A Daebaudjimowin for Native American Solidarity Sunday

Here is the text of a short talk I gave this past Sunday at the small Episcopal Church I attend. I dedicated my reflections to Michael Beasley and Ann Larimore, two Native American members of our congregation.

This is our annual Native American Solidarity Sunday at the Episcopal Church of the Incarnation. Rev. Joe Summers invited me to give the remarks today and frankly as the date approached I started to feel more and more anxious because I worried that it was presumptuous of me to talk about the spirituality of Native American people. After all, I’m not Native American, although I have spent a good deal of my life thinking about what it might mean to be Native American. Joe asked me to ground my reflections in my own experience, so this will be quite personal.

Before I begin, I’d like you to remember the etymology of the word religion. It comes from the latin re ligare. Ligare means to bind or to tie. Re means back. So the word religion means to bind back, which is an archaic way of saying to connect. Of course, there are many ways to be religious. First Nation cultures were wonderfully diverse in their religious expressions, but I believe they all shared a spiritual commitment to place or landscape, to the earth as our home.

I thought I’d briefly talk about Native ideas regarding where we fit into the universe. Some of these ideas are very different from our own. The Marxist anthropologist Stanley Diamond said that whenever we encounter people who do things differently than we do, it is an implicit critique of the way we do things. Diamond went on to say that the role of the engaged anthropologist is to make that critique explicit.

The Anishinaabe language is spoken by many of the indigenous people who live around here, and I recently came across the Anishinaabe word Daebaudjimowin, which means a kind of truth known from personal experience. This talk will be framed by my own experience. This is my Daebaudjimowin.

When I was a child we’d go for Sunday drives and occasionally my father would pull over to the side of the road, stop, and say,” Look at this, boys.” We’d crowd over to the window and look out at trash that was littering the road. “See that?” Dad would say. “That’s the grubby paws of the White Man.”

This happened back in the nineteen fifties.

In the 1930’s my father drove from Michigan to Montana and got a job working on roads on the Fort Belknap Reservation. Fort Belknap is in north central Montana, about 90 miles south of the border with Canada, which Native people called the Medicine Line. Medicine here is synonymous with spiritual power. Indian people had noticed that the U.S. Cavalry would not pursue them across the border with Canada.

The last battle of the Indian wars in the 19th century occurred at Fort Belknap when the U.S. Cavalry caught up to Chief Joseph, the great Nez Perce leader, and his band. They were on their way to join Sitting Bull who was just across the Medicine Line in Alberta.

Dad lived with the Chandlers, a Gros Ventre family on the reservation, who were wonderfully generous and hospitable. We have remained very close to them, and Fort Belknap has occupied a central place in the sacred geography of our family. When my grandson Gavin Morgan was baptized in this church he wore a pair of moccasins from Fort Belknap.

My father was not an anthropologist. He was a self-taught collector of Native American art. Most of the Great Plains and Great Lakes Indian art at the Detroit Institute of Arts is from his collection.

Our family went out west in the summertime. One summer we hit the pow-wow trail, traveling from one reservation to the next in the Great Plains to attend celebrations, camping with my dad’s Indian friends.

When we were young my dad told us stories in which animals could talk, especially Old Man Coyote, the Native American Trickster. For those of you who are familiar with these stories, I should explain that he told us the expurgated versions. Later, my father told me about Black Elk, the Oglala Lakota holy man, who spoke about the two-legged people and the four legged people and the winged people.

This implies a view that is very different from the way Europeans structure the world, which has been called the Great Chain of Being. You might think of the European structure as a vertical line with God at the top, followed by the angels and then human beings on down to animals, plants and the non-sentient world. Native people, on the other hand, saw all beings in the universe along a horizontal line as our brothers and sisters.

The ethical implications of this Native world view might be summed up by this old Winnebago saying: The grass under your feet and the birds in the trees above you know you for what you are.

I was so impressed by Black Elk that in my early twenties I drove out to Harney Peak in the Black Hills, which is where Black Elk had his vision. Indian people in the Great Plains believed that if you made a retreat to some isolated place and prayed and fasted for a vision—and if you were lucky—an animal would appear who would give you a song, which was your personal access to the spiritual power of the world. Sometimes they would pack mementos from this encounter with the spirit world into a medicine bundle. I’ve seen a photograph taken in the 19th century of a tepee with a tripod next to it which held a medicine bundle. It was explained to me that that particular bundle was considered so powerful that it shouldn’t be inside the tepee.

When I was a teenager I was present when a medicine bundle was opened. It was a clear day until the bundle was opened and from seemingly out of nowhere a thunder storm came up. I saw this but I don’t know what to say about it other than the world is undoubtedly more complex and interesting than we can imagine.

I brought along a reproduction of the rawhide case of a medicine bundle from the Great Plains which I’ve set on the altar here to indicate our solidarity with our Native American religious heritage.

In 1992 the National Gallery in Washington opened a show of my father’s collection of Native American art. This was the high point of dad’s career as a collector. The museum invited a Gros Ventre man named Baca, a traditional religious person from Ft. Belknap, to bless the show. The night the exhibit opened he spoke to a crowd in the National Gallery and said that after he’d been asked to bless the show he’d wondered if this was such a good idea. He said he’d prayed for some direction and that night he had a dream in which he saw what he described as the old time people spread out across the horizon on their horses. They were singing their blessing to him.

There were many times I felt my family was quite odd, but then everybody thinks their families are odd. In retrospect, I realize how extraordinarily lucky we were to be invited into this world given the shameful and bitter history of White/Indian relations.

One might conclude from these brief glimpses into our family that my father really wanted to be Native American, that he hated his whiteness. That wasn’t the case. He understood the boundaries. He did feel a profound aesthetic and spiritual affinity with the cultures of Native Americans. And as regards his whiteness, he just thought white people could do better than they had. After some reflection, I think he was right.

My father lived a very long life. He died 6 years ago at the age of 95. When his friends at Ft. Belknap heard that he’d passed away, they drove to Great Falls, Montana and flew to Michigan for the funeral. George Horse Capture brought along a hand drum and sang a traditional Gros Ventre song during the funeral service. Just before we closed my dad’s casket George gave me a box of hard tack biscuits—which was a food my dad was particularly fond of for some strange reason—and asked if I could put the box in the coffin. He explained that dad was about to take a journey to the Sand Hills, which was a long way from where we were. George was worried that he’d get hungry. I asked my mother and my brothers and, of course, it was fine.

Then George pulled out a sweet grass braid—this is a sweet grass braid—and asked me to put it in my father’s hand. He told me that when a person arrives in the Sand Hills, he or she should come bearing a sweet grass braid as a gift to the people living there. I lifted my father’s hand and bent his fingers so he wouldn’t lose his grip on the sweet grass braid and we closed his casket.

Two weeks before my father died, Dianne and I were having dinner with him when he turned to me with a puzzled look and asked, “Who are those people singing in the other room?” I told him there wasn’t anyone in the next room, but he asked me to get up and check for sure. Later that evening I remembered Baca’s dream of the old time people singing.

You could explain this moment in one of two ways. You could say that dad had a small cerebral event and he was experiencing an auditory hallucination.
Or you might say that the border between the realm of the living and the dead, which is usually opaque to us, became transparent to my father, and he heard the old time people singing him home.

Which explanation do you prefer?

So, in conclusion, of what value is the information contained in these stories? This is a legitimate question for an urban citizen living in this age of late capitalism. Maybe it is enough to just tell these stories because in telling them they become small ceremonies of healing.

I’ve always admired the beginning of John’s first letter in the New Testament. Let me quote verses one and three from the text:

1That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life;
3That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us.

This is an appeal to the authority of direct experience. It’s another way of talking about Daebaudjimowin, the kind of truth known from personal experience, and the point here, as John says, is to welcome others into the circle of fellowship.

Finally, I think we have an obligation to the next generation to nurture in them a sense of their connection and commitment to place. But how do we make these values fresh and meaningful to young people?

I’ve reached that stage in life where I’m now one of the old time people myself. On a good day I don’t normally see myself that way, but my grandchildren probably think of me as an old time person. From this vantage point I believe I can see the life cycle fairly clearly. Now I’m more aware of my obligations to the past and the future.

Over the summer my two year old grandson Gavin and I would often go for a stroll in the mornings, which usually meant that Gavin would walk about 50 feet and then he’d let me know he wanted me to carry him the rest of the way. As we walked into the park, often I’d notice that he was looking up at the trees, at the way the leaves scattered sunlight in constantly changing patterns.

I would stop and look at him in my arms. He would look back at me and say “Wow!” I’d say “Yes, wow!” Then we would move on to the playground in the park and then we’d go home.

I would argue that this was a ritual, our ritual, a kind of healing ceremony that connected us both to the landscape we live in, to our place in the world, our home.

