FUTURISM

THE ART OF NOISES

by Luigi Russolo

Dear Balilla Pratella, great Futurist composer,

In Rome, in the Costanzi Theatre, packed to capacity, while I was listening to the orchestral performance of your overwhelming Futurist music, with my Futurist friends, Marinetti, Boccioni, Carrà, Balla, Soffici, Papini and Cavacchioli, a new art came into my mind which only you can create, the Art of Noises, the logical consequence of your marvelous innovations.

Ancient life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men. For many centuries life went by in silence, or at most in muted tones. The strongest noises which interrupted this silence were not intense or prolonged or varied. If we overlook such exceptional movements as earthquakes, hurricanes, storms, avalanches and waterfalls, nature is silent.

Amidst this dearth of noises, the first sounds that man drew from a pieced reed or streched string were regarded with amazement as new and marvelous things. Primitive races attributed sound to the gods; it was considered sacred and reserved for priests, who used it to enrich the mystery of their rites.

And so was born the concept of sound as a thing in itself, distinct and independent of life, and the result was music, a fantastic world superimposed on the real one, an inviolatable and sacred world. It is easy to understand how such a concept of music resulted inevitable in the hindering of its progress by comparison with the other arts. The Greeks themselves, with their musical theories calculated mathematically by Pythagoras and according to which only a few consonant intervals could be used, limited the field of music considerably, rendering harmony, of which they were unaware, impossible. 

The Middle Ages, with the development and modification of the Greek tetrachordal system, with the Gregorian chant and popular songs, enriched the art of music, but continued to consider sound in its development in time, a restricted notion, but one which lasted many centuries, and which still can be found in the Flemish contrapuntalists’ most complicated polyphonies.

The chord did not exist, the development of the various parts was not subornated to the chord that these parts put together could produce; the conception of the parts was horizontal not vertical. The desire, search, and taste for a simultaneous union of different sounds, that is for the chord (complex sound), were gradually made manifest, passing from the consonant perfect chord with a few passing dissonances, to the complicated and persistent dissonances that characterize contemporary music.

At first the art of music sought purity, limpidity and sweetness of sound. Then different sounds were amalgamated, care being taken, however, to caress the ear with gentle harmonies. Today music, as it becomes continually more complicated, strives to amalgamate the most dissonant, strange and harsh sounds. In this way we come ever closer to noise-sound.

This musical evolution is paralleled by the multipication of machines, which collaborate with man on every front. Not only in the roaring atmosphere of major cities, but in the country too, which until yesterday was totally silent, the machine today has created such a variety and rivalry of noises that pure sound, in its exiguity and monotony, no longer arouses any feeling.

To excite and exalt our sensibilities, music developed towards the most complex polyphony and the maximum variety, seeking the most complicated successions of dissonant chords and vaguely preparing the creation of musical noise. This evolution towards “noise sound” was not possible before now. The ear of an eighteenth-century man could never have endured the discordant intensity of certain chords produced by our orchestras (whose members have trebled in number since then). To our ears, on the other hand, they sound pleasant, since our hearing has already been educated by modern life, so teeming with variegated noises. But our ears are not satisfied merely with this, and demand an abundance of acoustic emotions.

On the other hand, musical sound is too limited in its qualitative variety of tones. The most complex orchestras boil down to four or five types of instrument, varying in timber: instruments played by bow or plucking, by blowing into metal or wood, and by percussion. And so modern music goes round in this small circle, struggling in vain to create new ranges of tones.

This limited circle of pure sounds must be broken, and the infinite variety of “noise-sound” conquered.

Besides, everyone will acknowledge that all musical sound carries with it a development of sensations that are already familiar and exhausted, and which predispose the listener to boredom in spite of the efforts of all the innovatory musicians. We Futurists have deeply loved and enjoyed the harmonies of the great masters. For many years Beethoven and Wagner shook our nerves and hearts. Now we are satiated and we find far more enjoyment in the combination of the noises of trams, backfiring motors, carriages and bawling crowds than in rehearsing, for example, the “Eroica” or the “Pastoral”.

We cannot see that enormous apparatus of force that the modern orchestra represents without feeling the most profound and total disillusion at the paltry acoustic results. Do you know of any sight more ridiculous than that of twenty men furiously bent on the redoubling the mewing of a violin? All this will naturally make the music-lovers scream, and will perhaps enliven the sleepy atmosphere of concert halls. Let us now, as Futurists, enter one of these hospitals for anaemic sounds. There: the first bar brings the boredom of familiarity to your ear and anticipates the boredom of the bar to follow. Let us relish, from bar to bar, two or three varieties of genuine boredom, waiting all the while for the extraordinary sensation that never comes.

Meanwhile a repugnant mixture is concocted from monotonous sensations and the idiotic religious emotion of listeners buddhistically drunk with repeating for the nth time their more or less snobbish or second-hand ecstasy.

Away! Let us break out since we cannot much longer restrain our desire to create finally a new musical reality, with a generous distribution of resonant slaps in the face, discarding violins, pianos, double-basses and plainitive organs. Let us break out!

It’s no good objecting that noises are exclusively loud and disagreeable to the ear.

It seems pointless to enumerate all the graceful and delicate noises that afford pleasant sensations.

