More Reflections on Faun and Revolutionary Music

(The following is a expansion of my recent comments about Faun,  the outspokenly Pagan German musical troupe that has become part of Europe's post-Christian avant-garde Left and one of its primary cultural magnets. Like today's commentary, this too was birthed by my correspondence with the writer Cate Montana, who has become one of my closest friends.)

***

I WAS ZENNING OUT, recovering from the monthly madness of the senior-citizen newsletter I edit and produce, when I decided to play some more of Faun's work including “Blaue Stunde,” a piece to which I had not really listened before.

Then playing it while actually paying attention,  I discovered several of those poetically indicative chills in the musical accompaniment and instantly became enough curious about the song to run down a translation of its lyrics. 

What I discovered was rather mind-blowing. From the lyrics of “Blaue Stunde” I would say whomever wrote them actually encountered the Goddess, much as I did in the water meadow at Wickersham on 15 August 1970...

I had walked alone and lonely into the Innis Creek water meadow, a vast unkempt field beyond the buildings and gardens of the Wickersham, Washington commune where I was then staying, and now I stood amidst Nature's shadowy harbingers of Autumn: blown thistles, bright clumps of pearly everlasting, iridescent cobwebs bejeweled with dew. The communards were meeting in their main building but were ensnared in psychodrama intensified by ideological disputes, and I had left in bitterness and disgust. Now in search of inner peace I sprawled on the ground and gazed at the zenith-high improbably brilliant full moon as if it were some mandala of last resort. Then to my astonishment there was a kind of psychic jolt, intangible yet seismic in its intensity, as if some unseen door had burst open, and all in the same breathtaking instant the moon spiraled into a rainbow that expanded to fill the entire sky, contracted to a vortex of spinning colors, plunged tornado-like to earth and shaped a magnificently ageless woman pale and translucent as mist yet undeniably real. She was majestically naked but loosely wrapped in the lunar blonde infinity of her own hair; she smiled, reached out her hands, touched me, perhaps even kissed my brow, then like some impossibly magical dancer swirled her endless mane into rainbow hues that swept her aloft, dissolving herself back into revolving bands of color that expanded once more from horizon to horizon and shrank into the moon again – a millisecond's vision, a mere glimpse so brief and so ephemeral I could scarcely believe I had seen it and yet so vivid it could not be denied.  But now as if nothing at all had occurred there was only the commonplace moon again, the midnight sky and its diamond constellations, the fragrant crush of wild chamomile beneath my head, the vast nocturnal stillness of Pacific Northwest woods so unlike the firefly-bright insect-rowdiness of the fields and forests in which I'd spent the summers of my boyhood and adolescence.  When the night's chill finally urged me to my feet, I remember there were faint tendrils of fog rising from the creek, and for a moment, just once, it seemed I heard the clear cold water chuckle.

….much as Apuleius (124-170 CE) encountered her at sea (for which see the account beginning on page 70 of The White Goddess [Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition: 1982]), much as Graves himself obviously encountered her but – lest he be declared insane – never dared acknowledge it save in his poetry: “Her sea-blue eyes were wild/ But nothing promised that is not performed.”

Whether such encounters are objectively real or merely an especially intricate manifestation of some carefully unacknowledged insanity spawned by our species' overwhelming terror of mortality – and I must confess I myself alternate between precisely those antitheticals – one does not write such poetically accurate description from belief or theory alone: again my own statement that one cannot be truly Pagan unless one has spent enough time in the back country to have seen the shadows dance. Indeed  as I wrote the preceding sentence it came to me – and with that bright undeniable certainty of an old-time flash-bulb going off – here is the entire story of my life: seeing the shadows dance sufficient times to learn not to flinch, to embrace the experience as a demonstration of love, and now that I am too old and worn down by age and poverty to retreat again to the wilderness and once more hide there from the Lords of Chaos who have usurped that which rightfully belongs to Our Lady, to at last bear witness to what half the time I know to be unequivocally true. Quoth Graves: “none greater in the universe than the Triple Goddess.”