Interview with Buddhist Scholar Donald Lopez

Donald Lopez, one of the nation’s leading scholars of Buddhism, teaches at the University of Michigan. He is the Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies, and currently serves as chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and chair of the Michigan Society of Fellows. He is the author of many books, most recently The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Biography, published by Princeton University Press. He will talk about his new book at Crazy Wisdom Bookshop on the evening of Thursday, May 12th.

I recently interviewed Professor Lopez about The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Biography at his home on the northeast side of Ann Arbor. He is gracious, curious, quick to laugh, and obviously deeply engaged with the world of Buddhism.

Karl Pohrt: Your biography of The Tibetan Book of the Dead is an amazing story, beautifully told and darkly amusing. Your book makes it very clear that The Tibetan Book of the Dead does not have the religious and cultural authority it claims. You say that The Tibetan Book of the Dead is not really Tibetan, it is not really a book, and it is not really about death.

Donald Lopez: What we call The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a work that was published in 1927, is really the product of Walter Evans-Wentz, its editor. It’s not Tibetan in the sense that most of what you read in the book, including the prefaces and forwards and his copious footnotes, are in many cases quite unrelated to Tibetan Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhist practice.

Evans-Wentz was able to acquire a Tibetan text while he was visiting Darjeeling in 1919. He couldn’t read Tibetan so he took it to the local English teacher at the Maharaja’s Boys School in Gangtok, Sikkim, and he had him translate various chapters out of this much larger work. It is selections, in some ways random selections, from a much larger Tibetan text. And so the book that we have does not correspond to the book as it exists in Tibet.

And it’s not really about death. It is much more about rebirth and how one might use the process of death and rebirth and what is called the “intermediate state” to transform death into enlightenment.

In Tibetan Buddhism and some other forms of Buddhism, there is the idea of an intermediate state—the Bardo realm—a time between death and rebirth that can last from one instant up to 49 days. This is a liminal period in which many things can happen, and if you know what you’re doing during that state, you can ideally become a Buddha or at least have a good rebirth. If things go badly you have a bad rebirth. So the Tibetan book that Evans-Wentz had translated is really about the state between death and rebirth, its opportunities and its dangers. It’s not about death in the more conventional sense of the term.

Karl Pohrt: My first encounter with The Tibetan Book of the Dead was in the late 1960s when I saw a stack of copies in a bookshop on State Street. I noticed that it was published by Oxford University Press, one of the oldest and most prestigious academic presses in the English speaking world. The Oxford imprint carries a certain cache, and I assumed it was legitimate. When I finished your book I was reminded of Dostoyevsky’s remark that Don Quixote was the saddest book he’d ever read. Cervantes says Don Quixote’s “brain dried up” because he believed everything he read. The lesson is that whatever the reputation a text has, we should always read it critically. Is The Tibetan Book of the Dead a fraud?

Donald Lopez: It certainly was not meant as a fraud. When we use the word fraud we’re usually thinking about some sort of intentional deceit. I think that Evans-Wentz was quite well intentioned, but the work that he presented was ultimately one that was in many ways quite at odds with what we now know about Tibetan Buddhist practice and literature.

You have to remember that this was a time when it was very difficult for Europeans or Americans to go into Tibet. Evans-Wentz never went himself. He was just in the borderlands, in Sikkim and North India. Very few Tibetan texts had made their way out and very few people could read Tibetan. So I think we have to cut him a little slack based on what was available to him, but he also had a very distinct agenda with which he undertook this project. He was a Theosophist.

Karl Pohrt: Of course, does it matter whether or not it’s a fraud? All sacred texts take on a life of their own, however spurious their origins. The Lotus Sutra, which claims to present teachings of the Buddha toward the end of his life, appeared five hundred years after the death of the Buddha. And New Testament scholars generally agree that the earliest of the synoptic gospels—Mark—was written sometime after 70 AD at the earliest. The other gospels came later, even though they read like they were written by contemporaries of Jesus. My grandfather memorized The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a poem which claims to be a translation of verses composed by Omar Khayyaam, a medieval Persian poet. The poem by Edward FitzGerald, a Victorian poet, is not noted for its fidelity to the original, but I don’t think my grandfather cared a whit about that. The poem spoke to him. This is what you call Reception History. Could you talk about that?

Donald Lopez: What you say is exactly right. It is certainly true in the case of the Buddha himself. We know that nothing the Buddha said was written down until some four hundred years after his death. If we’re worried about figuring out what Jesus said from something that was written forty years after his crucifixion—now multiply that by ten.

However, those books are what we have. Those are the books that have been canonized and that have become the basis for the religion. There are certain things that are unrecoverable. We cannot recover exactly what it was that Jesus taught and exactly what it was that the Buddha taught. But I think we are bound to try as hard as we can and to establish the limits of what we can know and what we can’t know.

In the case of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, we now know a lot about where this Tibetan text came from. So you’re right. It really is like The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. To a certain extent it is something that has taken on a life of its own, and it’s very important to know that life story well. The book I’ve written is a history of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the book Evans-Wentz produced and published in 1927. I think that ideally one can know the history well, one can understand as much as it is possible to know about the process by which it was constructed, and still find inspiration there. I don’t see the critical or historical approach and the religious or spiritual approach as necessarily being antithetical.

Your mention of Omar Khayyam reminds me of Borges’ essay “The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald.” Borges ponders the miracle of an Englishman translating a selection of five hundred quatrains by a Persian astronomer of the thirteenth century and producing one of the most popular works of Victorian literature. According to Borges, the case calls for “conjecture of a metaphysical nature,” and he wonders whether Omar may have been reincarnated in England or whether the spirit of Omar possessed FitzGerald around 1857.

Karl Pohrt: Who vetted the manuscript at Oxford?

Donald Lopez: Walter Evans-Wentz’s real name was Walter Wentz—Walt Wentz from Trenton, New Jersey. He got his BA at Stanford and then went to England for further study at Oxford. While he was there he saw that many upper class British had hyphenated names and so he took his mother’s maiden name and became Walter Evans-Wentz.

Again, we need to acknowledge that there was relatively little available on Tibet back then yet the fascination with Tibet was almost as strong as it is today. So when he came forward with this translation—and the translation itself is quite good—I assume that Oxford was happy to publish it. And given how many copies it has sold, they’re undoubtedly still very happy.

Karl Pohrt: The Tibetan Book of the Dead gained traction in America at that moment when the taboos surrounding death began to give way. Everyone is anxious to know what happens after death, but The Tibetan Book of the Dead is still a fairly exotic explanation.

Donald Lopez: I think The Tibetan Book of the Dead has had several lives and has died and been reborn several times. As we know from the various editions and the new prefaces that were added, it has found an audience in each generation. The 60s was really the time—as you recall—when there was an explosion of interest in Asian religions. Part of that was because of the Vietnam War, part of that was just a sense we had that there was something profoundly corrupt about Western culture in all its manifestations and the idea, which has turned out to be a romantic one, that some sort of alternative could be found in “the East” or “the Orient” as we used to call it, this vague undifferentiated area that we used to talk about. There were the “Eastern Religions” and we somehow imagined that Hinduism and Buddhism and Daoism and Confucianism and Shintoism were all of a piece. So there was a kind of naiveté at that time, a naiveté which in retrospect is rather poignant. At that same time there was this whole explosion of work on death and how one dies and there was the Hospice Movement. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross wrote On Death and Dying and Raymond Moody wrote Life After Life. In the midst of all that, this old 1927 book came back and was picked up by Timothy Leary and the Beatles; it was ancient wisdom, perennial wisdom to be tapped.

Karl Pohrt: You couple the story of Joseph Smith’s discovery of the sacred plates buried in upstate New York with the discovery of sacred texts supposedly hidden in Tibet by the tantric master Padmasambhava in a way that is wonderfully respectful of both religious traditions. You do this without challenging the truth claims of either the Mormons or the Tibetans.

Donald Lopez: In Tibetan Buddhism there is a genre of literature called terma, which literally means “treasure.” The idea is that the great tantric master Padmasambhava came to Tibet in the late 700’s and he couldn’t stay very long, and he had various things that he knew the Tibetans would need in the future. As the story goes, he dictated these scriptures in a kind of coded script and buried them all over the country—in mountains and rocks and at the bottom of lakes and inside pillars. Those texts began to be discovered some centuries later and were even discovered into the twentieth century. They have become one of the most important genres of Tibetan literature over the centuries. The Tibetan work that became The Tibetan Book of the Dead was such a text, buried in the eighth century and unearthed in the fourteenth century.

Of course, scholars have to look at these buried “treasure texts” with a great deal of skepticism because they’re not written in Tibetan. They’re written in a language that only the person who discovers them can read and that person translates them into Tibetan so that others can read them.

This is a controversial point in the field of Tibetan Studies because from one perspective—to use your term—they look a lot like frauds. It looks like someone trying to gain spiritual authority for himself by saying look what I just found. Nonetheless, they have become part of the canon. We have a structurally similar case of the discovery of sacred scriptures when Joseph Smith unearths the tablets of The Book of Mormon in upstate New York.