To convince ourselves of the amazing variety of noises, it is enough to think of the rumble of thunder, the whistle of the wind, the roar of a waterfall, the gurgling of a brook, the rustling of leaves, the clatter of a trotting horse as it draws into the distance, the lurching jolts of a cart on pavings, and of the generous, solemn, white breathing of a nocturnal city; of all the noises made by wild and domestic animals, and of all those that can be made by the mouth of man without resorting to speaking or singing.

Let us cross a great modern capital with our ears more alert than our eyes, and we will get enjoyment from distinguishing the eddying of water, air and gas in metal pipes, the grumbling of noises that breathe and pulse with indisputable animality, the palpitation of valves, the coming and going of pistons, the howl of mechanical saws, the jolting of a tram on its rails, the cracking of whips, the flapping of curtains and flags. We enjoy creating mental orchestrations of the crashing down of metal shop blinds, slamming doors, the hubbub and shuffling of crowds, the variety of din, from stations, railways, iron foundries, spinning wheels, printing works, electric power stations and underground railways.

Nor should the newest noises of modern war be forgotten. Recently, the poet Marinetti, in a letter from the trenches of Adrianopolis, described to me with marvelous free words the orchestra of a great battle:

“every 5 seconds siege cannons gutting space with a chord ZANG-TUMB-TUUMB mutiny of 500 echos smashing scattering it to infinity. In the center of this hateful ZANG-TUMB-TUUMB area 50square kilometers leaping bursts lacerations fists rapid fire batteries. Violence ferocity regularity this deep bass scanning the strange shrill frantic crowds of the battle Fury breathless ears eyes nostrils open! load! fire! what a joy to hear to smell completely taratatata of the machine guns screaming a breathless under the stings slaps traak-traak whips pic-pac-pum-tumb weirdness leaps 200 meters range Far far in back of the orchestra pools muddying huffing goaded oxen wagons pluff-plaff horse action flic flac zing zing shaaack laughing whinnies the tiiinkling jiiingling tramping 3 Bulgarian battalions marching croooc-craaac ZANG-TUMB-TUUUMB toc-toc-toc-toc [fast] crooc-craac [slowly] crys of officers slamming about like brass plates pan here paak there BUUUM ching chaak [very fast] cha-cha-cha-cha-chaak down there up around high up look out your head beautiful! Flashing flashing flashing flashing flashing flashing footlights of the forts down there behind that smoke Shukri Pasha communicates by phone with 27 forts in Turkish in German Allo! Ibrahim! Rudolf! allo! allo! actors parts echos of prompters scenery of smoke forests applause odor of hay mud dung I no longer feel my frozen feet odor of gunsmoke odor of rot Tympani flutes clarinets everywhere low high birds chirping blessed shadows cheep-cheep-cheep green breezes flocks don-dan-don-din-baaah Orchestra madmen pommel the performers they terribly beaten playing Great din not erasing clearing up cutting off slighter noises very small scraps of echos in the theater area 300 square kilometers Rivers Maritza Tungia stretched out Rodolpi Mountains rearing heights loges boxes 2000 shrapnels waving arms exploding very white handkerchiefs full of gold srrrr-TUMB-TUMB 2000 raised grenades tearing out bursts of very black hair ZANG-srrrr-TUMB-ZANG-TUMB-TUUMB the orchestra of the noises of war swelling under a held note of silence in the high sky round golden balloon that observes the firing…”

We want to attune and regulate this tremendous variety of noises harmonically and rhythmically. To attune noises does not mean to detract from all their irregular movements and vibrations in time and intensity, but rather to give gradation and tone to the most strongly predominant of these vibrations. Noise in fact can be differentiated from sound only in so far as the vibrations which produce it are confused and irregular, both in time and intensity. Every noise has a tone, and sometimes also a harmony that predominates over the body of its irregular vibrations. Now, it is from this dominating characteristic tone that a practical possibility can be derived for attuning it, that is to give a certain noise not merely one tone, but a variety of tones, without losing its characteristic tone, by which I mean the one which distinguishes it. In this way any noise obtained by a rotating movement can offer an entire ascending or descending chromatic scale, if the speed of the movement is increased or decreased. Every manifestation of our life is accompanied by noise. The noise, therefore, is familiar to our ear, and has the power to conjure up life itself. Sound, alien to our life, always musical and a thing unto itself, an occasional but unnecessary element, has become to our ears what an overfamiliar face is to our eyes. Noise, however, reaching us in a confused and irregular way from the irregular confusion of our life, never entirely reveals itself to us, and keeps innumerable surprises in reserve. We are therefore certain that by selecting, coordinating and dominating all noises we will enrich men with a new and unexpected sensual pleasure. Although it is characteristic of noise to recall us brutally to real life, the art of noise must not limit itself to imitative reproduction. It will achieve its most emotive power in the acoustic enjoyment, in its own right, that the artist’s inspiration will extract from combined noises. Here are the 6 families of noises of the Futurist orchestra which we will soon set in motion mechanically:

1	2	3	4	5	6
Rumbles Roars Explosions Crashes Splashes Booms	Whistles Hisses Snorts	Whispers Murmurs Mumbles Grumbles Gurgles	Screeches Creaks Rumbles Buzzes Crackles Scrapes	Noises obtained by percussion on metal, wood, skin, stone, tarracotta, etc.	Voices of animals and men: Shouts Screams Groans Shrieks Howls Laughs Weezes Sobs

In this inventory we have encapsulated the most characteristic of the fundamental noises; the others are merely the associations and combinations of these. The rhythmic movements of a noise are infinite: just as with tone there is always a predominant rhythm, but around this numerous other secondary rhythms can be felt.