Which, by the way, is why I bristle at the Xtians even when, as now, they occasionally acknowledge the relevance of ritual dance and thereby (unwittingly) underscore the irremediable contradiction between the dialectically inertial momentum of matter that is the essence of life versus the infinite hatred of sensuality and indeed of the entire physical realm that is implicit in the definitively misogynistic, definitively ecocidal dogma at the core of Judaism, Christianity and Islam alike.

But perhaps I should not bristle quite so much. Ritual dance has been methodically denied the followers of the downpresser Abrahamic creeds since the Deuteronomic (patriarchal) "reforms" of approximately 600 BCE,  and the fact dance is now (begrudgingly) admitted to some Xtian ritual cannot be anything other than yet another example of how, when the Goddess is barred from the front door, she inevitably creeps in the back door – a truism that is of course dismissed as “an old wives' tale” – never mind that is precisely what she did via the folk-music renaissance of the 1950s – in which context note the noun "ballad" as a  derivative of the same root (Latin as I remember) that gave us "ballet." In other words, a ballad was once by definition  the musical and poetic accompaniment of a dance, a ritual dance, the  connection remaining so powerful that in some of the original folk-renaissance renderings of balladry (such as Martin Carthy's variant of “Willie's Lady”), the music is so vivid my mind's eye can see the turns of dance – the very sort of vision so emphatically underscored by Faun, obviously knowingly as I believe they are all classically trained musicians and being European are of course classically educated as well.

(How ironic one of our main hopes for a sustainable world comes from what was only recently the most warlike nation on this battered planet.)

Returning to “Blaue Stunde,” as an individual piece of music it stands in stunning contrast to the present-day music associated with U.S. expressions of the resurrection of the Goddess. What was performed nearly 50 years ago by the (probably murdered) Tim Buckley was wrenchingly powerful – “if you tell me of all the pain you've had/ I'll never smile again,” a line from “Phantasmagoria in Two” (a modern variant of the classic dialogue between poet and Muse), probably has no equal even in antiquity – but it has no  counterpart in today's U.S. Paganism, which has become like the USian people themselves, oppressively submissive. A good example is Loreena McKennitt's work, which was originally unapologetically Pagan, but which she has since – no doubt under severe external pressure – diligently repositioned as New-Age-ecumenical instead. Indeed – and despite the sometimes-bold content of its lyrics – in its new, self-consciously de-Paganized context, it often comes off more as lamentation than celebration or defiance. (And as I know all too well from my various odysseys into the organized versions of U.S. Goddess-centered Paganism, the decidedly serf-like passivity of its participants [and therefore of much of its present-day music] goes hand-in-hand with its definitively oppressed and obnoxiously oppressive we-are-all-victims pacifism. The result is a vehement but implicitly frightened [maybe-if-we-aren't-militant-they-won't-kill-us] rejection of politics in any form – which is of course the source of the real U.S. Left's unmitigated scorn of Paganism as “no different from many other religion in being just another opiate to facilitate the oppression of the masses” [the quote is from a Marxian comrade] – and which therefore provides us with a classic example, as valid as the induced racism and sexism that forever fragments the U.S. Working Class,  of “divide et impera” in action.)

It is an aside, albeit a pointedly relevant one, to note the curious anachronism within the Buckley video linked above. The song was recorded in 1967, while the video – obviously made by someone who recognized the poetic vision that was the wellspring of Buckley's best work – was made in 2011. Though he has been dead since 1975, and though the relatively free world of the '70s was almost indescribably different from the slave-world of today, in the parlance of hipster poets and musicians, “Tim Buckley Lives.” Indeed there may be no greater praise the human mind can formulate.