To get back to the issue of how one can be both a critical scholar and also a religious person—I was very struck and moved by the story of Smith because everything he did occurred not on the other side of the world, but in upstate New York. This is not a place we would consider exotic. And it occurred not in the 700s, but in the early 1800s.

It happened, in other words, in the light of history. American historians and Mormon scholars know a lot about everything that Smith did. We have letters and all sorts of pamphlets and papers—all the kinds of documents that we don’t have in the case of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. That places a different onus of credibility and authority on The Book of Mormon. It has been said that Mormonism or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the most American of all religions, and one reason it is so American is because it sanctified American soil. Smith dug down into the dirt of upstate New York and he found a sacred book.

And the Tibetans did a rather similar thing. They couldn’t go to India anymore. Buddhism had essentially disappeared there. So how do you find new scriptures? You dig them up.

In 2007 I gave some lectures in Puerto Rico, where Buddhism is becoming popular. Two Nyingma Lamas had been there to give some teachings. My hosts said, “They told us that Padmasambhava came to Puerto Rico and left some texts in the mountains.”

Karl Pohrt: From our vantage point, it is easy to dismiss Evans-Wentz, who was born in Trenton, New Jersey and never learned the Tibetan language, or Lama Govinda, who was born Ernst Hoffman in Germany, or Madame Blavatsky, a Russian medium who started the Theosophical Society as—at best—romantic amateurs who misrepresented and twisted Hinduism and Buddhism to fit their own agendas. But is this too harsh a judgment? Maybe the window through which we observe others is always cloudy. Evans-Wentz, Govinda, and Blavatsky were also early western pioneers in the encounter with Asian religious traditions.

Donald Lopez: I agree entirely. I’ve often tried to talk about the importance, especially, of Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society. In the late 1800s India and Asia were being overrun by Christian missionaries who were telling the Buddhists that their religion was idolatry and superstition. Madame Blavatsky, a Russian medium, and her friend Colonel Olcott, an American Civil War veteran, sailed to Sri Lanka to defend the Buddhists against the British and they went to India to defend the Hindus against the British. There’s something quite heroic about them. They believed that there is a single mystical tradition from which all religions spring, an idea that continues to this day. And so the fact that they were trying to see Hinduism and Buddhism through that lens is not surprising in the least.

Returning to this theme of the light of history, we know a great deal about these people and therefore it’s very easy to see their faults. It’s like the first time you see high definition television. Do you really want to look into the pores of your favorite actors?

It’s probably the case that every great religion began as a cult or as somebody calling it a cult and calling its founder a fraud. We know this is the case with Jesus, Mohammed, and the Buddha from their own scriptures. The question is: why did these cults turn into world religions? Why did these “frauds” turn into founders and saints? I’ve always found the study of this process fascinating. Most of the so-called frauds and cults fall by the wayside—they become heresies. But others survive, and it’s often for more worldly reasons than because the truth they have is better than the truth someone else has.

Karl Pohrt: And finally, what do you make of the late Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa’s strange comment, which you quote, that the animal realm is characterized by the absence of a sense of humor? My cat has a fine sense of humor unless he’s hungry or he thinks my grandchildren are teasing him.

Donald Lopez: My dear departed cat Benny was one of the funniest sentient beings I’ve ever met in my life. I miss him for his sense of humor above all.

This interview was published in issue #48 of The Crazy Wisdom Community Journal (May through August 2011):
http://crazywisdom.net/upcomin/MADfree-02/dw2008-02/journalinterviewpage.html

Nicaraguan Diary

Carlos is my nom-de-guerre here, a name that sounds much more exotic and raffish than I feel this morning.

“Carlos! Como esta?” Jazmine asks me.

“Carlos es…ah…muy tranquillo,” I say in my Tarzan Spanish.

“Si…Si.”

And then everyone bursts out laughing because, despite my claim to the contrary, I am obviously not in such great shape. I’ve developed a wracking cough, which I picked up during the nineteen hours—in four planes and four different airports—it took me to get here.

I’m also dizzy with exhaustion after spectacularly overestimating my physical stamina the day following my arrival. Sandy Canales,
a tough former FSLN soldier during the 1979 revolution, and his wife Jazmine invited me to take a two hour walk around Catarina. Near the end of our hike up and down steep inclines in this mountainous area I began crying out, half in jest, “Taxi! Taxi!” This outburst caused my friends to erupt in gales of laughter.

Catarina is a beautiful little town perched on the edge of a crater, an extinct volcano, now filled with a deep lake. People still ride horses through steep narrow streets here, negotiating their way around bikes, bullock carts, dogs, three wheeled moto-taxis with customized names (JesuChristo, Fast and Furious) a few automobiles and people. Everyone has cell phones now, and life in this large windy village feels somewhat more prosperous since I was last here two years ago. But the pace of things still feels languorous and civilized. Small birds, little flicks of bright color, dash around through the trees.

For the past few weeks my wife Dianne has been a volunteer teacher under the auspices of the Iglesia Bautista El Remanente, the sister church of the Episcopal Church of the Incarnation which we attend in Ann Arbor. Dianne has been warmly welcomed into this community, and I’m here coasting on the shirttails of her good reputation. I’m thankful for the opportunity to reconnect with these gracious and generous people.

El Remanente’s minister, Bayardo Lopez, is a dignified and open man with a fine sense of humor.
Religious services at El Remanente, which begin at 6 pm Sunday evenings, are celebrations. The church building revebrates with music, led by a lead singer on the dais, four backup singers and two of Bayardo’s sons—Joel on electric piano and Joshua or Derrick on drums. Everyone in the congregation seems to have already memorized the hymns. I never saw a hymnbook during the services we attended. Then Bayardo passionately delivers his sermon. This evening he preached on La pueblo de Dios and the coming reign of love. He has great oratorical powers in the pulpit. The service ends with more songs of praise.

* * *

And then I’m quite sick, down flat for a few days, coughing like some consumptive and drifting off into a number of lurid, feverish dreams whose plots I can’t remember. I wake during the night and for a few long moments I have no idea where I am. It is not an unpleasant feeling.

In the late morning Sandy stops by my room with a bottle containing a viscous yellow liquid that appears to glow slightly. He urges me to drink two tablespoons every three hours. After reading the label, Dianne informs me that it is cod liver oil cut with orange sugary syrup.

Sometime later Jazmine, who is a wonderfully sweet person,
sprinkles me with lineament and attempts to vigorously massage and pound the sickness from my chest.

Sometime in the evening the doctor pays a house call. She takes my vital signs, prescribes five medications and says my blood pressure is so high she won’t even tell me what it is. She will not accept payment for the visit.

Miraculously, the next day I begin to feel better. I’m sure that Sandy and Jazmine’s treatments greatly helped, but I think the doctor is mainly responsible for my recovery. She has scared me healthy.

* * *

Around 25 people gather this evening for a dance recital at Sandy and Jazmine’s home. Their daughter Gaby and her friends, who have been studying traditional Nicaraguan folk dances, perform for around twenty-five people. Dianne and I sit with Bayardo, his wife Francie, and Maria Nela, a teaching colleague of Dianne’s.

At the beginning of the recital the power is out in the compound, and Jazmine has lit the large open room with candles, a nice touch that makes the space feel more intimate than it does under the ubiquitous florescent lighting.


The young people perform with great skill and dignity, mimicking elaborate courtship rituals. The men show off, execute fancy steps and dramatically stomp in place like flamenco dancers, while the young women, dressed in long full skirts, retreat from then advance toward their partners, using their fans to indicate approval or disapproval and then swirl open their beautiful skirts like peacocks. Gaby is especially graceful with her fan

Jazmine serves cold drinks and a delicious cake that her daughter Kenya somehow constructed from scratch.

Among those present is Cristian Lopez Mayorquin, an 11 year old boy widely admired in Catarina for his abilities as an orator.
He’s known as ‘el Poeta Nino’. After the recital Cristian, who is here with his mother and father, recites a number of poems to the delight of most everyone present. It is a stylized and dramatic performance. He lifts his arms and gazes skyward one moment and then mimics wiping away tears the next. He is preternaturally calm and somewhat robotic, like an animatron figure, but it’s late and Cristian is obviously tired. His mother, who writes his material (and prompts him from the sidelines when he falters), urges him to recite more poems. He complies without resisting.

His father proudly tells Sandy that the boy has been training to be a poet since he was four years old.

I ask Jazmine later if she felt that Cristian’s mother is overly anxious. No, I’m told. She is by nature an emotional person.

* * *

One morning we drive to La Boquita on the Pacific Coast with our Nicaraguan friends and Christine Herzog, a young German woman doing volunteer work at the church. We watch children race up and down the wide beach on horseback and then we wade in the ocean. A wave knocks me down almost immediately and I’m swept into an area with razor sharp rocks. I emerge from the water bleeding with small cuts on my hands and legs and with a renewed respect for the power of the sea.