Cover of the original Italian edition, publishe d 1916.

Conclusions

1. Futurist musicians must continually enlarge and enrich the field of sounds. This corresponds to a need in our sensibility. We note, in fact, in the composers of genius, a tendency towards the most complicated dissonances. As these move further and further away from pure sound, they almost achieve noise-sound. This need and this tendency cannot be satisfied except by the adding and the substitution of noises for sounds.
2. Futurist musicians must substitute for the limited variety of tones posessed by orchestral instruments today the infinite variety of tones of noises, reproduced with appropriate mechanisms.
3. The musician’s sensibility, liberated from facile and traditional Rhythm, must find in noises the means of extension and renewal, given that every noise offers the union of the most diverse rhythms apart from the predominant one.
4. Since every noise contains a predominant general tone in its irregular vibrations it will be easy to obtain in the construction of instruments which imitate them a sufficiently extended variety of tones, semitones, and quarter-tones. This variety of tones will not remove the characteristic tone from each noise, but will amplify only its texture or extension.
5. The practical difficulties in constructing these instruments are not serious. Once the mechanical principle which produces the noise has been found, its tone can be changed by following the same general laws of acoustics. If the instrument is to have a rotating movement, for instance, we will increase or decrease the speed, whereas if it is to not have rotating movement the noise-producing parts will vary in size and tautness.
6. The new orchestra will achieve the most complex and novel aural emotions not by incorporating a succession of life-imitating noises but by manipulating fantastic juxtapositions of these varied tones and rhythms. Therefore an instrument will have to offer the possibility of tone changes and varying degrees of amplification.
7. The variety of noises is infinite. If today, when we have perhaps a thousand different machines, we can distinguish a thousand different noises, tomorrow, as new machines multiply, we will be able to distinguish ten, twenty, or thirty thousand different noises, not merely in a simply imitative way, but to combine them according to our imagination.
8. We therefore invite young musicians of talent to conduct a sustained observation of all noises, in order to understand the various rhythms of which they are composed, their principal and secondary tones. By comparing the various tones of noises with those of sounds, they will be convinced of the extent to which the former exceed the latter. This will afford not only an understanding, but also a taste and passion for noises. After being conquered by Futurist eyes our multiplied sensibilities will at last hear with Futurist ears. In this way the motors and machines of our industrial cities will one day be consciously attuned, so that every factory will be transformed into an intoxicating orchestra of noises.

Dear Pratella, I submit these statements to your Futurist genius, inviting your discussion. I am not a musician, I have therefore no acoustical predilictions, nor any works to defend. I am a Futurist painter using a much loved art to project my determination to renew everything. And so, bolder than a professional musician could be, unconcerned by my apparent incompetence and convinced that all rights and possibilities open up to daring, I have been able to initiate the great renewal of music by means of the Art of Noises.

–Luigi Russolo

First published in Milan as a pamphlet, March 1913

VERONICA FORREST-THOMSON

A LETTER TO G.S. FRASER

by Veronica Forrest-Thomson

14, Searle Street, Cambridge 19/8/74

Dear George,

Thank you for your long and helpful letter. I don’t know about Reading yet and am meanwhile starting to apply to schools and thinking of doing a Dip. Ed. next year if I can get a grant. The snag is that the only places still vacant are in London polytechnics and I don’t fancy trying to live on a grant in London (I spelt that, Freudianly, Lonedong). Meanwhile I get on with work — have just finished revising my Dada article for Twentieth-century Studies and am still up to the eyes in my Swinburne article. No holiday this year. I think you’re right that poetry does in the end say “Beauty is Beauty is Beauty” but this not as a conversation-stopper or in any way reducive of differences or of criticism but as a sort of background. Also emotion in literature — about the other arts I’m not so sure as they are non-verbal — is precision. The precision which gets us out of the mud-bath of mere “appreciation” and allows us to say something about the particulars of this poem and of poetry in general. My great danger is to talk about literature as if it were all poetry but I think me same is the case with novels and drama. Simplicity can only be got through complexity of technique as it is only by ‘‘thickening” the imaginative webs of formal pattern that poetry can criticise or present imaginative alternatives to the world of everyday language. Criticism’s first duty is to follow and stress the complexities and only after this is done to say, if necessary, genius is simplicity. Thus I feel more at home with English departments than Philosophy since at least the English depts. do try to trace the complexities even if they do it in an aesthetic of “truth to individual texts” aesthetic which is alien to mine. Philosophers are too apt to slight the differences between the individual arts and their stress on aesthetic emotion seems to be dangerous in isolation from particular topics and texts.

The Open University don’t want me and although I could get some supervising here in Cambridge the snag is that I really want for personal reasons (Yes, George, cherchez l’homme) to be in Oxford next year where I have few contacts. I’ve asked Blackwell’s to give me a job but had no response yet likewise O.U.P. who said maddeningly “how nice you are going to be in Oxford do give us a ring when you get there”. I shan’t get there at all unless someone gives me a job there.

I’ve investigated the Civil Service a bit but am now somewhat off it. After all if I must spend my days doing something at least let it be connected with my real interests in literature.

America alas is quite out for me (personal reasons again — my former husband was an American and I had a hellish time there before we were married) at least in the foreseeable future. Besides I don’t want to leave the country just now. Oh, well, something will have to turn up. Perhaps Reading will interview me (though they are cutting things very fine leaving interviews until September) or I shall find a nice school which won’t think me incompetent because I haven’t got a Dip. Ed.

