Читать книгу Home from the Dark Side of Utopia - Clifton Ross - Страница 10

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-term 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.

“When the revolution comes, what’s going to happen to all the people who oppose it? That’s probably going to be, what? Ninety percent?”

Bob’s eyelids dropped and he looked at me with a cold squint and leaned back on the arm of the couch as he took a long drag on his cigarette. “They’ll have to be eliminated,” he said matter-of-factly, with a wave of his hand.

I protested, but the conversation turned to other problems that would arise when the revolution happened, or logistics required in bringing it about. The insanity, the cruelty, the utter self-righteous and blind inhumanity struck me and I knew then that eventually the two of us would part ways. But at the same time I found bob’s perspective, while insane, in other ways well reasoned, even if I wondered about some of his assumptions. The utopia would be realized, he had no doubt at all. It was part of the “law of historical development.” Those who were unable to meet the challenges of the future would be disposed of to allow room for the “New Man (sic)” of communism.

I found what I thought to be more humane and reasonable perspectives among the Liberation theologians and their advocates whose books I read. I found Fr. Camilo Torre’s view reassuring: “I have given myself to the Revolution out of love for my neighbor.”4 I felt about bob the way I began to feel about all the secular political activists I met who were struggling against the economic inequality created by capitalism that the socialists, communists, and anarchists were attempting to resolve. As Jose Miranda put it, “ultimately the Marxists have been doing us (Christians) a favor by propagating the idea of communism in our absence—our culpable absence.”5 I was grateful to bob for having demolished my absolutist pacifism and for having shown me a way into the secular Left that I had yet to explore, but I often found myself shocked and disturbed by what I considered to be his more extreme views—and behavior. In the honeymoon period, bob served the purpose of challenging a house that was still predominantly Christian not only to give his Taoist views a hearing, which we did without hesitation, finding in Lao Tzu a very sympathetic and credible teacher, but also to look more closely at ideas current on the secular Marxist, and Leninist, left.

Meanwhile, I deepened relations with Christian leftists and ex-Christian leftists. Among the former was Marc Batko, who introduced me to an entirely different current that flowed into the river that was carrying me away. Marc, a Jewish convert to Christianity, had a particular interest in the German theology of Jurgen Moltmann and other disciples of Ernst Bloch. While I found the translations difficult reading (Marc never quite got them into English) they inspired me to investigate an entirely different moment of Anabaptist history.

Ernst Bloch was a Jewish Marxist atheist of the Frankfurt School who, oddly enough, inspired a generation of German Christian theologians with his writings on the utopian vision of Marx, proposing the “principle of hope” as a meeting point for revolutionaries and Christians. Bloch’s first book was called The Spirit of Utopia (1918) and it was followed by Thomas Müntzer as a Theologian of Revolution.

Thomas Müntzer was a contemporary of Martin Luther who started out as an ally in the Reformation, but his contact with the spiritualist Zwickau Prophets led him to advocate for deeper changes than Luther felt comfortable advocating. Müntzer became popular among the peasant class and his agitational sermons caused consternation among the princes, nobility, and his old ally, Martin Luther. Part of the so-called “Radical Reformation,” which included the Anabaptists and an array of other spiritualists, prophetic, and apocalyptic movements, Müntzer was a principal organizer of the disastrous 1525 German Peasant War that ended with the armies of the nobility slaughtering thousands of peasants and then capturing, and executing, Müntzer himself.