We stayed overnight at the Biological Station near the top of the Mombacho Reserva and we walked through a dense cloud forest near the peak of the (mostly extinct) Volcano looking at salamanders and small red-eyed frogs. These creatures both prefer to perch on thick palm leaves at night. The diversity of life inside the ecosystem of this park is immense, and Mombacho is part of the Corredor biologico mesoamericano, a project which will extend from Mexico through Central America linking national parks.

At twilight we stand near the Sendero Crater. The sun is behind us and we are looking down on Lake Nicaragua from a height of around 1,000 meters. We see a rainbow in the middle of Lake Nicaragua that rises straight up like a thick pillar of light out of the water. It isn’t curved. I have no idea what meteorological conditions are necessary to create this extraordinary optical vision, but it reminds me how beautiful and strange our world is. This is a place filled with signs and wonders.


Nicaragua is a country with a surprising variety of enchanting landscapes—tropical jungle, farmland, wetlands and the sea shore.

It is also a country with many active volcanoes, a landscape of geological uncertainty that exists at the intersection of shifting tectonic plates. Maybe the instability of the earth has given the people here an awareness of impermanence that those of us living in North American spaces of privilege have lost sight of. Perhaps this awareness has crossed over into an appreciation for the slippery and changeable nature of language. Words are mutable and plastic. They can be artfully arranged into beautiful and memorable patterns.

I don’t want to make too much of this, but I wonder how else to account for the average Nicaraguan’s love of poetry, a form that usually has a small audience among the literary arts. It is said that the Nicaraguan people have a special affinity for poetry. The most famous Nicaraguan, Ruben Dario, was a poet and Rosario Murillo, President Daniel Ortega’s wife, is a poet. For some reason poetry has been embraced here. It is something essential. This is a reversal of Plato’s belief that poets should be exiled from the Republic.

* * *

For the past six years Nicaragua has celebrated this heritage with a week-long International Poetry Festival in Granada , a lovely colonial style town founded in the early 16th century. It is a 45 minute drive from Catarina. Happily, my trip to Nicaragua coincides with the Seventh International Poetry Festival.

This year the Festival is dedicated to Claribel Alegria, a Nicaraguan poet of the ‘Committed Generation’ from the 1950s and 1960s. She is known as a writer concerned with bearing witness to the social and political issues of the day. In her poem Ars Poetica she writes

I,
poet by trade,
condemned so many times
to be a crow, would never change places
with the Venus de Milo:
while she reigns in the Louvre
and dies of boredom
and collects dust
I discover the sun
Each morning
And amid valleys
Volcanoes
And debris of war
I catch sight of the promised land.

* * *

In order to attend a poetry reading in Granada this evening, seven of us pile into Sandy’s old van, which has no backlights, weak headlights and leaks brake fluid. He wraps two wires together under the steering wheel, releases the brake and as the car moves down the hill he jumps the clutch and guns the engine. He always parks on an incline, with the van facing downward so we don’t have to push it much to start it.

When we arrive in front of La Merced Church I’m astonished to see hundreds of people from a variety of social classes sitting on folding chairs in the plaza, listening attentively to the speakers. Poetry is news, as Ezra Pound said, and everyone here appears anxious to hear what the poets have to say.

I’m standing fairly far back at the edge of the crowd. The acoustics (and my pathetic grasp of the various languages) make it difficult to understand much, but I hear Spanish, French, German and English.

Brian Johnstone, a Scottish poet, reads from his recent collection The Book of Belongings (Arc Publications, 2009).

The book of belongings of those found dead
lies open across my lap. I cradle it and look and look,
not knowing what I must find, half hoping to recognize nothing.

Photograph after photograph, page after page
of someone's jacket, trousers, shirt: I'm searching the fabric
for stitches my hand has known, for threads my thumb has pulled.

This book is heavy with more than belongings:
with gestures an arm has left in a sleeve,
with breath filling the breast of a shirt.

I place a plate on a table surrounded by empty chairs.
Each speaks to me in the voice of a husband, a son.
Those found dead are a handful. I sweep away the crumbs.

I am reminded that there is a deep pleasure in something as simple as gathering together with strangers to listen to a variety of voices artfully expressing joy, pain, anger, anguish and desire, each of these reports embodied by an actual person. We are hungry for the singular human voice. This experience has been devalued in my own community, where just about everything is so easily accessible. Our reality—or the future we are living into at close to the speed of light—is based on the values of convenience and effortlessness. This Festival is an example of an alternative global culture. It is about something altogether different—the primacy of direct experience:

…what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life.

When the poets finish, the folksinger Norma Elena Gadea, who is described as a national treasure beloved by the Nicaraguan people, steps up to the microphone and her extraordinary voice fills the plaza with beautiful music. Sandy and Jazmine know most of Gadea’s songs by heart.

* * *

On Friday the Festival organizers have scheduled poetry readings in the municipalities. Groups of poets fan out into the towns surrounding Granada. Late that morning Jazmine and I walk to the Casa de Cultura Municipal in Catarina, a cavernous hall with a high ceiling and a huge sound system that blasts out ear peppy Latin music at an ear shattering level.

The program was scheduled for 10 am, but the audience—a hundred or so polite school children in white and blue school uniforms—start to drift in around 10:45. At 11:15 the entourage of seven poets and their handlers pull up in black vans, like some oddball rock band. The lineup includes Anthony Phelps, a well dressed older man from Haiti; Maria de los Angeles Camacho, a beautiful tall woman from Puerto Rica; Rozalie Hirs, a Dutch woman in blue jeans who reads her poems in Dutch and then reads them again in perfect Spanish; Luis Chacon from Costa Rica, Guatemalan poet Enrique Godoy Duran, Antoni Perez from Puerto Rica and Nicaraguan poet Jose Adrian Montoya.

Everyone stands for the pledge of allegiance and the national anthem, which thunders out from the sound system. No one sings along, but the children looked properly respectful and attentive. A couple of young people perform folk dances to warm up the crowd and Cristian Lopez Mayorquin, el poeta nino of Catarina, recites a poem welcoming our guests.

As the poets read, municipal employees quietly move through the hall with trays, distributing orange pop and small vanilla wafers. It is welcome in the midday heat, another example of the thoughtful kindness of these people.

* * *

In the middle of the week there is a parade in Granada that is billed as a funeral procession for ‘the Burial of the Miseries and Poverty of the Soul.” We arrive early, in time to catch the end of an open mic poetry reading, and I catch sight of Ernesto Cardenal, the eminence grise of the Festival, moving slowly across the plaza greeting people.

At 2:30 the parade begins. A group of men dressed in what looked to me like ski masks with odd antenna jutting out from the tops of their heads snake forward. They remind me of Heyoka, sacred clowns, trickster figures in traditional societies Then people wearing death head masks and dressed in black cavort down the street.


They are followed by hundreds of musicians and dancers who shimmy and shake their way down the street, caught up in the trance-like rhythms of the drummers, slick with sweat. The temperature is a toasty 90 degrees plus and the afternoon sun is brutal On a float stopped at the intersection high above an enormous crowd a poet declaims his verse. People packed together around him break into applause. This is followed by a horse drawn funeral carriage bearing a coffin draped with flowers and the slogan Que Viva La Poesia!


Jazmine tapped my shoulder and when I turned she introduced us to the glamorous Gioconda Belli, poet, memoirist and one of the organizers of the Festival, who is walking through the crowd. Belli gives us a dazzling smile and welcomes us to Granada.

The parade continues for hours. It ends with two antic spectacles.

The central figure in the second to the last float is a man dressed in a white slip wearing a gaudily made-up woman’s mask up and kneading a huge paper Mache breast that juts out from his slip. He is lying on a mattress in the back of a truck and kicking his legs in the air suggestively. Men dressed as Catholic hierarchy walk next to the truck. They feign outrage, acting scandalized by the overt sexuality of the figure writhing on the mattress. They douse her with holy water and then recoil with disgust. This is all done with great energy and gusto by the actors and the crowd roars with laughter.

The last float mocks the ruling FSLN party of Daniel Ortega—the Sandinistas. Two men made up to look like President Ortega and his wife walk down the street waving to the crowd and blowing kisses. They are surrounded by men dressed as soldiers in camouflage outfits, wearing black ski masks and brandishing toy Kalashnikovs. There are actors who imitate other Sandinista leaders, including a man in an Ernesto Cardenal mask. People in the crowd surge into the street to have their pictures taken with the actors.


Both of these floats are examples of el Torovenado—traditional street performances that satirize the rich and powerful, protests against corruption and social injustice.

The extraordinary events in the street signal the survival of an anarchic, bacchanalian, sensual spirit among these people, despite the failed promises and various compromises of the political classes. This seems to me to be heroic given the difficult economic circumstances of many Nicaraguan people. I hope these qualities survive the compromises and seductions of the global consumer culture. Today’s parade reminds us that our lives, bracketed as they are by a great silence at either end, should be passionately lived and fiercely embraced. According to the Festival brochure, the official slogan for the ‘Poetic Carnival’ is POETRY IS THE REALM OF THE IMAGINATION AND THE MOST HAPPY AND PAINFUL TESTIMONY OF HUMAN BEINGS ON EARTH. LONG LIVE POETRY! LONG LIVE FREEDOM! LONG LIVE LOVE!