Enclosed is my curriculum vitae which I hope will help you. I also hope though don’t quite see how at the moment that I shall see you again soon. In any case I am very grateful for your support.

Best wishes to Paddy.

Yours ever,
Veronica

P.S. — I like Cordelia* and its arrangement winds up a nice crescendo. I hope they do well with it. Edwin Morgan wrote me a very nice letter about it.
________________
* Cordelia, or a Poem Should Not Mean But Be, was a pamphlet of Veronica’s more recent poems published by Owens Press, Leicester. Alas, it sold badly and I did not trace any reviews. -G.S.F.

This letter was first published in Jacket 20 — December 2002.

COMMENTARY

Roman coin depicting Janus, the god of doors and beginnings.

TIME EXCHANGES: SHARE YOUR LIFE ENERGY

by Heather Young

Time exchanges have been around for over a 100 years, presumably much longer in various forms, many undocumented. During the last two great depressions in the US, hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of people organized to meet their basic needs when the mainstream economy and centralized monetary system failed them. Unemployed poor folks got together to create time dollar stores, cooperative mills, farms, healthcare systems, foundries, repair and recycling facilities, distribution warehouses, health care systems, and a myriad of other service exchanges. Many of these were based on the hour as a unit of account, and often everyone’s hour was equal and could either be exchanged for another hour of service or the equivalent in goods.  Now with unemployment topping 10 percent (likely twice that given recording problems), time exchanges are making a come-back, though modern forms branded as Timebanks and LETS (Local Employment Trading Systems) have been around since the 1980’s.

Timebanks USA, a system of over 120 timebanks in the US and a few other countries, was developed by activist lawyer Edgar Cahn as a way to help the underprivileged and underserved help each other through an organized system of reciprocity. Official Timebanks purchase software that provides a ready-made, standardized directory and accounting system of individuals, and sometimes nonprofits or government agencies, that are willing to provide services to their communities and receive help in return. Timebank coordinators help create matches between people who need things and others who can help meet those needs locally and enter completed transactions into the system.  No money is involved and everyone’s hour is equal in this system, which is one of the features that enabled Timebanks to receive an official IRS income tax exemption declaration so people on disability, social security, unemployment and other government benefits can participate without penalty. The egalitarian nature of the system ensures that people will be able to purchase the services that they need without toiling endlessly for high priced services like in the market economy. People can also trade goods with the stipulation that their price be based on the amount of time involved in producing the goods and not their market value. Timebanks’ most successful application has been to provide a means for at-risk youth who have gone to court to do service for their community.

LETS systems also operate without money (except for fixed costs like gas or paper copies), but the value of time or goods may be linked to its market value. Every community determines its own rules so every LETS is a little different. LETS are now mostly online accounting and directory systems just like Timebanks, but they have also taken the form of paper ledgers, checkbooks, paper currencies, and time-based stores. When one person provides service or goods to another, the giver receives credit in her account and the receiver gets a debit to his account so the system is always in balance. People manage their own accounts and make payment over the internet by logging into their personal account. Businesses, nonprofits and government may also have accounts if they are involved in reciprocal community exchange. Some systems have account balance limits, others don’t or merely flag high or low balances and then contact members to help them figure out how to spend or earn their credits.

Other similar time exchange projects exist, going by other names like Fourth Corner Exchange, Village Networks, Richmond Hours, and Austin Time Exchange. Probably the largest time exchange in the world is the Furai Kippu in Japan. Fureai kippu (meaning “Caring Relationship Tickets”) was created in 1995 to help families who had migrated to other parts of Japan care for their elder family members that they became separated from. Seniors can help each other and earn the hour credits, family members can earn credits and transfer them to their parents who live elsewhere, or users may keep credits for when they become sick or elderly themselves. Free open source software is now available for any community to tailor a time exchange to its own needs and to reflect the local culture. Many of these projects also have regular in person meetings, swaps, potlucks, etc. to help facilitate exchange, trust and community building.

While we may not have many dollars these days, most people do have some time. Instead of paying professionals who we may never see again to provide services, we can use time exchanges to find neighbors who might provide service in exchange for hour credits, thereby saving scarce US dollars for things like rent and medicine. In the process, people get to know and trust their neighbors, establishing caring relationships that can help reweave the fabric of our communities and replace our culture’s over-reliance on individual financial security.

–Heather Young

For other writings on the new economy see Heather Young’s blog Trust Is The Only Currency.

Further Reading:

All Power to the People: Changing the Economic Power Structure by Heather Young, 9/7/09

Towards a Democratic, Cooperative, and Caring Economy by Heather Young, 8/14/09

WHEELER HALL PROTESTS

Protesters in front of Wheeler Hall at UC Berkeley. Flickr photo by Pye42.