Luther had played what many (including myself) considered to have been a shameful role in the slaughter of what he called “the murderous and plundering hordes of the peasants.” Luther was unequivocal in his opposition, directing in detail to the princes and their armies as to how the peasants should be treated: “They should be knocked to pieces, strangled and stabbed, secretly and openly, by everybody who can do it, just as one must kill a mad dog!” He went on to recommend, “dear gentlemen, hearken here, save there, stab, knock, strangle them at will, and if thou diest, thou art blessed; no better death canst thou ever attain.”6

Müntzer was written off as a madman and a fanatic for centuries until he was “rediscovered” by Friedrich Engels who saw in him the precursor of modern communism. Ironically, Thomas Müntzer, the revolutionary Christian mystic, eventually became intrumentalized by the German Democratic Republic, part of the Communist movement that went so far to destroy religion that it sent many believers to the death camps of Siberia to be rid of the “plague.”7

I discovered Christians for Socialism (CFS), a national organization with a very strong Northern California branch. In September 1981 I went to a gathering in Vallejo with Dave Smith, expecting to see people pounding the pulpit and calling for revolution in the name of Jesus. Instead it was a sedate group of nuns, one very friendly and gentle Presbyterian minister named Joe Hardegree, a quiet couple from Tracy, and a few other pretty average-looking people. There was a potluck and discussion about God’s “preferential option for the poor” and the need to build a socialist movement to redistribute the wealth of the country and the world and we brainstormed a Christian Socialist creed.

We formed a Christian socialist study group and of the books we read I remember being particularly impressed by José Miranda’s book, Communism in the Bible, and wishing his work would get a fair hearing in US churches. Both he and Geevarghese Mar Osthathios, the late senior Bishop of the Indian Orthodox Church in Kerala and author of Theology of a Classless Society demonstrated that both communism and a classless society were the bottom-line Christian positions on economics and social structures for the church and, by extension, society. The “world turned upside-down” that Winstanley the Digger and so many Christians before and after him foresaw was a vision reawakened in the 1980s and it inspired a few of us in Berkeley.

But we knew we were few. The mainstream Christian Church, after a brief opening in the late 1960s, showed signs of going with the mainstream secular culture as it took a right turn under Ronald Reagan. The sense of isolation I often felt helped me understand bob rivera’s loner approach to politics, and it also gave me a real empathy for Garry Lambrev whose religious and political community had gone out in an apocalyptic fury. Dorothee Sölle expressed our feelings well in an article published in Radical Religion about that time. She wrote of “the dilemma of being Christians without a church and socialists without a party.” But our marginalization was powerful, she said, reminding us “It is not the center from which liberation will come. It comes from the periphery. Christ was not born in the palace of Herod but in the stable. He did not grow up in the center of Jewish culture among the power elite but in the backwaters of Galilee.”8

And our little “cell” of Christian socialists was going to become more isolated still. Sometime in 1982 the national office of CFS was closed down, as the director explained, due to “burnout.” The Northern California branch made several valiant attempts to first relocate the national office to the Bay Area (the offer was refused) and then to keep the local branch going. All attempts failed and within a year or two of my joining the organization, it ceased to exist.

Caught up in a millenarian mania, I plotted ways to get the word out. I’d initially bought a proof press with my friend Julie Holcomb, but politics separated us and she went on to take the proof press and become a master hand-press printer. I had a vision to save the world so I started learning to print on a mimeograph machine, but never managed to get it to function well enough to print more than a dozen or so semi-legible sheets. I quickly disposed of the machine and several of us in Calhoun House began looking for alternatives. We had no resources: as a house we fed ourselves mostly by dumpster diving. But we had faith and a vision so we began compiling and editing articles for a small magazine we hoped to eventually print down in the basement.

My ex-wife Karen and I were giving our relationship “one last try” and she joined in the project, offering to contribute her skills as a printer. We finally found a printing press advertised for $75 and when a few of us went to look at it we found it under a tarp next to a garage, the image for a flyer for a demonstration for the 1976 UFW grape boycott still on the blanket. We took this as a clear sign we had to buy this movement press, and I didn’t even try to bargain with the seller.

The printing press, in as bad shape as it was, seemed to be no problem for Dave Smith to fix and the challenge even excited him. Dave and I set to work, using rubber bands and pieces of pipe to replace springs and missing handles, and he sewed elastic bands together to make a conveyor table. It took weeks of hard work to get the machine running, and a month or two of long days working to print the forty-eight-page magazine. We had to raise the press up on a platform in the basement because the periodic winter rain would flood the area where we worked, and we often had to walk through two or three inches of water to reach our workstation. We solved that problem by making a path with milk crates to the platform holding the press. Bob rivera threw in his energy as art director, accompanied by my ex-wife Karen, and while Dave and I worked trying to fix the press, to get it, and keep it, running, bob and Karen spent the next several months of winter laying out the magazine.