For Jazmine, Sandy & Bayardo

Hermanos, siempre debemos dar gracias a Dios por ustedes, como es justo, porque su fe se acrecienta cada vez más, y en cada uno de ustedes sigue abundando el amor hacia los otros. Así que nos sentimos orgullosos de ustedes ante las iglesias de Dios por la perseverancia y la fe que muestran al soportar toda clase de persecuciones y sufrimientos. (2 Tesalonicenses)

We must always give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing. Therefore we ourselves boast of you among the churches of God for your steadfastness and faith during all your persecutions and the afflictions you are enduring. (2 Thessalonians)

Oaxaca Journal Entries

October 27, 2010: RATTLESNAKE VALLEY

“You must be very brave,” the nice lady at the Oaxaca Lending Library told me after I said that I’d just driven down from Michigan. “So many people in the United States are afraid to travel in Mexico these days.”

“Everyone has been so nice, even the cop who pulled us over and shook us down for $60 cash about 30 seconds after we’d entered the country,” I said.

Actually, after reading the accounts of the horrific narco-cartel violence in the news, I had been terrified about making this trip.

“I suppose I could have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Well, I assume you weren’t out looking for drugs at 2 o’clock in the morning!”

“No, I’m way beyond all that,” I told her. We both laughed.

This is the second time I’ve driven down from Michigan to Oaxaca in the last twelve months with mi amigo Jon Swanson. We listened to Blues and Gospel from Jon’s
extensive CD collection as we drove south. Bessie Smith’s Gimme A Pigfoot summed up my deepest hopes for the outcome of our adventure:

Check all your razors and your guns.
Do the Shim-Sham Shimmy 'til the rising sun.

However, some lines from Bo Diddley’s Who Do You Love? kept coming to mind:

I walked 47 miles of barbed wire
Used a cobra snake for a neck tie
Got a brand new house on the roadside
Made out of rattlesnake hide.
I got a brand new chimney made on top,
Made out of human skulls.

I’d been so jacked by the news reports that I wondered if the grotesque images in Bo Diddley’s song might be a more accurate description of what we were heading into than the pictures of Enchanting Mexico touted in the tourist brochures.

We stayed on the toll roads this time. They were beautiful four lane divided highways with good shoulders, no speed bumps, no police speed traps and very little traffic. The landscapes we drove through were spectacular.

Speaking of rattlesnakes, midway between the Laredo border and Mexico City we drove through a windy valley in the mountains.

Maybe 20 feet back from the highway in this place were wooden racks—there were too many to count—with rattle snake skins drying in the sunshine. Some of the snake skins were huge. There were small bottles filled with a yellow liquid tied to the top of each skin.

There were hundreds of snake skins.

Yards back from the road were houses, but they appeared to be empty. And there were no dogs, horses or parked cars.

“What’s this all about? What’s in those small bottles? Maybe we should stop and ask someone.”

Absolutely no one was in sight.

We looked at each other briefly and Jon stepped on the accelerator.


October 30, 2010: SMACKDOWN IN THE PLAZA

At approximately 1:20 yesterday afternoon Jesus Ruben Maldonado Marmolejo, alias ‘el Dragon’ and Jose Maria Gonzalez, aka ‘el Guero’ (the Blond) aka ‘el Chema’, were walking down the steps in front of the Santo Domingo church in the heart of Oaxaca’s Central Historical District when two red and white motorcycles pulled up next to them. Gunmen riding on the back of the bikes opened fire and el Dragon and el Guero went down in a hail of hot lead.

Even though it was midday in one of the most crowded and trafficked areas of the city, the assassins escaped.

The police showed up, removed the two bodies, scoured the crime scene for bullet casings and hosed the blood off the stones. They tracked down el Dragon’s Black Hummer, which was parked a few blocks away, and discovered 3 cases of 9 mm cartridges, 3 cell phones and a portfolio containing suspicious “diverse documents.”

Exactly three hours later Jon and I were standing at the center of the crime scene, unaware of what had taken place earlier. We were watching a group of children gather for a Halloween parade. We first learned about the murders from friends that night just as we sat down for a lecture at the Biblioteca Henestorsa entitled Music and Death in the Oaxaca Valley.

This morning, as is the custom around here, both Imparcial & Noticas, the local daily papers, featured large color photos of the bullet ridden bodies in the plaza.

I don’t wish to speak ill of the dead, but it was probably a poor decision on the part of Marmolejo to assume a macho nickname like ‘el Dragon.’ Isn’t this just inviting trouble? Wouldn’t it be better to be known as, say, el hombre querido (the beloved man) or el hombre compasivo (the compassionate man)?

But this was the least of their bad life choices. Gonzalez had been arrested in 2007 for fraud and Marmolejo was described in the press as a henchman (un esbirro) and bodyguard of a general secretary in the moribund Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Jorge “el Chucky” Franco Vargas. Vargas is named after the murderous doll in the American slasher movies. Shouldn’t a nickname like that automatically preclude one from a position of public authority?

The papers also reported that both men were porros. A porro is a member of a mercenary gang associated with Mexican universities. They are street thugs for hire who act as an informal paramilitary force inside universities to prevent the rise of student opposition movements. Marmolejo was a porro at the Universidad Autonoma “Benito Juarez” de Oaxaca and he organized death squads (‘las caravanas de la muerte’) against students during the 2006 uprising.

My friends suspect that el Dragon and el Guero may have been taken down by a leftist hit squad. Ulises Ruiz, current lame-duck governor of the State of Oaxaca and member of the PRI, is widely hated. He has been accused of genocide and various acts of repression against indigenous people. There are signs around the zocalo in Oaxaca calling for his prosecution and imprisonment. This summer Gabino Cue Monteagudo was elected governor by a coalition of center left voters. Perhaps el Dragon’s victims decided the moment was ripe for a settling of scores.

Of course, this is just speculation. Undoubtedly, these hombres violentos had many enemies.

* * *

When we first arrived in town we stopped at Amante Books, one of my favorite.
bookshops. The Black Minutes, a first novel by the Mexican writer Martin Solares (Grove/Atlantic) was faced out on the new arrivals table, and I purchased it. It’s a big book, ostensibly a police procedural about the search for a psychopathic killer of young girls, but it wanders into many interesting places. Literary legend B. Traven appears briefly in the novel as does the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock. A detective dreams of being attacked by a half-human jaguar, a UFO investigator mysteriously disappears, a blind man with the assistance of two dwarfs
is able to accurately fire a rifle, an esteemed criminologist discovers an equation that reveals the identity of serial killers. The feverish violence in the novel reminds me of Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. I have no idea how accurate a portrayal this is of the inner workings of Mexican police departments. If it is even partially true, the Mexican system of justice is a nightmare. The Black Minutes isn’t a mystery. It’s a horror novel.


November 4, 2010: DIA DE MUERTOS



Of course, the violence and corruption are only slices of the complex reality here. It would be a terrible misrepresentation to define the country in these terms. There are many Mexicos. All of them exist simultaneously, alongside or on top of or underneath each other.

One morning Jon and I decided to see Oaxaca by riding city buses from the Abastos Market to the end of the line and back. I watched people on the bus. This was another Mexico. The old men in cowboy hats looked perpetually startled and sharp teenage boys, their hair slicked up into a point, flirted with girls in tight jeans. Grandmothers carried small children, who eyeballed us and then looked away when we smiled at them. Husbands and wives herded more children on the bus. These people were decent and hardworking and they valued family. No one looked like they had any disposable income. They were all just trying to get by, like most people everywhere.

Jon, a retired anthropologist and social worker who has lived in Oaxaca on and off for a number of years, told me he thinks the social fabric here is more intact than our own.

And the cosmopolitan cultural life in Oaxaca is still another Mexico. There are an amazing number of excellent museums and libraries here, including a beautiful new children’s library near Jon’s house. Oaxaca has jazz venues and an opera house and it hosts an international film festival. One evening we went to a flute and oboe concert held in a large room in a library. It was packed with people. I think Oaxaca can compete with any city its size in the world in terms of its sophisticated cultural offerings.

* * *

My visit to Oaxaca coincided with the Day of the Dead celebration, which is one of the most important holidays in Mexico, especially in places with indigenous populations. It’s an event connected with pre-contact religious festivals that celebrated Mictecacihuatl, the guardian goddess of the dead. Today people remember their dead by assembling altars to them in their homes and by maintaining an all-night vigil at the gravesites of their deceased relatives. In this way the dead live on here in the people who knew and loved them.

Shortly after nightfall on November 2, the Day of the Dead, Jon and I walked down to the Panteon General, a cemetery near the center of the city.

The streets immediately surrounding the main entrance to the graveyard were shut off from traffic and were packed with people, many of them carrying bouquets of flowers, moving slowly under blazing electric lights. It was a night market with carnival rides and vendors hawking food, and long tables had been set up in the street to serve visitors. The mood was celebratory.