That said, “Blaue Stunde” is truly a horse of a different sort (if you will pardon the spontaneous emergence of a stream-of-subconscious reference to the Celtic/Scythian Goddess Epona), with what kind of horse she is revealed by the accompany drumming. “Blaue Stunde” is ritual dance, yes, but it has none of the implicit submissiveness that has come to define so much U.S. paganism, which given the omnipresence of the secret police (and precisely as suggested by the semiotic evidence I cited above), has probably been infiltrated and co-opted much as Women's Liberation was infiltrated and co-opted – so that the depth of one's commitment is now defined by only by one's material success. As the mainstream brand of U.S. feminism is surely Ayn Rand feminism, so it seems there is also a mainstream Ayn Rand Paganism. Such is the Pavlovian power of capitalism, specifically the mind-mangling might of Madison Avenue.

What first caught my attention about “Blaue Stunde” – what prompted me to seek out the lyrics (and what so surprised me about their content) – was obvious militance of the music. Focusing more closely, I realized it was the drumwork, which, when I began actually hearing it, stood my hair on end with that wondrous chill of recognition. Note the four-beat drum-flourish at the end of certain lines in the lyrics:

“And the pale light of dawn outlined
Her head adorned by the morning dew” (drum flourish).

“Her fairy-like limbs were white as the moon
Her hair was like made of gold” (drum flourish).

Note also the drum riffs elsewhere in the piece.

What I realized, listening so intently, is “Blaue Stunde,” despite its poignant beauty, is most assuredly not the music of submission. It is instead the music of active resistance. Indeed – though I do not know how I knew it – I suddenly recognized the drums as  war drums, the sort of tribal ritual that is a prelude to a battle and the sort of music that accompanies you as you advance across open ground against a vastly superior enemy, you assuming you will not live to see the next moonrise or maybe even the next minute but not really giving a damn because that is the desperation to which you have been driven by the foe's depredations and yet by some miracle not only you yourself survive but so do most of your comrades and in the end you have won the day and won the future – perhaps as if Boudicca and all she symbolized had triumphed on that fateful morning in the midlands of Albion somewhere north of the still smoldering ruins of Londinium or if Wounded Knee had become the beginning of a victorious rising rather than the end of First Nations resistance. Whatever, I glimpsed it clearly for a moment, by the time-reference provided by its weaponry sometime in the pre-atomic past or more likely in the post-apocalyptic future...

(“And the pale light of dawn outlined
Her head adorned by the morning dew”)

I am as you know given to reject such mind's-eye visions unless I am able to rationalize them at least to the extent of recognizing their real-time sources, and of course I have since tried to do that with “Blaue Stunde” and have succeeded to the extent of recognizing the longer riffs with the congas echoing as if through slumlord streets, the rhythm identical to what one so often heard on the Lower East Side during the weeks after the Tompkins Park (Police) Riot of 1967, as an organization called Jade Companions of the Flower Dance briefly united Hippies and Hispanics in common resistance to the invading cops and thrill-seeking suburban phonies. Verily, if I may be allowed to paraphrase Dylan, “red lights flashing in the hot Manhattan night,” complete with drums echoing ominously 24/7. 

Faun's eclectic combination of drums and pipes in “Blaue Stunde” also reminded me of an incident during one of the anti-Vietnam War protest marches when maybe 500 or 1000 Caucasian thugs had bottled up the entire 500,000-person demonstration in Central Park and kept us there until the members of the Columbia University Pipe Band edged their way to the front of the crowd, formed themselves into what a half-century earlier would have been a line of battle and, skirling their pipes and drumming a rhythm similar to (or maybe even identical to) that of "Blaue Stunde," led us out of the park and onto Fifth Avenue. The thugs, some of whom had baseball bats or chains and who were brazenly countenanced by the cops (as was commonplace in those days), fled in obvious fear as soon as the pipers began leading the advance.

But what it was about the punctuational drum flourishes in “Blaue Stunde” that first caught my attention remains undefined, never mind the undeniable recognition implicit in the initial chill. Though now as I think of it I believe I remember reading or hearing somewhere – most likely both as the reality of music remains beyond the descriptive ability of linear language – such drum-emphasis was, along with stringed instruments and pipes, characteristic of ancient epic poetry.

