puzzled over their charts of the “End Times,” and while they argued over whether the Rapture came before, midway through, or at the end of the Great Tribulation, Dan Berrigan swept the whole discussion aside to present the heart of the question: how do we propose to live in this world? What shall we do before the great inhuman machine, East and West, that devours humanity like Moloch and produces only a mechanistic simulacrum of human life?

  Berrigan’s class moved me ever closer to the concern, the challenge, that Steve Scott had laid out before me in the café: what about the poor? Is there a greater question to be resolved, for a Christian, or anyone, for that matter, than feeding the poor?

  Around this time the BCC and HCOB experienced another split. Three households, calling themselves “Bartimaeus Community,” decided to have a “common purse” along the lines of the first century church, in which all possessions were held in common. It was a painful parting, and it also signaled the beginning of the end of the community I’d come to Berkeley looking for. Eventually the various ministries of the Berkeley Christian Coalition separated and only the few larger ministries survived independently. Eventually the House Church and Bartimaeus disbanded.

  Some of us had a sense that it had been a fatal error trying to “build a community” in the first place: community, if it happens at all, emerges out of natural sympathy and friendship as people go about their lives. David Fetcho, a poet who had been in both the House Church and then Bartimaeus, reflected on those projects saying that “In our youth we felt that we needed to mandate the structures of love and, as it turns out, love mandates its own structures. Those structures come into being organically over a period of time. And that was a lesson we all had to learn.”

  Chapter Four: Fire from Heaven

  The election of Ronald Reagan sent shock waves through what was left of the Left, and the Left was still a significant minority of the population, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area. After four years of the bland but somewhat endearing and moderate Evangelicalism of Jimmy Carter, many of us in Berkeley sensed that a brutal change was coming.

  I was living in the basement of Calhoun House, the cheapest room in the house. The outer wall of the room still had the initials of one of the house’s earlier residents, Steve Soliah, spray-painted on the wall. Steve was one of the survivors of the Symbionese Liberation Army and former lover of Patty Hearst. I remembered Calhoun Phifer telling us about the day the FBI came looking for Steve.

  “I was coming home from work,” he’d told us with a big grin on his face, “and saw these two men with dark sunglasses, black suits, and ties sitting across the street from the house in a new black car. They definitely weren’t from Berkeley!” He laughed. “I went inside and mentioned it to Steve, and he started. His face turned white, and he ran out the back door.” They eventually caught him, but such was the legacy of the house in which we lived in early 1981 as Ronald Reagan took the office of the presidency. Most of the residents of Calhoun House thought of ourselves as inheriting the tradition of revolutionary struggle, and in that moment our faith took on a distinctly apocalyptic hue.

  One night in early 1981 I went to hear Carolyn Forché read from her book, The Country Between Us, on the UC campus. I didn’t know Forché’s work so I didn’t know what to expect, a perfect set-up for the sort of surprise I got. I remember the sense of shock, confusion, and awe I felt as I listened to Forché talk about a far away country of El Salvador where the US was pouring in millions of dollars of aid to help the army slaughter its own people. The Salvadoran army was also being trained by US military advisors, so I felt ashamed and angry that I knew nothing and had heard nothing about what she was discussing; I also felt morally outraged, and morally obligated to do something. She read her poems about the military death squads, financed and directed by my country, each poem telling a story more gruesome and shocking, or painfully moving than the previous. It was a wrenching experience for me, and I came out of the reading shaken.

  When I got home, I realized I didn’t really know where El Salvador was. I found the country in the index of our house atlas, and I looked it up. It was in Central America, right next to that other country she’d mentioned where they’d just had a revolution: Nicaragua.

  I’d already begun looking around for other poets beyond the Christian community to invite in to read at the Radix-sponsored events, and that led me to attend the Left Write conference in San Francisco about that same time. Among the poets I met there were Jack Hirschman, John Curl, and two others with whom I was to have closer and longer-t
erm collaborations, Garry Lambrev and bob rivera.