When we entered the high walled cemetery, the transition from the noise and light in
the surrounding streets was a shock. The only light inside the cemetery came from tiny flashlights and candles. The cemetery was very crowded with elaborate mausoleums. If one wanders off the central pathway, it would be very easy to fall here.

It was very quiet. People sat on fold-up chairs next to the graves of their loved ones in the darkness.

As I walked through the graveyard I considered my relationships with my own dead. I thought about my mother, who died early this summer, and my father, my aunt and my grandmother.

My grandmother was particularly important to me. She was a kind and caring person, and I felt she loved me unconditionally. I’ve had a recurring dream about her in my adult life.

In the dream someone tells me that she is still alive. I’m overcome with emotion and I run down the street to her house. My grandmother is sitting quietly in a chair in her living room, just inside the screen door on her front porch. The dream always ends as I open the door and walk in.

* * *

Jon and I walked to the Colonia Reforma area for dinner on the last evening before I returned to Gringoland. North of us it was raining in the Sierra Madre. The nearest mountain was quite dark. I looked up at the peaks receding in the distance. Each appeared to be filled with light in the rain, like the mountains in classical Chinese paintings.

Three Dharma Frags

dharma: law; teaching; the way things are.


Masahide’s Famous Haiku

My prayer is always the same. I ask for clarity.

I’ve come to understand that everything is characterized by impermanence. This is not something we often acknowledge, despite the evidence that surrounds us.

I hold this awareness alongside the knowledge that, as it says in the Samanthabhadra Sutra, we are all adrift on the ocean of karmic hindrances.

Mizuta Masahide was a haiku poet from the samurai class during the Tokugawa Shogunate. In 1688 he suffered a catastrophic economic setback when his storehouse burned. He wrote:
Barn’s burnt down—
Now I can see the moon.

It is said that Masahide became quite poor following this disaster, but I’m not sure it mattered much to him. There was an exchange that took place when his storehouse burnt down. Something was taken away, but then something was given to him.


A Discourse on Emptiness heard in the late afternoon, driving west on Highway 88 in upstate New York

Sandy is driving. I ask him about Madyamika Buddhism.

These ideas are 1,500 years old, but they are still alive, they’re still vital.

From a Buddhist point of view, there’s nothing to hold onto. Suffering is due to our attachments, our clinging. What would it be like not to cling to anything?

The Madyamika philosophers were interested in exploring the nature of things and ideas. Are there truly existent things? Or is it that things are concepts, beliefs, ideas? And how is it that we become attached to them?

The Prajnaparamita texts are filled with allegories, anecdotes and parable. Nagarguna, who founded the Madyamika School, synthesized ideas from this literature into a systematic philosophy, but he didn’t come to a view or a conclusion. Madyamika philosophy is not about proving anything. It’s about not clinging.

Buddhists argue that the self is based on a comparison of relationships, that it’s an illusion. If you break the idea of self down into its component parts, you see that the parts are also devoid of reality. Emptiness is an extension of the idea of no self. It’s very subtle.

Of course, you can also cling to Emptiness as an idea, which is to misunderstand it. For instance:

A man walks into a store. All the shelves are bare.
‘I have nothing to sell,’ the shopkeeper says.
‘I’ll have that,’ the guy says.

It is a beautiful spring day. The landscape flashes past us.


Report to Tanya following a two-day retreat at the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center

first day:
Mind cloudy, thoughts scattered, body in pain.

second day, 10:50 a.m., fourth sitting:
Mind settled enough to glimpse the Dharma-gate of repose and
bliss. For an hour I am very clear, empty. I have the
properties of light.

The text says, Once this is grasped, you are like the dragon
when it gains the water, like the tiger when it enters the
mountain.

This is why I am here.

An hour later, everything shifts. Pain whooshes back, rattles
down on me like that monsoon rain off the Gulf of Siam that
hit Bangkok at 4 o’clock in the afternoon six years ago. You
remember? The wind rose suddenly, a metal sign slammed into
the street in front of us, followed by fierce rain. Weren’t
you and your sister standing with me under the temple gate as
the water sluiced off the trough above us?

The teacher tells me, Keep your practice steady. Don’t judge
It. Don’t grasp.

The text says, Progress is not a matter of far or near. But
if you are confused, mountains and rivers block the way. I
humbly say to those who study the mystery, Don’t waste time!

I saw birds glide over the building & on out over the lake in
the early evening when I left.

bliss
repose

"Like in Star Wars, We’re the Small Rebel Force"

Notes from the US Social Forum

I’m writing these notes 95 days into the Gulf Oil Disaster. Supposedly BP has just capped the well, but that’s cold comfort to the people along the coast who are out of jobs and not much consolation to all the dead sea turtles. It’s been nine years since the War in Afghanistan began, and it feels like a very long time since the economy went south in Michigan. It’s difficult to be optimistic, and perhaps the best we can do, as the poet from Saginaw Theodore Roethke wrote, is hope that in a dark time the eye begins to see.

I first heard about the US Social Forum last November when I was in Oaxaxca, Mexico, from Michele Gibbs, a poet and former SNCC organizer. On Thursday evening during the Social Forum I had dinner with her and some other friends near Cobo Hall. Edith Lewis showed me Michele’s poem “I Would Like to be Wrong, But…” from Harvest From the Field, a new collection. It contains these lines:

the facts i need
don’t seem to be recorded;
or at least, are in dispute

This feeling resonates with anyone who has ever suspected they will never be part of the conversations surrounding decisions regarding their lives. What facts do we need to live better lives? Why haven’t they been recorded? If they have been recorded, why can’t we find them? What tools do we need to sort through the trash and toxic distractions that assault us every day so that we might see things more clearly? What is to be done?

Over 15,000 people showed up in Detroit June 22 through 28 for the US Social Forum to try to answer these questions. Attendees wore day glow orange bracelets stamped with the statement Another World Is Possible, a hopeful slogan in this twilight era of late capitalism.

The US Social Forum is a national version of the World Social Forum, which was launched in Porto Alegro, Brazil, in 2001 by groups “opposed to a process of globalization commanded by the large multinational corporations and…governments…at the service of those corporate interests.” They were “committed to building a planetary society directed toward fruitful relationships among Humankind and between it and the Earth.”

The first Social Forum in the U.S. was held in Atlanta in 2007. Detroit was chosen as the second site because, among other reasons, “it is a post-industrial environment with the fastest growing urban garden movement in the country.” Organizers scheduled over 1,000 workshops and nearly 50 People’s Assemblies, placing the highest priority on groups that are actually doing grassroots work. “This is… a process built from the ground up.” According to the program guide, the Social Forum “is not a conference. It is a political process,” a space for people to exchange their experiences and a forum for debate.

I drove into Detroit on Tuesday morning with Jon Swanson, who was leading a workshop on the history of Gaza, and Don Watanabe, an activist from the south side of Chicago. We parked in a nearly deserted lot on top of Cobo Hall for the shockingly low price of $5 a day. Cobo was filled with people, especially young people and people of color. The place looked like a hip United Nations. The registration line moved in stops and starts, but no one seemed to mind. People were energized by being in the presence of so many other activists who shared their political commitments.

Behind the registration area was a huge hall for vendors. Exhibitors spanned a broad political spectrum, including the Evil Twin Booking Agency (“We’ll Teach You How To Change Everything”), the Detroit Marxist-Leninist Study Group, the Revolutionary Communist Party USA, the Indigenous Environmental Network, various anarchist and anti-authoritarian organizations, the International Socialist Organization, the Catholic Worker and Tikkun magazine, among many others. Even the U.S. Census Bureau had a table, but it didn’t appear to be busy.

I stopped by the Technology Inc. table because it seemed to be somewhat of an anomaly—quaintly utopian and retro 1950s—given the complex social and political challenges of the 21st century. Under the Technology Inc. program, private property and banks would be abolished and everyone would be issued a personal lifetime consuming power card based on their “measurable energy input.” The MEI determination would be non-negotiable. Leaders would be chosen by a system called “the vertical alignment method.” This would be similar to “the way that industry now selects its supervisory staff. Promotion would involve recommendation from below and appointment from above.” This felt to me like Ayn Rand meets the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. “Work less to have more” was their motto. Technology and “the scientific design of social operations” was their solution to our problems. “The dreamless, mindless machines… (are) immune to want or need.” I am less optimistic about the benign power of technology, but I’ve undoubtedly been poisoned by the Terminator and Matrix films.

I gravitated to the AK Press bookseller table and purchased a copy of Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire, a collection of papers by David Graeber, an anthropologist and direct action group participant. The last essay in the book is “On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets: Broken Windows, Imaginary Jars of Urine, and the Cosmological Role of the Police in American Culture.” I felt that chapter title alone was worth the price of the book.

* * *


Marilyn Sinkewicz, Ben Burkett (President, National Family Farm Coalition), Jess Gilbert.