As most of you know, I’m not one to send out mass appeals for letters or signatures, but in this case, I spent a little time outside of Wheeler Hall at Berkeley on Friday and was truly shocked to see Alameda riot cops standing guard, aiming and ready to shoot those rubber bullets at us, and who knows what else (tear gas?). Surely there were way more cops around than protesters inside the building. It was fortunate that we had some committed faculty (Ananya Roy, George Lakoff, Judith Butler and others) inside and outside defusing the situation, which was greatly aggravated by the chief of police and the Chancellor’s refusal to exert any leadership (except to let the cops have their way). If you haven’t seen the news, here are some links:

http://oaklandnorth.net/2009/11/20/u-c-berkeley-students-take-over-building-to-protest-fee-hikes/

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/11/20/BA611ANSAB.DTL

If I could just trouble you to take a look at the info below and let the chancellor’s office know that in times like these, when tuition and fees have been raised through the roof, the world is watching. Below is a letter drafted and signed by Berkeley geograds following Friday’s deplorable acts by Alameda County riot police on the UC Berkeley campus. A link to the letter is also here:

http://ucbgeograds.tumblr.com/post/253251070/an-open-letter-to-chancellor-robert-j-birgeneau

or via http://ucbgeograds.tumblr.com/

The campus community has been asked to write to the following people, and it would be useful to have support from the larger academic world and alumni(!) letting them know their conduct has not gone unnoticed. A quick two lines would suffice to say you have read the reports and are concerned about this. “Write to the chair of the Academic Senate and the Chancellor’s office about the use of excessive force – both visual and narrative testimony – and to send the same documentation to a systemwide effort.

Emails: chancellor@berkeley.edu, ckutz@law.berkeley.edu (Chris Kutz, chair of the Academic Senate who is also chair of the Police Review Board). The idea is to compel an investigation into specific incidents and assaults but also into the broader questions of why this police presence.”

Youtube videos of assaults and rubber bullets:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWGCnVjWRd0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOI5l2_RghQ

–Javier Arbona

###

OPEN LETTER TO THE CHANCELLOR

by 40 Geography Graduate Students

Dear Chancellor Birgeneau,

We write this letter in response to your email sent out on Friday, November 20, 2009, at 10:49pm (posted at http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2009/11/20_wheeler-rjb.shtml), regarding Berkeley’s campus-wide protest of UC fee hikes, lay-offs and other cuts that have decreased the accessibility and quality of public education across the University of California’s campuses.  We feel that this email misrepresented Friday’s protests and is a disservice to the democratic debate that continues over the UC regents’ actions.

While we understand the spirit of your email, it does not bear much resemblance to the events that took place.  Indeed, we are insulted by the euphemistic claim that “a few members of our campus community may have found themselves in conflict with law enforcement officers.”  What we observed, and what is well-documented, was the police indiscriminately striking, shoving, and knocking over unarmed and non-aggressive students who were fully within their constitutionally guaranteed rights.  Further, to argue that the protests “necessitated significant police presence to maintain safety” makes a mockery of the fact that the only threat to safety on Friday was the police presence itself. The broken fingers sustained by two protesters and the bruises and welts sustained by many were not inflicted by their fellow peaceful demonstrators, but by the police themselves.  We deplore these actions, as well as the entrance of heavily armed Alameda Sheriffs onto our campus at a time when faculty and students were engaged in peaceful negotiations.

Such a misrepresentation of the events does not speak to the good faith of the Office of the Chancellor, particularly in how it deals with democratic protests on campus.  No irony was lost in the fact that Friday’s protests and police violence took place steps away from UC Berkeley’s “Free Speech Café”.  We believe that the student body and the general public deserve to hear a more honest summation of events from Berkeley’s administration, particularly regarding the violence inflicted on students.

Sincerely,

The undersigned UC Berkeley Geography graduate students,

Javier Arbona, Jenny Baca, Teo Ballvé, Rachel Brahinsky, Sandy Brown, Liz Carlisle,  Jennifer Casolo, Erin Collins, Alicia Cowart, Shannon Cram, Juan David de Lara, Lindsey Dillon, Sapana Doshi, Zoë Friedman-Cohen, Anthony Fontes, Sapna Elizabeth Gardner Thottathil, Jennifer Greenburg, Ju Hui Judy Han, Katy Guimond, Leigh Johnson, Julie Klinger, Sarah Knuth, Jessica Lage, Miri Lavi-Neeman, Nicole List, Seth Lunine, Nathan McClintock, Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern, Diana Negrín, Youjeong Oh, David Pieper, Shaina Potts, Tim Rowe, Kao-Shih-Yang, Rajshekhar Singh, John Stehlin, Jason Strange, Alex Tarr, Alberto Velazquez, Max Woodworth

###

http://ucbgeograds.tumblr.com/

HITCHHIKING & TRAINHOPPING–Part VII

THE CONFESSIONS OF FOFI LITTLEPANTS

PART VII

by Fofi Littlepants

VII. PEOPLE

Hesse wrote that each person is more than just himself or herself; he or she also represents “the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again.”

Joey and I further recognized, with a bit of melancholy, that the moments of convergence formed by the collisions of our own unique points of intersection with those of each of the people we met, would also never come in the same way again.

I’ve already mentioned that the people that gave us rides as we hitchhiked across the country included artists, musicians, farmers, a preacher, rodeo riders, a nurse, a doctor, a prison guard (female), co-dependents, ex-hippies, ex-hitchhikers, ex-convicts, ex-drug addicts, ex-drug dealers, cancer survivors, a suicide attempt survivor, a white supremacist, immigrants, refugees, migrant workers, truckers, bikers, veterans (Vietnam and Iraq), fast food managers, a fashion designer, a cage fighter and a gang member, a soccer coach (and former player on a national team), a male stripper (and aspiring porn star), a firefighter and swinger. (though these are all very shallow descriptions that don’t capture the complex nature of each person.) There were many other people besides; below are a bit of the stories of just a few of the people who are not described in other sections. I’m sad not to be able to give every person their due because of time and space.

