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“But there is one thing about those days I am sure of, one memory I have that sticks like glue. I began haunting the movies on Forty-Second Street like every other miserable unemployed bum in New York in those days. I never even looked at the marquee to see what was playing. I simply bought a ticket every day and plunged into that fabled darkness. Then not only was ‘realife’ suspended, but very soon I began feeling wonderfully anesthetized. One day a Russian movie came on the screen. It was Eisenstein’s Strike. Inside of ten minutes I felt something electrifying was happening on that screen. And inside of twenty minutes I realized I was in the presence of a new world, a place where some new sense of human life was stirring. And it stirred me, it stirred me deeply. I came out of that movie feeling alive for the first time in months, maybe years, maybe my whole life.
“I went back to City, walked into the library, and got out every book I could find on contemporary Russia. Then I calmly walked out of the school, went back to my room, holed up, and began reading. I don’t think I came out of that room for a week.
Rindzer falls silent. Glances out his window. Plays with the venetian blind behind him. Looks around his book-lined office. Then he says:
“So for me there’s no politics anymore. The years when I was a Communist, bar none, were the best of my life. The relation for me between the personal and the historical was intense, deeply felt, fully realized. Now, I live an entirely personal life, removed from the larger world. I feel no interest in anything beyond my work. I work hard, I’m proud of the work I do, I consider it an obligation to take as much responsibility for the medical profession as I can, but that’s it. The world is smaller, colder, darker by far for me than it was when I was a Communist. . . . That’s a funny thing to say here, isn’t it?” He laughs, waving his hand toward the brilliant Arizona afternoon. “I’ve made my peace with my life, but I have no illusions that I live a life of larger meaning.”
“Marxism stirred me deeply,” Grace says, leaning back in one of her two chairs, crossing her long, blue-jeaned legs on her low table. “It struck chords in me as deep as the remembrance of New England. It transformed the memory of those isolated human efforts, made my parents’ lives a thing of beauty. Simply understanding their lives through Marxism lent them a beauty in my eyes. Clarity, purpose, seeing them in the larger design, that was beautiful to me. The act of understanding was an act of creation. The discovery through new materials, so to speak, of the hidden content.
“Marxism was the transforming stuff, the new color, the new space, the new texture, the one that brought to the surface the life until then obscured. Do you know what that means? That’s what the artist waits a lifetime for, that newness, that particular discovery that catalyzes inner sight, makes you ‘see’ like you’ve never seen before. . . .
The afternoon is fading, the brilliant north light vanishing from the studio. Grace and I replace our coffees with scotch. We remain silent for a bit in the gathering darkness. Then Grace lights a cigarette, inhales deeply, and says:
“I guess I’m an old-fashioned ideologue. For me, discipline is freedom, ideology is specific, organization is crucial. Without these tools, these structural means, I don’t know how to perform or produce. I sense that there is a new world out there, a new and important idea forming itself, perhaps even a new step in the human struggle is being taken with this cry of ‘consciousness.’ I sense it, but I don’t feel it. It doesn’t speak to me in my gut. It doesn’t give me new sight. . . . So I make my quilts and my pots. Here in the studio I fashion a kind of structure I understand and within which I can function. And that’s it. That’s how an ideologue without an ideology goes on.”
“I’ll tell you what a Communist is,” Lanzetti said. “An organizer goes into a factory. He works with the men, begins giving them leaflets, points out what’s happening at work, suggests relationships the workers didn’t see before. A worker becomes interested in what the organizer is saying. He begins coming to a few meetings. He begins to read. He gets a little larger sense of things. He begins to think about capitalism. He learns about slavery and feudalism. He sees a pattern to this thing. He starts to feel history. Now he begins to see his life not only in terms of the corporation, or the sonofabitch over him, or just this lousy life that keeps pissing on him. He sees a system of oppression older than God and he feels himself part of something bigger than he ever knew existed. It eases his heart, gives him courage and stamina, he’s politicized.
“All this time he belongs to the CP. Now, let’s say he moves. Drops out of meetings, gets to a new town. Delays looking up the Party. They don’t go looking for him. He doesn’t pay his dues, he’s dropped from the rolls, he’s no longer in the Party. Time passes. He doesn’t feel like going to meetings. Times change. He drifts away. Now, you tell me, what is that man? I’ll tell you what he is. That man is a Communist! And for the rest of his life he’s a Communist. Wherever some shitty thing is happening and he’s anywhere near it he is going to respond in a certain way and act on a certain understanding. And men like him are everywhere. These are the Communists, these are my people, my children, my own. . . .