I drove into Detroit from Ann Arbor on Wednesday morning with Marilyn Sinkewicz, UM Social Work prof, and Jess Gilbert, an Environmental Sociologist from the University of Wisconsin. I was anxious to be on time for Other Worlds Are Possible: Visionary Fiction, Organizing & Imagining the Future because I figured this session would be about the progressive possibilities of Science Fiction, my genre fiction of choice ever since I picked up Danny Dunn and the Anti-Gravity Paint at the Civic Park Elementary School Library in Flint in 1956.

The workshop was sponsored by Left Turn magazine and was led by Walidah Imarisha, who has guest edited a special section on Visionary Fiction for the Jan/Feb 2010 issue. Ms. Imarisha told the thirty five people in attendance that she felt the need for a new term to separate work whose intent it is to spark social change from regular science fiction and fantasy. She described Visionary Fiction as having the following characteristics:

-explores current social issues
-conscious of identity/power issues
-change comes from the bottom up
-power is in the hands of the oppressed
-not neutral

This struck me as slightly formulaic. Art in the service of a specific political agenda usually doesn’t work for me, but I still take her point. I think science fiction is a wonderful way to get outside our usual conceptual frames around issues like race, class, gender and the social implications of new technologies.

Someone said that sci fi “tends to be dominated by white dudes,” which is undeniably true, but Ms. Imarisha mentioned Octavia Butler, the African American MacArthur Foundation winner who wrote Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents (two novels I admire very much), as an author who wrote Visionary Fiction. Ms. Butler read at Shaman Drum Bookshop a year before she died. I recall she was somewhat shy but unfailingly gracious, especially to the young people who attended the reading.

“Like in Star Wars, we’re the small rebel force!” an energetic young woman informed us fiercely. I was definitely down with this given that it’s always been my dream to attend a Science Fiction Con costume ball dressed as Yoda.

“This is the sci-fi geek session. If you’re not here to geek out, you’re welcome to leave.”

Everyone stayed, although a nervous librarian left when we broke into groups to collectively write Visionary Fiction.

The exercise was fun, if not entirely successful. Despite my commitment to build a communal vision, I’m not convinced that writing collectively works (although I have heard from reliable sources that television situation comedies are all written by committee).

The issue my group chose to explore was militarism. We settled on killer drones and robots as our central characters, but we ran into trouble when we tried to build the story. We couldn’t decide on the setting and we weren’t clear about the conflict. Were the killer drones sentient? Or were they controlled by human beings back at military headquarters, far from the battlefield? Given the right plot twist, if they were sentient they might experience a collective crisis of conscience. I suggested we end the story with the mass suicide of the drones, but this didn’t get much support.

The second group reported their issue was lifeboat ethics—as in who gets to be on the lifeboat when the ship goes down. The main character was a queer and pregnant starship commander. This detail was the occasion for a burst of applause in the room. She gives birth to twins who can time travel, but then the story got a bit too muddy for me to follow.

The third group imagined a ravaged earth in which humans were divided into three castes. The ruling class lived in sky cities and controlled the technology, the lower class was left to work on the polluted surface of the earth, and a third group acted as intermediaries, transporting goods from the earth to the sky. This all sounded promising until the group spokesperson revealed that the main character, who was a member of the transporter class, could communicate with the spirits and energies of people who had died. I’m quite willing to suspend disbelief, but this revelation of special super powers sent me over the edge.

The fourth group was interested in prisons and race. In their scenario, three corporations ruled the world, each with its own skin color. It was illegal to look different. The conflict comes when suddenly everyone could change their skin color, like chameleons. A financial crisis occurs and all the poor people are radicalized. The story seemed a bit too schematic for my taste, and the resolution was predictable.

Whatever. We did the best we could, and after all we only had an hour to mind meld and create fully realized stories. I believe that if we’d had enough time, our ideas would have evolved into something more coherent.

* * *

During the noon break I returned to the vendor area and stopped to chat with Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn near the Jimmy and Grace Lee Boggs Center booth. They both were delighted by the number of young people at the Social Forum.

Someone handed me an invitation to a workshop entitled Art Criticism—Betrayed, sponsored by the Platypus Review, a Chicago broadsheet whose mission is to reconsider “what is meant by the Left.” The flyer was a passionate call to “restart the dynamo of modernity…through…the recovery of emancipator politics (and) the necessity of revolution.” Contemporary cultural critics were called to task for betraying or failing their mission. “Critics have…pimped themselves for hire as cultural boosters.” Pimped? This was tough talk. Were these folks an aging cadre of disgruntled comrades from the Partisan Review, setting the ideological stage to spank the daylights out of the cultural poseurs and bourgeois philistines in our midst? I figured I needed to check this out.

When I finally located the meeting room, I felt I’d wandered into a Modern Language Association panel discussion. The speakers were young, serious and smart. The small audience of a dozen or so people was intensely attentive. The panelists read formal papers. We didn’t break into small groups.

It turned out the Platypus crowd is committed to reconnecting people with the arts, a project I can certainly get behind. They want to reinvigorate interest in literature, art and theater by creating a “criticism that exists outside the horizon of capitalism.”

This wasn’t an attempt to reduce art to political propaganda. We were told that “art shouldn’t be subsumed into the concrete world of politics.” Instead, the panelists wanted to explore the way contemporary art is bound up with social relations in a market economy. They were also interested in the relationship of artistic practices to political movements. They argued that these issues aren’t being discussed and that art criticism has degenerated into arts journalism. Criticism has become merely descriptive and it is ignored by the public. Critics are hobbled by a vocabulary that is no longer relevant. Art works are being produced now that the critics don’t understand.

One of the panelists rather plaintively asked, “What happens when we look at an art work and don’t know how to interpret it?” Well…we struggle with it. And sometimes we walk away from it.

I admired one of the panelists for stating that “anti-elitism is problematic,” but their angst regarding critical betrayal and the failure of modernism to save us left me slightly puzzled. Does our experience of art always require that it be mediated by critics? Sometimes it does, but I worried the panelists were inflating of the role of the art critic or the possibilities of art criticism. And aren’t there already a number of excellent critical voices—John Berger, Rebecca Solnit, the people at Adbusters magazine come immediately to mind—who speak from “outside the horizon of capitalism”?

Of course, the panelists were ultimately interested in reconstituting leftist politics. They wanted to “shake it up and move it forward”, as one of them put it. They were motivated by a fear that “the actual political possibilities to change the world are shrinking.” This should worry all of us.

The question and answer session was dominated by a young man who defended the political philosopher Slavoj Zizek against a panelist’s charge that Zizak was an unintelligible jester with a
meandering contrarian style.

I was more interested in a question posed by another person in the audience who asked, “What can poetry do for Detroit?” Although I don’t believe poetry needs any justification, there are many interesting answers to this question. Earlier one of the panelists said that the arts “offer us certain new possibilities,” which I liked.

Following the Platypus session, I purchased Criticism of Heaven: On Marxism and Theology, by Roland Boer, after I noticed the book contained a chapter on Zizek. I hoped it would bring me up to speed on Zizek, whose writing I find difficult. In his introduction Mr. Boer describes him as “a Leninist with a Protestant emphasis on grace.” ‘Nuff said!

* * *

I drove into Detroit late Thursday morning with my wife Dianne to attend the Interfaith People’s Movement Assembly: From Internal Reflection to External Action. It was sponsored by Jubilee USA, an alliance of religious and community groups that works to fight poverty and injustice in Asia, Africa and Latin America by calling for the cancellation of international debt. Our meeting was facilitated by Brooke Harper, a Jubilee National Field Organizer.

Despite the scandals and disappointing failures of organized religion, I believe many religious communities offer just about the only organized resistance to consumer capitalism these days. In the interest of full disclosure, I should reveal that I’m a Soto Zen Buddhist practitioner who feels at home in Christian communities that struggle with social justice issues. I’m currently a member of the Church of the Incarnation, a small Episcopal congregation in Ann Arbor.

The twenty-five workshop participants divided into groups, established norms (“to insure that all faiths are respected”), and introduced ourselves. I was in the group with Brooke, who grew up Methodist; John, a “cradle Catholic”; Jim, a Presbyterian; and Mary, who described herself as “active in the interfaith community.”

We worked through a series of grounding exercises. I was most interested in naming the core values we want to lift up in building the Movement. My group came up with some fine suggestions:
--emphasize hospitality rather than tolerance
--have a preferential option for the poor
--express anger nonviolently
--stress mutuality rather than differences
--build a foreign policy based on generosity
--create a long term vision

I volunteered two core religious values:
1. Pay Attention
2. Stay Curious

Paying Attention is an important core value with the Soto Zen crowd and is predicated on the assumption that most of us spend our waking lives in a kind of fog, either fretting about the past, being anxious about the future or just daydreaming. Whatever, we’ve checked out of the present moment. This isn’t helpful if we’re trying to do social change.