  Garry was a gay man who had spent many years in People’s Temple. He was still recovering from the shock of that experience when I met him outside of Noe Valley Ministry early one evening after a day-long session of the Left Write Conference.1 For some reason our eyes met and we began talking. Within a few minutes we discovered that we had a mutual passion for, of all people, Nicolas Berdyaev! Garry and I started talking about spirituality and politics, Berdyaev’s personalist socialism, poetry, and became immediate and close friends—and we have remained friends ever since.

  A week or so later Garry and I went to Talking Leaves bookstore for a meeting of a Union of Left Writers (ULW) that was emerging out of the conference. The bookstore lent its space to us for the meeting and it was also the place where Kush had brought the Cloud House to settle for a while. Cloud House was a regular open “round-robin” poetry reading that went on for over a decade, living up to its name as it floated around San Francisco like the characteristic fog that comes and goes, irregularly flowing through the neighborhoods and down the streets to lend its mystery to the Pacific city.

  After the meeting I was talking with strangers—everyone there was a stranger to me—when a tall, dark-skinned man with a big bushy Afro and scarves around his neck, Hendrix-like, interrupted the conversation to contradict something I had just said. Eventually Garry and this new comrade, bob rivera (he refused the use of capital letters—perhaps because they were “capital”?) and I were engaged in an intense conversation about politics, spirituality, sexuality, and I don’t know what else. Bob ended up in the East Bay either that evening or within a matter of days, and the conversation continued as he eventually moved into Calhoun House, on Berkeley Way, pushing what remained of the Christian community there still farther to the left.

  Bob, Garry, and I formed the Rosa Luxemburg/Dorothy Day Poetry Brigade of the nascent Union of Left Writers that had emerged out of the Left Write conference, and eventu­ally we held open poetry readings on Telegraph Avenue every Friday afternoon. I was familiar with Dorothy Day’s ideas, of course, but Rosa Luxemburg was still a mystery to me. But not for long. I was moved deeply by her writings, especially after I read “You would have thought the servants of the Church would have been the first to make this task easier for the social democrats. Did not Jesus Christ (whose servants the priests are) teach that ‘it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven?’”2

  Around this time I changed jobs, which had the effect of further removing me from the Christian community in Berkeley. I began working as a night desk clerk at the Berkeley City Club, an elegant social club located in a Julia Morgan-designed building on Durant Avenue in Berkeley. Responsibilities were minimal so I spent three nights a week in an excited state of study, feeding my obsessive curiosity a steady diet of whatever it chose to devour. From ten at night until eight in the morning, with only two or so hours of security work, my job was to stay awake at the front desk—not always an easy thing to do during the blue hours before daybreak—and I took advantage of the time to read books on liberation theology, Latin American politics, and poetry. I started translating the poetry of Ernesto Cardenal and other Latin American poets, sitting at the desk all night with my Spanish-English dictionary and my books, drinking coffee to stay awake. It was my idea of heaven.

  In those all-night study sessions, I now added onto my list a number of revolutionary classics like Regis Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution, speeches of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, as well as histories of the Cuban revolution. I read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and had my adolescent intuitions confirmed, that everything I ever thought I knew about my country was a lie. I felt a deep sense of shame and guilt: shame that I knew none of this, and guilt for having benefited from my childhood in the “warrior caste.” I anguished over how to expiate the sins of my nation and I didn’t have to look far. As I read Ernesto Cardenal’s poetry and theology, my curiosity about the Sandinista Revolution deepened. Cardenal’s book, In Cuba, increased my curiosity about what was happening on that island.

  I became obsessed with Latin America, in particular, Central America, which was in the throes of revolutionary upheaval. I befriended a poet who had just arrived from Colombia, Rodrigo Betancourt, and we began translating revolutionary poetry together, and that was how I learned my first words of Spanish.

