If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.
—Emma Goldman
The Occupy Wall Street people are not really occupying Wall Street. They are instead occupying Zuccotti Park. Which at least touches Wall Street.
It would be nice if Wall Street were occupied as the French would occupy it: by filling it with a million or so people, and truly shutting it down. So that no business, other than the business of the occupiers, might proceed.
First the truck drivers would arrive, to jack-knife their rigs across all intersections leading in and out of the Street; mission accomplished, they would then lean back in their cabs, to read Liberation, and smoke Gitanes. Meanwhile, a million or so people would stream in to occupy the desired space, eradicating all business-as-usual. And they would stay there. Until something resembling the desired change was attained.
However, the United States is not France. People do not behave in the US as they do across the Great Water. Governments change, in the streets, in France. For good or for ill. And have for hundreds of years.
But such a thing has never occurred in the United States. Rarely are even policies, much less governments, affected by rumbling Americans roiling about outdoors. A notable exception is the nation’s civil rights laws of the 1960s. Which were enacted less because of the black people who took to the streets, than to the extreme and finally terminal discomfort of white people repeatedly exposed via their TV screens to badged Neanderthals treating those black people like beasts.
Still: nothing is forever. It could happen there. In the US. Why not? It’s a young country. Lots left to learn. And experience.
Too, in the end, what matters most is not whether Wall Street is actually, physically occupied, but the Reality that is formed in the public mind. If there occurs an American group-agreement that Wall Street is occupied—even though the occupiers may physically be confined to Zuccotti Park, and/or behind whatever orange nets the NYPD fitfully casts upon the surrounding streets and sidewalks—then Wall Street will, in fact, be occupied.
Exiting the second week of their stay in Zuccotti Park, the various and sundries assembled combined to produce what they monikered their first “official” statement. Released upon the last day of September, it is the product of relentlessly pursued “small d” democracy, in which anyone present could suggest something for inclusion, as anyone present could press that something be excluded.
I quite like it, what they came up with. Which is this.
What is said there is true. And simply put.
They're getting there. Them folks. Us folks.
And: they're dancing.
What I know for sure is this: it doesn't matter, in the end, if Occupy Wall Street doesn't move the whole of the world. Because it will move the world of all those intimately involved in it. And it is through moving the world of each individual human being, that the world itself, will someday be moved.
I know this, because my own world was moved. Many years ago. In an occupation like this one. Though on a more modest, local level. I was changed, through that occupation, down to my very cells. I have never been the same since. Neither, as a consequence, has anybody I have since come in contact with. Which amounts, now, in all the years that have since gone by, to tens of thousands of people.
When I went down to the occupation, I made the mistake—common—of trying to make my world like one that had come before.
I was trying to rerun the Haight. Which Jerry Garcia described, when it was happening, thusly:
[T]hat's about what the hippie scene was—it was just this very small neighborhood affair when we were all working for each other's benefit.
Then when the big media flash came out—when the Time magazine guys came out and interviewed everybody and took photographs and made it news, the feedback from that killed the whole scene. It was ridiculous. We could no longer support the tiny trickle that was really supporting everybody. The whole theory in hip economics is essentially that you can have a small amount of money and move it around very fast and it would work out, but when you have thousands and thousands of people, it's just too unwieldy. And all the attempts at free food and all that, certain people had to work too hard to justify it.
At the early stages we were operating completely purely without anybody looking on, without anybody looking through the big window. We were going along really well. And then the crowds came in. All the people who were looking for something.
What they were looking for, all those latter-be stragglers, was this, which the original Haight people had, on a molecular level, come to understand:
The information we're plugged into is the universe itself, and everybody knows that on a cellular level. It's built in. Just superficial stuff like what happened to you in your lifetime is nothing compared to the container which holds all your information. And there's a similarity in all our containers. We are all one organism, we are all the universe, we are all doing the same thing. That's the sort of thing that everybody knows, and I think that it's only weird little differences that are making it difficult. The thing is that we're all earthlings. The earthling consciousness is the one that's really trying to happen at this juncture and so far it's only a tiny little glint, but it's already over. The change has already happened, and it's a matter of swirling out. It has already happened. We're living after the fact. It's a postrevolutionary age. The change is over. The rest of it is a cleanup action. Unfortunately it's very slow. Amazingly slow and amazingly difficult.