***

“Tanya” pulled over with a car full of teenage girls covered with dyed hair and piercings, and baby presents.

“Gawd, where are you girls going?!”, she exclaimed. “Are you hitchhiking??!! She was totally amazed to learn that we had made it to that street corner from California. She was even more flabbergasted to hear that we didn’t really know where we were going except “East”. She exclaimed: “What?? You don’t know where you’re going??? You girls need to get a map!!!!”

She would give us a ride as far she could go, she said, cause it’s dangerous!! “Gawd!!” she kept saying.

They were on their way to a birthday party, she said, at her sister’s. She was a recovering addict, and when we asked to what, she said “Everything!” This seemed to mean alcohol, drugs, and relationships. It turned out that she had been at the “Celebrate Recovery” event downtown in the park that weekend, as we had. (Celebrate Recovery is a program started by (controversial) Saddleback Church pastor Rick Warren, which is designed to “help those struggling with hurts, habits and hang-ups by showing them the loving power of Jesus Christ through a recovery process.” Joey and I had been there because Joey was wandering through the park looking for somewhere to pitch our tent to squat for the night, and had gotten picked up by some preachers, who offered us a place to stay if we promised to go church on Sunday ~ we ended up driving two hours with one of them (a very nice man who did a lot for troubled youths) to hear him sermonize at a rural “Cowboy Church”.)

Tanya was excited we were at the event. “It must be a sign!” she said. “Did you see the Strength Team??” she asked. “Weren’t they great???!!”

(The “Strength Team” was a group of men who were ex-military people and the like, who looked like they had been popping a lot of steroids. They did a show at the event in which they performed feats of strength, which in the beginning consisted of standard things like breaking blocks and bricks with various body parts, but then evolved into more unique tasks like ripping multiple phone books in half, ripping a deck of cards in half, ripping license plates in half, breaking out of handcuffs, and finally, blowing up two thick, plastic hot water bottles until they burst.

This exhibition left me with some food for thought, such as: Who came up with these ideas for feats of strength? Was there a committee within the Team that voted on proposals? Or did they just come up with this stuff when they were sitting around having beer? And how much beer was generally involved before one of these ideas was generated? Was there some concrete benefit to be derived from these feats? I could see the utility in being able to break out of handcuffs (especially given my current lifestyle), but what about ripping apart phone books/cards/license plates? Perhaps could it be a public service given that there didn’t appear to be any paper recycling in that state ~ ripping phone books and cards in half by hand might help them biodegrade? And would developing lung capacity to the level of being able to explode a hot water bottle have possibility for practical application someday? Like… what? Self-fueling a trans-Pacific voyage in a sailboat perhaps?)

When Tanya dropped us off, she insisted on giving us some cash. When we argued with her, saying all we were asking for was a ride, she said she was a co-dependent so she had to feel like she was helping people out, and after much back and forth, in the end we agreed she would give us one dollar. And she also made us and all her teenage girls hold hands, and said a very detailed, extensive, prayer for us. The prayer was basically a single run-on sentence that went on and on and covered a wide range of people and topics, but I was impressed she didn’t say “Gawd!” in the same inflection once throughout the prayer.

We thanked Tanya and all her kids for their kindness, and wished them well at their birthday party.

***

“Sam” was Canadian in his forties, with a dog. He would occasionally burst into song while driving, crooning along with the 80s hits that he had recorded, as a teenager, from his radio onto a series of cassette tapes that he played for us in his 80’s car.

He was an amiable guy, taking a detour on the road to show us a pretty park with some old railroad tunnels. After the five-hour drive, he dropped us off where we were going in British Columbia, and told us that if we needed to go back the other way, he would be going in two days. We met up again at the appointed hour, and this time, the real dog was gone, but had been replaced by a plastic bulldog on his dashboard (which Joey didn’t mind because the real dog had been 100+ pounds and had an odd penchant for repeatedly walking across Joey’s stomach, nearly puncturing her internal organs in the process.) The plastic bulldog was rather grotesque though ~ it had glassy bug eyes, and its head bobbled to the bumps on the road and to the rhythm of the 80s rock when Sam hit the breaks to jerk the car in synchronicity with the music. (Joey later told me that she had thought that the car was breaking down, but I informed her that this whiplash-inducing jerking was quite deliberate.)

On our tenth and final hour together, Sam suddenly started to let loose a string of startling revelations, which followed one after another: he had been in jail for a few months, for stealing a car. It was the fourth time that he had ended up in jail. It was because he had gotten addicted to meth. He had lost everything ~ his family, his job. His descent into meth took place when he was already an adult, married, with a daughter. It was because he was the heir to a computer parts company that his parents built, and he had been responsible his whole life, working every summer and vacation at the business. One day, after his youth had already passed, he couldn’t take it anymore. He got hooked on meth, but he was just having the fun that he didn’t get to have when he was young. He got beat up a few times (including getting his arm broken once); he also beat a few people up. Now he was off the drugs, and trying to mend things with his daughter. His parents had forgiven him. The drugs might have fried his brain, but now he could just be himself ~ he liked rock music (he was in a band for a while), and he just liked “stupid stuff” (his words).

We wished him and his bulldog luck and gave him a hug when we parted.