For me, Staying Curious means being open to experience rather than shutting down. My mother passed away a week and a half before the Social Forum, and so I’d been thinking about the gifts she gave me by the choices she made in her life. She lived most of her adult life within a one mile radius of where she was raised, in Flint’s Civic Park neighborhood. It was what we might call a sustainable life-style—modest, supportive and responsible, with a focus on community and family.

However, there is a downside to this. People who never leave the old neighborhood sometimes end up suffering from the Gated Community syndrome. They become small minded and stunted. My mother managed to avoid this trap by nurturing her curiosity about the world through her love of reading and her engagement with contemporary art. This deeply impacted my life. What would our lives be like if religious leaders taught us that curiosity is something positive, a core religious value? I suspect the world would be a better place.

We moved on to discuss spirituality, which Brooke suggested means “getting beyond ourselves.” It is experiential rather than a rational idea. Our group came up with adjectives like healing, nourishing and interconnecting, which we associated with spirituality.

I regret that we couldn’t stay for the second half of the People’s Movement Assembly. We missed the Large Group Amendment and the Resolution Process. Michele Gibbs was reading her poems at Hart Plaza.

Mary told our small group her grandmother had advised her that “You need to pray with your life.” This may have been the most important thing anyone said during the afternoon meeting.

* * *

Friday morning I hustled in to the Motor City and caught a shuttle bus from Cobo Hall to the Woodward Academy to attend Community Supported Publishing: Print Media Strategies for Movement Building, a session sponsored by AK Press. This was the Social Forum meeting I was most interested in.

I’ve spent most of my adult life working in independent book stores. In the last decade and a half big box chain bookstores, Amazon, the explosion of entertainment alternatives to reading, and e-books have made it more and more difficult for independent bookstores to survive.

I fear the independent bookstore is about to become a boutique business rather than a central public space where people gather to discuss ideas and celebrate literature. This culture is about to become a counterculture, which would be a great loss to the arts and letters in America. And if we assume there will be bookshops in the future (a leap of faith, I fear), what will they look like?

The twenty or so people gathered in the classroom represented AK Press, Left Turn magazine, AREA Chicago, Charles Kerr Publishers, the Red Emma Collective, a radical bookshop in Philadelphia, and a newsletter for incarcerated youth in Olympia, WA, among others. I hoped that they might have some answers or at least some new ideas.

Editors were mostly upbeat but realistic about the crisis in publishing. They told us print magazines are dying because the advertising dollars aren’t there and readers are no longer subscribing. They are responding by publishing in both print and electronic formats.

Penelope Rosemont, a writer and director of Charles H. Kerr, the pioneering publisher of anarchist books, spoke about the differences in the social life of printed media and on line publications. “On the level of production, print publications bring people together whereas electronic media ruins community,” she said.

Another publisher reminded us that many people don’t have access to electronic publishing.

Max from Left Turn asked people if anyone had purchased a book or magazine in the last year. Everyone raised their hand. However, when he asked people if they had purchased an e-book in the last year no one responded.

Publishers spoke of the need to be nimble and focused in this difficult environment.

“We don’t depend on traditional sales,” one person said. “We see our magazine as a political project rather than a financial vehicle.”

This is a neat way to reframe the issue, but activists are still left with the problem of how to fund projects. What followed was a long discussion on grassroots fundraising strategies.

People described a variety of creative methods to raise funds. Staff at one magazine spent two months organizing a Fourth of July party. Another group had an auction in which people’s skills and services were raffled off. Someone mentioned the sustainer subscription program South End Publishers created as a model of community supported publishing. Financial contributors receive new South End titles as they are published. Everyone spoke to the need to build a diverse financial base by building relationships. Fundraising is relationship building.

Max from Left Turn shifted the conversation a bit when he suggested people ask, “Who is our audience? What is the Movement? What voices are we trying to put forward?” Usually white male academics write for movement publications, but Left Turn attempts to engage people on the front lines of struggle. The editors go to people who don’t think of themselves as producers of informational material and ask them to write material. “I think we get a more authentic voice,” he said.

Daniel Tucker quoted Civil Rights historian Vincent Harding: How can we be educators for an educational system that doesn’t yet exist? “We’re going to create a newspaper for a neighborhood that doesn’t yet exist. We want to make what is a loose network visible, but how then does a network become a community?”

Speakers stressed the importance of creating strategic alliances, which is probably what the anarchist Peter Kropotkin had in mind when he wrote Mutual Aid. Our ideas have strength and power. We don’t have money but we have lots of other things. We have contacts with cultural workers, we have publications and we know how to put events together. We know how to collaborate with other groups and alliances and create mutually beneficial arrangements. Both sides get something they really need. We can help make institutions more relevant to the community.

The discussion turned to organizational models. Kate from the Red Emma Collective in Baltimore, works at AK Press, which is collectively owned and operated. It is a workers collective that pays people salaries and shares editorial decisions. Daniel Tucker, editor of AREA-Chicago, said his organization has six coordinators (communications, financial, people, content, design, outreach) that are each paid to work five hours a week. Every year previous contributors to AREA-Chicago are invited to be advisors to the magazine. Finally, they can become coordinators. Tucker saw this as an organic way to build relationships.

“Our job is to come up with challenging questions that frame the issues and then attempt to discern who is coming up with interesting answers, political responses and practices” Tucker said. “We need to build community. This is a slow process. This is not theoretical.”

* * *

At 1:00 I dropped in on the Art Is Change: Art & Creative Practice for Cultural & Political Transformation workshop. One hundred and fifty people showed up. We crammed into a room that was scheduled to accommodate maybe thirty people.

The session worked largely because it was facilitated by Anasa Troutman, a Senior Fellow at the Movement Strategy Center. Ms. Troutman, who described herself as a Cultural Strategist, knows how to connect with people. Now based in Atlanta, she had worked on Dennis Kucinich’s presidential campaign and was a music producer for India.Arie.

Anasa Troutman and workshop participants.


“Art is my transformative religious practice,” she told us. She said she believes that politics must be rooted in personal transformation and that the arts are a powerful way to decrease the cycle of social isolation in our world.

She presented a series of exercises intended to get people to connect with their own creativity. Each of us wrote autobiographical poems and read them to another person, and we had short small group discussions about reimagining our work. In the hands of a less skillful leader, these exercises would have fallen flat. With Ms. Troutman’s encouragement, people in the room suspended their normal defensiveness and skepticism.

“Art is a way to communicate. This is the way we reimagine art, engage in creative practice and recreate the world.”

Ms. Troutman advocated for what she called narrative based organizing. “Most of the time we chase the story without asking what the story is really about,” she said. “We should ask ourselves how we would like to change the story.”

She ended the session with a series of questions. “We should ask ourselves, Who do you need to be? Who do you need to become? Who do the people around you need to be? Who do the people around you need to become?”

She suggested that we should care about the impact of our work as much as we do the outcome.

The tone and content of the Art Is Change workshop couldn’t have been more different from the Art Criticism—Betrayed session I’d attended two days earlier. I left the Social Forum Friday with a sense of the healthy variety of conversation about the role of the arts in social change.

Re:Imagining Change by Patrick Reinsborough and Doyle Canning (PM Press) is an excellent introduction to story-based strategy, and there are two websites that showcase the range of participation by artists engaged in social transformation--www.artandstruggle.com and www.artischange.com.

* * *

I was only able to attend a tiny fraction of the sessions offered at the US Social Forum in Detroit. I missed Grace Boggs’ 95th birthday party, I couldn’t get in to South of the Border, the new Oliver Stone documentary, and I was just too tired to make it over to the Leftist Lounge Friday evening. But I was moved by what I did see. I thought the US Social Forum was terrific.

In one of the sessions I attended in Cobo the panelists decided the Left was dead. That conclusion seems premature to me given the energy level of the 15,000 plus people who attended the Social Forum.

The vibe in Detroit was markedly different from mass meetings I’d attended in the late 60s/early 70s, when most of the resistance was centered in universities and colleges. Back then, in spite of our commitment to radical democratic values, we replicated the power structures and hierarchies of academia, and too often movement organizations self destructed over ideological struggles. Activists forgot how to talk to people other than themselves, and they became superfluous.

This is a different scene now. It reflects the impact of feminism, the leadership of people of color, and the input of direct action movement activists who understand the provisional nature of political struggle. This is the New New Left.

A few of my friends were dismissive of the Social Forum. They said it was a cool scene, but they noted that a cool scene wasn’t a mass political movement. To some extent I share this concern, but no one should underestimate the energy and intelligence of the people at the Social Forum in Detroit.

Early Thursday evening when we walked back to Cobo Hall from the USSF Village, we met a young woman from Georgia. Marilyn asked her what she thought of the Social Forum.

“I kind of wandered into the first Social Forum in Atlanta three years ago,” she said. “That experience changed my life.” She told us she drove to Michigan from Georgia without enough money to stay in a motel, so she logged onto couchsurfing.com. That night she was staying someplace in Dearborn. She said she is active in progressive politics in Georgia. She said she was absolutely thrilled to be in Detroit.

If there are enough people like this around, maybe another world is possible.