As to the use of genuine love poetry as inspiration to resistance, the only people I know of in the modern age to have done so are Celts...and of course Russians, in which context note “Beriozka” (Birch Tree), a favorite of the Red Army in World War II and – because birch is used in making musical instruments – an invocation of Yulya,  one of the many Slavonic names for the Goddess – hence the chorus: variations on the theme of “Yulee, Yulee lovely birch tree.” 
 
It was so beloved by the Red Army, it was recorded by the Red Army Chorus and Dance Troupe.  and just for retro-kicks, here it is, static and all, as I heard it via the 78-rpm music of my earliest childhood.  Then of course there is how it is formally danced, in this instance preceded  by some of the most stunningly hypnotic choreography I have yet seen:   With this sort of aesthetic quality commonplace elsewhere, no wonder the rest of the  world damns us as “nyekulturniy.”

Not really relevant to this essay (which began as the sort free-association, semi-stream-of-consciousness thing Cate so often inspires whenever she and I talk or exchange emails) – or maybe relevant in some way I don't yet see – is the Faun piece that, were I a videographer, I would use – as I stated in an OAN essay in 2012 – as the accompaniment to that incredible footage of the horse rescue in Holland c. 2005.

Quoth Buffy Sainte-Marie many years ago, when only allegedly nutso people like myself (and unfortunately a few spooks) had any idea what obtained: “Goddess is alive/Magic is afoot”

LB/24 November – 2 December 2015

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Unbearable Truths: Reflections on the Imbecility of Hope

AGAIN MY APOLOGY for extended silence. I am struggling, quite painfully, with questions of content, which of course are actually questions of conscience and consciousness. How, for example, does one who came of age when the United States was still a quasi-democratic, socioeconomically mobile society, cope with the new USian realities of irremediable powerlessness and inescapable socioeconomic hopelessness? 

Obviously I have not found an answer. But unless one is willing to embrace madness and retreat into a clinical state of delusion, the facts are undeniable, even to former optimists like Chris Hedges.   Powerlessness and hopelessness are now the summum bonum of our lot – the best we in the 99 Percent dare imagine – and given the invincible technological superiority of the surveillance-and-murder state that protects and sustains the One Percent who rule us all, so will it be forever – that is, until our species is extinct.

Quoth Hedges in a more recent essay:  “No one, not least our corporate overlords, believes that our material conditions will improve with the impending collapse of globalization, the steady deterioration of the global economy, the decline of natural resources and the looming catastrophes of climate change.” The first major-media journalist to acknowledge the terrifying totality of the doom capitalism has brought down on all of us, Hedges now writes from a perspective similar to the one that has been mine at least since 2007. 

Unfortunately Hedges remains bound by the intellectual paralysis imposed by Abrahamic religion and his ministerial training therein. Though unlike most Leftists he understands the symbiotic and synergistic roles of religion in human society and consciousness, he fails to acknowledge how capitalism – infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – is derived from the three principle doctrines of the Divine Führer Yahweh/Jesu/Allah. These articles of belief, at the core of each of the Abrahamic faiths, are (1)-the murderous hatred of woman and the ultimately suicidal contempt for nature; (2)-the ubermenschen/untermenschen hierarchy of the chosen and/or the saved versus the damned; and (3)-the prosperity gospel so derived – the point at which Ayn Rand, despite her defiant atheism, becomes the world's most influential prophet.

Nor – with the tragic blindness characteristic of most of my gender – will Hedges allow himself to recognize capitalism as the direct descendant of patriarchy, the seemingly alien paradigm that arose mysteriously about 4,000 years ago to overthrow at least 100,000 years of human societies that were centered on motherhood and structured around its requirements. Thus he will not – perhaps cannot – admit how the rejection of biology and biological imperatives that began with patriarchy eventually morphed into the death-worship at the core of Judiasm, Christianity and Islam and now, via capitalism, imposes the unthinkable horror of apocalypse as its self-fulfilling prophecy. Literally – because it is ever more obvious the capitalists are too terminally greedy to allow us any exit – we are doomed.