***

“Oscar” picked us in his sportscar that glided to smooth music, and spoke openly about his life. He was a member of a gang, he said, and had been in prison for 4 years. He has been straight for years now; he now felt old and boring at 30, being more responsible and looking out for the younger kids. His life didn’t seem boring to us ~ he was apparently a cage fighter, engaging in brutal free style martial arts competitions under his gang name; when he dropped us off, he was on his way to meet his brothers in a park where they were beating someone up.

We didn’t quite know what to tell him when we parted ~ do you wish people “luck” when they’re on their way to beating somebody up?

But really, he was perfectly mellow, and there seemed to be a logic to the beating-up of the person at the park ~ the guy had allegedly beaten the sister of one of the brothers yesterday and was being taught a lesson. And our friend was apparently going over not to join in on the beating-up, but rather, as the older wise man, to make sure that things didn’t get out of hand.

***

“Jason” picked us up in a crossroads in the middle of nowhere, and seemed very agitated. He was sick of driving, he said, he had been driving for FUCKIN’ FIVE HOURS! He spoke in exclamation points, with every other word being “FUCK!”

Over the next five hours, by picking through the profanity, we learned a bit about his life. He was moving his stuff from the north to Iowa, because he had gotten a job down there. He had been in prison for six years. It was hard, he had been very young. He had gone in as a minor for breaking and entering, but his sentence got extended because he had stabbed someone that tried to kill him. He was a “wild motherfucker” in his youth, he said, but now at 34, he had mellowed, and felt older and wiser.

His shouting and swearing was grating but I didn’t find it intolerable; but near the end, we were horrified because we came to suspect that he might have been (or currently be) a member of the KKK. When we arrived at his house, we helped him unload his stuff, and in the process, we saw that shirtless, he displayed two large tattoos, both with hooded figures on them, with “WHITE PRIDE” running along the bottom. He also had a large Confederate flag blazing across the wall of his living room.

We didn’t have the opportunity to ask him about it, since we were all busily unloading the stuff from his truck (and how do you ask someone you just met if he or she is in the KKK? Do you just say, “Hey are you in the KKK?”)

Despite these suspicions, I wanted to believe that he had good in him. I have no doubt that he was a racist, but I still felt like I had to recognize the kindness he showed us. Despite the constant swearing and aggression, we eventually noticed that he was, in fact, rather accomodating and nice in certain ways. He told us a lot about himself, he moved his stuff so we could sit comfortably, and he offered us something to drink, as well as to pull over whenever we wanted, and even to let us sleep on his couch (we didn’t take him up on it ~ we were too freaked out by the tattoos). Every time a choice had to be made, he would give us the option to choose. The funny thing was, when we made a query such as whether it was okay for us to run and get something to eat now, or if he wanted us to wait till later, instead of expressing his generosity in a standard way, like “Whatever you want is fine with me”, he would instead roar, “I DON’T FUCKIN’ CARE!!”

When he parted, he gave us his cell phone number in case we had any problems, and told us to text him to let him know we were okay.

I thought about him later, and wanted to believe that maybe he had joined a white supremacy group out of practical considerations and not an irreparable racist sentiment ~ perhaps he needed protection in prison ~ he had said that being in prison so young was really hard. And he had clearly been reforming since his youth, and he told us that he now no longer believed that everyone was out to get him, as he used to. So I hope he’ll keep growing, and maybe someday he won’t be racist anymore.

***

In a sleepy suburb of Baltimore, we were walking down the road with our backpacks to our friends’ house at around 9pm, and a police officer pulled over. “Carlos” offered to give us a ride, and seemed quite pleased to have us; he told us all about how the neighborhood was so very dangerous (which was news to my friends that lived there). We guessed that he was either really bored, or wanted to impress some girls. After he dropped us off, he sped away blaring his sirens and flashing his red and blue lights, which surely woke up the neighbors. But maybe not, because they probably had already been awakened ~ before he dropped us off, he had searched out my friends’ house in the dark, wooded neighborhood by shining the giant spotlight that was on top of his police car into all the houses on the street.

***

At Sturgis, South Dakota, about a 60 mile drive from Mount Rushmore, a Fourth of July (motorcycle) Rider’s Rally was advertised as a beautiful ride through the Black Hills that will culminate at Mount Rushmore in time for the independence day fireworks. Joey and I obviously weren’t bikers ~ we didn’t have motorcycles nor even know how to ride one ~ but we turned up there with the hope of hitching a ride with a motorcycle gang.

Sturgis is tiny town of less than 10,000, which became world-famous as the host of the ginormous Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, in which an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 bikers and their accessories congregate every year in the beginning of August; there are concerts, parties, and mayhem that go on for at least a week. The wealth of the town is based on this Rally; many people that live there only work for one month and shut down the rest of the year. We were told that we should come back for August and get a job ~ we could make $10,000 as a waitress in a week.

But that’s Sturgis in August. Sturgis in July, however, was a sleepy place where everything was closed; to say that the Fourth of July “Rider’s Rally” was a pale shadow of the Motorcycle Rally in August would be the most inadequate of understatements. There was a whopping five people that showed up: “John”, “Kyle” and his wife “Peg”, “Randy”, and “Angie”. But Joey and I were elated because they agreed to give us a ride to Rushmore for the fireworks.

Angie was in her late thirties, blond, dressed in black leather with a big motorcycle with a sticker that said, “Yes, I’m a chick ~ get over it!” She had come out all the way to South Dakota from Indiana with her dad, but her dad decided to skip the fireworks. She was friendly and funny, and offered to give us a ride on her bike. Two women on a motorcycle would look strange, she said, but “I guarantee you we’ll get a lot of attention!”