  Rodrigo was an actor, a poet, an artist, and a revolutionary. He had personally suffered through the years of “la Violencia” in Colombia and had lost a sister who had been killed by the Colombian military alongside of the revolutionary priest, Camilo Torres. So I read Camilo Torres, and his words echoed from another side those of Rosa Luxemburg: “Why do we Catholics fight the communists—the people with whom it is said we have the most antagonism—over the question of whether the soul is mortal or is immortal instead of agreeing that hunger is indeed mortal?”3

  That spring of 1981 Dave Smith returned to Calhoun House from a trip through Central America and brought back a green military duffel bag full of books. Dave’s new awareness of the changes wrought by the potent combination of Christian theology and Marxist analysis that comprised liberation theology caught fire. Suddenly our house was studying and discussing the Sandinista Revolution of Nicaragua. We collectively began reading The Gospel in Solentiname series, and used it as the basis of what someone called our “Commie bible study.” The Gospel in Solentiname was a collection in several volumes of transcripts of Bible studies Ernesto Cardenal conducted with a peasant community on an island of the Archipelago of Solentiname in Lake Nicaragua under the Somoza dictatorship. Through the reflection on the gospels the peasants began to understand their world more deeply as well as articulate the revolutionary vision of the gospels. Something catalyzed in me as I read these books and I found my “mission.”

  Suddenly my interest in the Orthodox theologians and mysticism was displaced by Roman Catholic liberation theology. I put aside Berdyaev’s mystical anarchism, his religion of creativity, his theosophical conception of unconditional freedom and the ultimate value of personality, and began reading Gustavo Gutiérrez, José Porfirio Miranda, Dom Hélder Câmara and others who dispensed with theological speculations, no matter how profound, to focus on the practice of liberation, or as Gutiérrez might have put it, setting aside “orthodoxy in favor of orthopraxy.” Certainly there were overlapping concerns between Berdyaev and liberation theology, but there were also significant departures. Liberation theology was far less skeptical of Marxism; indeed, it embraced it, often, it could be argued, uncritically. Berdyaev’s starting point was interiority, spirit, subjectivity, personality, but liberation theology was all about the objective, external world of society. Ernesto Cardenal, who was becoming a new poetic mentor for me, called his poetry “Exteriorism,” and it was a far cry from the Jungian erotic mysticism of William Everson.

  Calhoun House was going through changes as the Christian philosophers graduated from UC Berkeley and Kevin and Steve moved out to get married. Of that particular formation, only Dave Smith and I remained. The house was big and growing as we colonized new spaces in the basement and built new rooms (literally) where there had been only boxes of the new landlord’s massive book collection. The number of residents rarely went below six, but it reached a peak of fourteen when the house was completely full. And now a whole new group of people began moving in. Among them was Marc Batko, who was also a night desk clerk at Berkeley City Club (the Club). Marc could no longer afford to live alone in his studio apartment on what he made at the Club, so we welcomed him into Calhoun House, and I was glad to be able to return the good favor he’d done me by offering me a place to stay in his studio when I returned a few years before from Switzerland. He joined bob rivera and others who began to change the nature of the house back into a more overtly radical space.

  Bob, when he wasn’t building floats for a demonstration or painting placards
for a protest, attending meetings of the recently formed anti-nuclear Livermore Action Group, or in his room reading and writing poetry, spent his days pontificating at the house dining table and I sat spellbound, usually accompanied by several other residents. In addition to being an extraordinary poet, bob’s memory was phenomenal, despite all the alcohol, marijuana, and LSD he was able to put away. Bob could recount word for word whole conversations, and could as easily expound on the ideas of Georg Lukács as he could on the nature and aims of the Red Brigades of Italy or the German Red Army Faction, about the latter of which he inexplicably seemed to have much inside knowledge.

  In those days the word “terrorist” had not been forced into vogue by the policies of the US national security state, presumably because the US government wanted to keep a focus on the enemy du jour, “communism.” Bob, however, was the perfect combination of both, although mostly in theory. His Marxism-Leninism was detached from any party formation, allowing him to live an entirely anarchic existence and maintain an utterly independent ideological “line.” His line, as I understood it, was “total revolution by any means necessary, moral or not,” and in that way it was fairly indistinguishable from most other Leninist party lines. I found myself at once adopting him as a mentor, and also in a constant disagreement with him.

  One incident in particular indicated for me the deep gulf between bob’s views and my own. It was a sunny summer afternoon in 1981 and our house had moved all the living room furniture onto the concrete back-yard patio: the couch, two or three easy chairs, a table, and the television. We were lazing in the sun, late morning, and bob was talking about the forthcoming revolution as the joint was passed from person to person and we quietly listened to bob and sipped our coffee. At some point I had to ask bob the obvious question.