No doubt because such absolute hopelessness has never before been the central fact of human consciousness, there seems to be nothing in our legacy – no psychology or psychiatry, no religion or spirituality, in fact nothing apart from the slow but relentless suicide of intoxication by debilitating drugs – that can genuinely ease our adjustment to the new and ultimately deadly master-and-slave paradigm by which capitalism now rules all the peoples of this planet.

Hedges, for whom despite my criticism I have enormous admiration and respect, suggests in the the first of his two essays linked above we embrace the opiates of religion or at least spirituality and the intoxicants of art. But I am too skeptical for the former alternative, and too experienced in the real-world economics of art to accept the latter.

Though a part of me believes, fervently and on the basis of seemingly otherwise-inexplicable evidence, in the existence of (some) deity and an afterlife including reincarnation, another part of me can with equal conviction refute all such evidence as hallucinatory symptoms of terminal insanity – the final response of the human mind to the terrifying reality of death: the fact that for the one who is dying, death is literally the end of everything, including the cosmos itself.

And Mr. Hedges' other option, art, is increasingly beyond our economic reach: computers, musical instruments, cameras, paint and canvas, ceramic materials, most of all the essential education in content, form and method – all these prerequisites to making art have become so prohibitively expensive, they are even now legally accessible only to the aristocracy – that is, the One Percent, the Ruling Class. Hence there is now a huge gap, indeed a truly unbridgeable chasm probably greater than at any time in human history, between the arts of the aristocracy and the arts of the people.

Hence too, in the great ghetto that is now 99 percent of USia, there is an intimate connection between people's art and people's crime: note for example the relationship between hip-hop, graffiti and gang-banging. In other words, to be a successful as a people's artist in today's world is to be successful as a criminal, or at least to successfully consort with criminals – and I for one could never be comfortable in such outlaw realms.

*****

It was with earlier, less-well-articulated variants of the above considerations I responded to the footage of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech posted by the Seattle on-line daily Crosscut nearly a month ago: 

While I applaud Mr. Copeland's decision to post the video of Rev. King's speech, to call it “uplifting” in the context of today's socioeconomic and political reality is like calling a film about gourmet dining “uplifting” when it is shown at the height of a famine. As anyone fit to be an editor should understand instinctively, context is everything. The United States in which Rev. King could dream of “the riches of freedom and the security of justice” is no more, nor will it ever be again. “The whirlwinds of revolt” cited by Rev. King have come and gone, and their merciless suppression by the Ruling Class has left us with far less than we had in 1963. The so-called American Dream is as dead as the American experiment in constitutional governance, both slain by the most obscenely powerful oligarchy in human history. Nor will we in the Working Class ever have such liberty and wealth again. Now we are all slaves, enslaved by a capitalism so diabolically cunning, so infinitely greedy, so sadistically merciless, resistance truly is futile. Thus the significance of Rev. King's speech today: a eulogy, a lamentation for all we have lost, for what might have been but is now beyond our reach forever.

Later on the same thread I replied to a poster who rejected my “cynical perspective”:

My apology, Louploup, for responding so tardily. But the fact remains the unwilling subjects of empire have ever spoken as you do, with hopes nearly always false and all too often fatal.

Here in the United States today it is only our abysmal ignorance of history that keeps us from realizing real empires last effectively forever and are overthrown only when superior force is applied from without. The Roman Empire empire in its diverse forms lasted 1,700 years (c. 300 BCE to 1453 CE), and even now its legacies shape global political and economic realities. The U.S. Empire is just beginning, not approaching its end, and based on its policy of merciless application of its technological superiority and its utter lack of effective enemies anywhere on this planet, it can be rationally expected to last at least as long as the Roman forebear after which it is increasingly patterned.

The only factor that could possibly shorten its longevity is Gaian intervention, the extermination of our entire species in retaliation for its contempt for the natural environment and its hatred of nature's microcosm the human female.