Called The Second Coming, the editorial line was “Evangelical Marxist” since we were all former or current Evangelicals, with the exception, of course, of bob. The issue included solidarity statements with Nicaragua, articles by Dorothee Sölle that Marc had translated (and all of us had taken turns attempting to get them into English), poetry from the Rosa Luxemburg/Dorothy Day Cultural Brigade, and others, and it ended with the statement from the Christians for Socialism Vallejo meeting. “Towards a Christian Socialist Creed” affirmed, among other things, “that change is the result of the linking of the variety of our gifts and struggles in a non-hierarchical sharing” and that “the world and all its wealth belongs to everyone, that we are stewards of the resources within our reach and that the means of production cannot be owned by any individual but should be administered collectively by those who labor.”

The centerfold was perhaps the most controversial part of the magazine. It was a series of four illustrations by the Nicaraguan artist Cerezo Barreto and the first one was innocent enough: Jesus, with the dove descending on him and his Father’s hands reaching down to him as his own great hands protect little black children. That, however, was followed by a giant Uncle Sam with a blood-stained napkin around his neck, devouring handfuls of black and brown people. That was followed by a Nicaraguan pietá and the sequence ended with the giant Uncle Sam menacingly towering vampire-like as if preparing to pounce on a Sandinista demonstration above which was held a banner in Spanish saying “The children of Sandino neither sell out nor surrender.”

Needless to say, we gained few, if any, converts or supporters and the fact that we were supporting the revolutionary cause of the Sandinistas, a cause that had been won by force of arms, put us at greater odds with the pacifist Anabaptist and Evangelical community in Berkeley, the only community likely to be otherwise sympathetic.

Ronald Reagan had decided to go on an anti-communist offensive, declaring the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire.” Many socialists and communists I knew agreed with that assessment, but we also saw the US as no less evil an empire. The anti-nuclear movement burgeoned under Reagan: he ended up being its best organizer. We seemed to be ever closer to nuclear war as well as intervention in Central America. Meanwhile, the entire culture seemed to be veering off toward the right in politics as well as in ethics and Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority seemed to have captured the attention of Christians in Middle America. The entire political scenario, domestic and international, looked bleak, except for Central America where revolutionary insurgencies offered some hope for alternatives in a bipolar world, or so we thought. I expressed my sense of doom in a journal entry in late 1981:

I watch my hands turn to ash.

I hear the cry of billions.

The stars roll up like a scroll

into the glowing darkness.

A black silk shroud

for a can of Del Monte corn.

A coffin for a box of Kelloggs

Sugar Frosted Flakes.

The Pepsi generation degenerates

into a carbonated corpse.

Capital and competition

are the whores in every bed,

the idols of every altar;

icons of these gods reside

in every mind,

in the eye of every heart

and each tv screen of the soul.

I watch my legs melt away.

The waste of autos fills my lungs.

My veins pump pesticides and preservatives.

The little I have left is a shriek.

And I screw my lips into a smile

to meet my dead friends at a party

where we’ll spend the evening re-

membering what it was like

to be alive.

I was obsessed with activist politics, and I could tell even bob was beginning to worry about me. He suggested I take a break and gave me a copy of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery to read. I didn’t read it. I had more important things to read than what I thought to be the obtuse, elitist and a-political poetry of Ashbery. I couldn’t understand why bob would push such material on me. But he was worried, and trying to cool me down with some post-modern cold water. That was how worried he appeared to be.

I didn’t have it in me to worry about myself. I could only think that I needed to act against the great injustice of the world somehow, the great insanity that had even engulfed the church. And I was sure that if we could raise our voices and speak out it would somehow make a difference. It had worked with the prophets of Israel, hadn’t it? Or had it?