America's speech waterfalls forth in meltingpot tongues of Babel in
telegraphic ads, pop songs, street-corner rapping, bar room brag & bluster, bad-mouthing, put-ons, putdowns,
the home-made rhetorics of Whitman, Melville, Andrew Jackson Davis, L. Ron Hubbard; the streamclear prose of Thoreau or Hemingway; Gertrude Stein's devotions;
the sportcaster's spiel tracing a horse race over & thru the radio; the hawking, squawking, conning & jiving; preaching, teaching, wheeling & dealing; the jive-ass realms of speech; the hard-sell, the soft-soaping;
gossip columnists, breathless, telling-all; right-on; can you dig it? letting it all hang telling It like It is; out
anyway, it's all semantic;
hermetic trade lingo: jazz musicians, short-order cooks, truck-drivers, car mechanics, stereo buffs, doit-yourself, tool talk -- the technologic speech forms, machine-sprouted vocabularies whose sounds rebound in & out of USA livingrooms & bedrooms;
the self & tribe protective languages, shields against a rude deluge -- layer & layer -- worthless degrading words --
the black man's linguistic counter-attack on white America's word-gas clouds webbed with war-blood; the same cloud hanging over the American Indian (whose language was charged & precise as what a poet wants his to be), the Chicano, the Puerto Rican; curt New England speech brittle as icicles; the Southerner's smoothing-out of word sounds; the Midwesterner's flat speech of plains; the shtetl-to-ghetto Yiddishisms of the Eastern cities; the regional, community, tribal tongues;
shop-talk, cop-talk, bop-talk, TV's hypno-rant; the daily dose of phony baloney; the nightly hot air; animal invective clash of sounds as radical meets reactionary, as power crashes down on the powerless;
these sounds, the languages, these codes & messages, all meet in the ears & eyes of poets who have been Jacob-wrestling Europe since landing on Plymouth Rock.
America was claimed: a new place, a new space to build great cities on.
The poets began immediately to innocently & arrogantly fashion a language to meet & match America's impossible largeness.
sick
KR: I don't think there were very many people in the thirties. There were people in San Francisco who were writing and not publishing anything when I came. Most of those people became involved in red San Francisco. The interesting thing is that most of them became practical labor organizers, rather than Bohemians sitting around in Union Square arguing about proletarian literature.
There was a real pattern there, due to the fact that there were all sorts of things wrong with red literature in the thirties in New York. But when the Communist artist and writer's groups were formed, the John Reed Club the one in San Francisco, they put up some pretty stiff qualifications. The members were actually artists and writers. They stayed around.
What happened in New York was that the clubs became dominated by Bohemians who didn't do anything except argue about Marx, whom they had never read, and they would avoid the artists and writers. It's very hard to convey to the present generation what that was like. People talked about communism . in those days the way people talk about acid or smack. I mean, they bored you to death, and they didn't know anything about it.
lol
I was sort of the outdoor organizer for the John Reed Club. I was organizer of everything in the West, and, of course, the New York apparatus thought the West started at Hoboken and that is one reason the Chicago organization was better the reason it had people like Dick Wright and Farrell and people like — Outside of New York, we tried to confine the thing to bona fide artists and writers. In San Francisco our people were actually involved in the real labor movement. You have to understand that there was an enormous amount of bullshit. People were running around talking about "the masses" and there wasn't really any contact with the masses. But hell, I mean, I wrote the Waterfront Worker ... all of the goddamn thing, week after week after week. A mimeographed thing we used to hand out on the waterfront long before the strike. All of us were actually were involved. We were involved in the Agricultural Workers Industrial Union. I had somebody ask me one time at an anarchist meeting in Italy, "Is The Grapes of Wrath true?" One-eighth is true. In the novel, one guy gets killed. In a Bakersfield cotton strike, to which I took Steinbeck, eight guys get killed.
You see, all of us were very actively involved and this makes all the difference in the world. Another thing, very few of these people were orthodox Commies because the basic tradition on the West Coast was IWW. The attitude was really an anarchistic attitude, and for many years I treasured to — flaunt in the face of the FBI, if they ever bothered me — an application to the Communist Party that had written across it, "Comrade Rexroth is a very valuable comrade, but he is entirely too much of an anarchist to be good party material." It was signed by Earl Browder, the general secretary of the Party. This movement stretched all the way from Seattle, where the dominated the intellectual and Bohemian world in the years around the First World War and well into the twenties. People like Gary Snyder, over a generation later than myself, and I grew up in very similar worlds.
:)
Whereas the counterculture as a culture, as a way of life ... you can't catch up with it, it's in the bloodstream of society. You can't pin it down. Its effect is continuously corrosive. It's these capsules they stick in people that keep feeding medicine into their bloodstream for twenty years. The more the poetry of music is massive confrontation, the less effective it is. It may be effective in a very limited range, but the other thing is effective over a long term. This is true of the whole protest-rock and protest-folk bit. Young people are wise to the fact that Donovan is more revolutionary than Dylan. The whole thing that has grown up around Leonard Cohen is more subversive than Country Joe and the Fish. And as the years go by, it becomes completely phony. Play Pete Seeger singing "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night" ... it would make you throw up.
oof
The Autumn constellations
Begin to rise. The brilliant
Moonlight shines on the crowds.
The moon toad swims in the river
And does not drown. The moon rabbit
Pounds the bitter herbs of the
Elixir of eternal life.
His drug only makes my heart
More bitter. The silver brilliance
Only makes my hair more white.
I know that the country is
Overrun with war. The moonlight
Means nothing to the soldiers
Camped in the western deserts.