Meanwhile the realities of imperial subjugation offer us not the “audacity of hope” as described by Obama the Orator before he shape-shifted into Barack the Betrayer and sold us to the oligarchs, but the utter imbecility of hope proven by how so many of us were deceived by the Big Lie of “change we can believe in” and by how promptly the Occupy Movement was crushed thereafter. The same lesson – need I say again the imbecility of hope – is taught abroad by the imperial legions, much as it was taught to Queen Boudica's anti-imperial revolutionaries by the Roman massacre of 80,000 of their number in Britain c. 61 CE.

In bitter truth -- unquestionably since the advent of patriarchy and the sack of Knossos, possibly throughout the entire 100,000 years of our species' existence -- the light of freedom is never more than a very occasional spark in an otherwise unbroken eon of darkness. Hence in old age I celebrate the accidental good karma of my childlessness: because I fathered no children who lived beyond birth, I have damned no descendants to inescapable slavery, which is now the only future possible for anyone not of the Ruling Class.

*****

A few days later, when Robert Reich predicted a new progressive revolution, I responded via a Reader Supported News thread. My comments, which I realize now were an elaboration on the above, were rejected by 26 thumbs-down votes – an all-time record for me:

Sadly, Mr. Reich's claim -- “it will happen again” -- panders to the imbecility of hope, the moronic Polly Anna optimism of those who, by ignorance or delusion, deny the apocalyptic reality underlying the permanent death of the American Dream. A progressive resistance to capitalism will not arise again because the world's resources are decreasing too rapidly to allow such reality-based optimism. That's why the Dream is dead beyond resurrection; without the material wealth of the Dream, the progressive vision is meaningless.

Even if this were not so, the Ruling Class will never allow another progressive era. The Ruling Class is hoarding the world's wealth to protect its self against the looming triple apocalypse -- terminal climate change inflicted by fossil fuels, the exhaustion of those same fuels and, as a result, the extinction-class disaster of total technological collapse. And this time, unlike any other epoch in human history, the Ruling Class has the technological superiority to impose zero-tolerance enforcement of its will.

The combination of all these factors means our powerlessness and ever-worsening poverty is forever – that is, until our species is extinct. Thus the damning validity of Chris Hedges' claim our only sane alternative is to embrace the opiates of spirituality and religion, never mind they too are mostly delusional.

***

To clarify, I was an activist all my adult life, going to jail, sacrificing a promising journalism career on the altar of change.

That's why, two months away from my 73rd birthday, I am economically no more than a common bum – damned to the slave-pen powerlessness of dependence on welfare for the remainder of my life, condemned to die if not literally in the street then surely and inescapably in the proverbial gutter of shame and degradation that is the welfare-recipient's lot.

In today's United States activism is not just pointless; it is often also socioeconomic suicide.

It is rendered so by the obscene reality of Moron Nation. The U.S. population has been dumbed down to a nadir of prideful ignorance and moral imbecility that has no peer in human history – a collective idiocy so grave, Ayn Rand with her variants on the Mein Kampf theme now elevates it to perverse heroism – infinite greed as ultimate virtue.

As Occupy proved, the resultant combination of anti-intellectuality and selfishness forever prohibits solidarity. It reduces activism to egotistical shouting. Hence – beyond the likelihood of wrecking one's economic prospects – activism changes nothing.

Nevertheless I persist in small acts of defiance. Why? So I feel less useless as I sink into the pre-extinction darkness.

Here in Moron Nation, it is idiotic to expect anything better – a bitter truth no deluge of negative numbers can refute.

*****

But such realization does not give us any respite from the looming horrors we are ever-more-obviously powerless to avert. Though it pains me to say it, perhaps the junkies are right; perhaps there is no longer any human prospect for joy or pleasure beyond the suicidal ecstasies induced by drugs.

With or without drugs, we long-ago bohemians saw the darkness hidden beneath the American Dream decades before the economic defeat of the Soviet Union eliminated forever capitalism's need to disguise its bottomless savagery. Allen Ginsberg's Howl denounced it: “I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan foretold its consequences: “It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.” Tim Buckley's “Phantasmagoria in Two,” speaking as for all true-hearted men to all the world's oppressed women, lamented its devastation: “If you tell me of all the pain you've had, I'll never smile again.” And Diane di Prima's Loba speaks so powerfully it could have served – if indeed there were any remaining long-range hopes of human survival – as the foundational epic of a new consciousness, its definitive lay of magic, the wellspring of its revolutionary spirituality: “All things are possible within the mother...”