Well: sure: we all know that: right?
Not really. Not the bleeders, the vampires, the energy-suckers, the downers, who came in with "all that political, heavy-handed, East Coast, hard-edge shit, and [they] painted it on Haight Street, where none of it was happening."
Painted it, like fetid stinking sewage, in a place where "everybody had already been through being disillusioned." Gloried, did the sewage-spreaders, in "represent[ing] a step backward." In making everybody take a step backward. Until Garcia himself, some years on, was arrested shooting up heroin, in his car, parked in the park, because he just couldn't wait to do it, till he got from the SF streets where he bought it, over the Golden Gate Bridge, to his home in Marin. 'Cause that's where the temptation is to go. When once you've really seen it. But understand you won't ever, in this world, live to see it. Opiates.
The Occupy Wall Street people, they're not disillusioned. People: stay that way.
Now, I, coming on close after that world, skirted all that. For a time. The disillusionment.
As I once wrote in a comment on this blog:
i lived
in a world like that, in the next decade, for quite a number of years, in a modest little California valley town. Relatively small amounts of money moved very fast through the musicians, the commie newspaper types, the enviros and woods-people, the plastic artists & theater people, the legal aid folks, the food co-ops, the music stores and head shops and art studios, the bars/music halls, the funky restaurants, the dope people, etc., etc. There was some leakage out of the system for rent and power, but that was about it. Nobody got rich, but nobody suffered, either. It's a young & lucky person's world, though—the system breaks down, for example, if you get really sick or really hurt. And, as in the Haight, it didn't last. Everybody had great visions that whatever they were pursuing would assume some sort of permanence. None really did. Except for the guy whose dreams were all about beer. That was Ken Grossman, who founded and today still runs Sierra Nevada Brewery.
"Is it enough," I was asked, "to have had that once?"
To which I replied:
yes
It's like the Spanish anarchist communities that flourished for a time during the Spanish Republic, before they were mucked with by the Communists and then crushed by Franco. It's proof that it is possible.
When once you live it, you know that it is Real. It gets into your cells. And you never go back. None of those people that I lived with then, ever went back. None of them have assimilated into the machine. All, are still, in some way, dancing.
It's a hard life, pretty much always. But so what? It's Real.
Our little occupation was quaint. We didn't want the campus police at our little California university armed. We saw no reason for it. There was no crime, really, there. Even if there had been, the guns would still be stupid. The guns were only about Fear. And Power. And Money.
What it's always, always about. For the Thanatos people.
We: we were the Eros people. And so we occupied the administration building. For a time. Until we lost. In that they kept the guns. And we all ended up getting arrested. And ensnared for various lengths of time in the criminal-justice system.
But so what? We won. Every single one of us. Because, through the opening flowering communal experience, we imprinted always, for the rest of our lives, as Eros people.
So that is why, if, from Occupy Wall Street, there does not, in the end, come the final to-change-all-the-world-fire-this-time, all involved have already won. For they will have all changed themselves. And they will move out, for the rest of their lives, to touch, all, as they have been touched.
And that's what it's about. Here on this planet.
One soul at a time.
That is a supremely powerful image, the woman dancing, in mastery, upon the bull of Wall Street.
Gazing upon that image, I know, to the depths of my soul, that the Occupy Wall Street people will prevail.
There isn't even any question.
It doesn't matter. Whether I live to see it. Because it will happen. I know that it will happen.
And it will happen like this:
spread your wings
come on and
fly awhile
all you gotta do
is ring the bell
and step right up
step right up
step right up
just like a ballerina
keep on movin' on up
movin' on up
movin' on up
move on up
move on up
(This one's For Audrey. Ballerina.)