Given such undeniably compelling poetic inputs, had we bohemians been allowed to pursue our own visions, we might well have evolved an ideology genuinely capable of averting the coming darkness – or at least of coping with it. Much of bohemia was thinking in that direction; many of us saw the old Counterculture as an ultimate and ultimately encouraging expression of our species' survival instinct. Gary Snyder in Earth House Hold hailed the children of Countercultural parents as “different in personality structure and outlook from anybody...since the destruction of Knossos.” My own forever-lost “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer” – obliterated by mysterious fire just as it seemed bound for publication – identified via semiotics the hitherto-unnamed common vision that might have united the diverse threads of what Walter Bowart had already correctly labeled “revolution in consciousness.” It was my hope “Dancer” would encourage collective exploration of the often-sensed but never-before-identified legacy shared by traditional folk music, its folk-rock derivatives and the Feminist, Environmentalist, Back-to-the-Land and Alternative Press movements. Such exploration, I believed, was the essential precursor to solidarity – perhaps even the formation of a nationwlde Countercultural united front akin to the spontaneous cooperative efforts I had witnessed in Lower Manhattan and in the larger cities of the Puget Sound area.

But the domestic bohemia that was birthmother and midwife to these revolutionary impulses was soon to be crushed. Its unforgivable sin was providing the U.S. Working Class with opportunities in music, art, literature and the quest for humanitarian social change that had previously been available only to the Ruling Class. Bohemia had thus become the grassroots population's aesthetic, ideological and spiritual incubator. The suppression of its radical potential (and the restructuring of the economy to eliminate all possibility anything like it would ever rise again) was therefore an important part of the war on the 99 Percent declared by Nixon in his 1973 post-inaugural declarations to William Randolph Hearst Jr. Speaking on behalf the One Percent, Nixon said the U.S. Working Class had become like spoiled children; from now on, he said, we would be disciplined with whatever degree of hardship was deemed necessary to guarantee our submissiveness. In this context, di Prima's 25-year, 1973-to-1998 perseverance in writing Loba approaches both the miraculous and the heroic – all the more so since bohemia's destruction was effectively complete by the mid-1980s. And without bohemia, which was not just an attitude and a subculture but the protected space in which rebels and visionaries could gather and interact, any potential our species might rescue itself from the impending apocalypse was dead in the womb.

Not that it matters now, three decades after the fact. Successful reformations, like successful revolutions, are born only of optimism, of rising expectations. But capitalism's rape of the environment guarantees there will never again be rising expectations anywhere on this planet. Every day we in the 99 Percent are thrust closer to the brutal, hand-to-mouth existence characteristic of antebellum slaves and medieval serfs. Our only certainty is tomorrow will be worse than today; our only question is how much worse will it be. Loba thus becomes, in the old First Nations sense, a kind of death song, not just for di Prima herself but for all humanity and our Mother Earth as well:

“there is no knife can sever me from her
where I go down to bleed, to birth, to die.”

Moreover, history proves declining expectations provoke no protests beyond flash-in-pan flare-ups of agony and rage, tantrums of rebellion as doomed as any of the Middle Ages' innumerable peasant uprisings. The peasants failed – just as their Working Class counterparts fail today – because they lack the four prerequisites essential to revolutionary success:  ideological solidarity, or at least a commonality of analysis; organization, including leadership; mastery of all extant technologies; support by powerful forces beyond the oppressors' deadly reach. Most of all they are doomed because each of these prerequisites requires some degree of optimism as a condition of its birth. But the savagery of capitalism has combined with the certainty of self-imposed terminal climate change to banish optimism forever from the Earth.

How could we have let our only home be trashed beyond repair? How could we have been such fools?

LB/11 February 2013

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