I personally had wanted to ride with Angie to see what would happen, but predictably at the end, Joey and I got distributed out to sit behind different men: Joey was with Randy, a young man that looked like he might have an excess of testosterone, but ended up being a nice guy with a slightly melancholic sensitivity (he had come to South Dakota to work and he was far away from his family, and he had lost his dad last year), and I was directed to climb behind John, who looked a classic Harley archetype, with long white hair and beard and black leather everywhere. But he was surprisingly nice, and in fact rather jovial, and didn’t mind me reaching around the gut packed into his leather to try not to fall off the bike; he probably would have made an equally good Santa as a Harley ad (though he most likely would not be very happy to hear me say that.)

The ride from Sturgis to Mount Rushmore followed a gorgeous winding road that goes through the Black Hills for about an hour; on the back of a motorcycle, with the air and wind and sound and bugs and scenery in your face, it was enough to make one misty.

Rushmore, however, looked like an evacuation in progress of a metropolis under threat of destruction by Godzilla. Thousands of cars were bumper to bumper, and people were milling around everywhere and sitting, standing, walking, camping on the road and all over the place. It took us forever to find parking, even though we were on motorcycles; one parking security nazi almost ran Angie over, and she yelled at him and flicked him off.

We waited patiently into the night for the fireworks, but the fog was descending deeper and deeper ~ we couldn’t even see the Presidential heads at all. After hours of waiting, rumors started flying that the fireworks would be cancelled. In the end, they did a test shot, but we could see nothing ~ just a slight tinge of pink behind the clouds. So we got back on the bikes and went to get some pie.

Over pie, Joey and I discovered more about what bikers talk about ~ bikes, previous rides, complaints about gun control, work, and more about bikes.

When the topic of gun control came up, Kyle went off on a big rant about how he had moved out of California because of the despicableness of the gun laws there (he thought they were too strict.) He said everyone he knows has a gun, and urged us (quite vigorously) to get one too; he offered to take us to get a concealed weapons permit.

We asked Angie if she had a gun too. She said yes, but it was because her brother got murdered by his partner and her lover; they shot him in the head while he was sleeping and tried to make it look like a robbery. She couldn’t sleep for a year. The reason she had come on this trip, all the way from Indiana with her dad, was to scatter her brother’s ashes in South Dakota.

***

“Joe”, an older trucker with a shining heart, told us about his turbulent life. He had lung cancer as well as prostate cancer, and less than a year ago his wife of many years left him for a guy that she met on the internet, taking all their money and furniture with her. Her disappearance had also caused him to lose custody of a child that he had raised since an infant ~ the only son he knew ~ a five year old whose smiling picture was tucked into his rearview mirror, who had been abandoned at his house by a woman he barely knew. At the end of each tragic story, he would say, “Well, it’s jus’ one of them things!” and drive on.

He seemed really happy to have us; he called us his “angels” and made us talk to his nephew on his cell phone, and introduced us to his trucker friends. He was also the one that knocked on our tents at 2am to tell us a tornado was coming, and flew us in his truck to safety, driving all night to beat the storm, to deliver us to a magnificent magenta sunrise in the next state (Minnesota).

I tried to call Joe at the end of our trip to thank him and see how he was. But I think he might have died because a woman answered the phone, and said that was her number and she didn’t know who I was talking about. It made me very sad, and kick myself for waiting so long to call him.

***

We heard lots of other sad stories. Victor told us about how his fiancée had died in a motorcycle crash. He then broke his back falling down some stairs and has been recovering for the last 5 years. Another woman had lupus, and her daughter did too; tragically, her friend had gotten murdered when she was young (incidentally, at the end of a hitchhiking trip when they were teenagers). One of the truck drivers we met spoke about how his wife died of breast cancer. She was gone only six months after diagnosis. He himself was diagnosed with skin cancer shortly after.

***

How do people survive so much pain?

(Some people don’t I guess. Joe had tried to shoot himself in the head when his wife left him, but was interrupted by his niece. A few weeks into the trip, I received word that a friend in the West Coast had committed suicide. I was saddened but not entirely surprised ~ she carried so much pain and there had been two prior attempts. She had been a photographer among other things, and I knew she had a print in the archives at UT Austin; as a tribute to her I went there and stared at it.)

I don’t have a moral or religious aversion to suicide, so it seems sad to me when people kill themselves, but sometimes I also marvel at the fact that more people don’t actually do it ~ many people have to bear so many burdens and sorrows in life. But I guess I find it inspiring ~ I’ve always been amazed at how many “ordinary” people, whether or not they get recognition for it, see and live through a Herculean amount in the course of their lifetime. They seem to have a resilience in spirit that is superhuman.

On our journey we saw people that were visibly bereaved, but many who were struggling to reach out, to others and to happiness. We found a poet waiting tables in a small train town in Montana, at a rest stop restaurant in which we were glumly having a grilled cheese sandwich after our 30-hour ordeal in the trainyard. We must have looked pretty pitiful (I think Joey had bits of grass stuck in her hair and all over her black fleece jacket), because he kept hovering over us and offering us more water. “Ken” seemed so nice, but blue and lonely. We found out that his girlfriend had left him and was now with some other man. He didn’t have much, but he now had an “efficiency apartment” (a studio?), which was about 45 minutes walking to work. At the end of his shift, he paid for our breakfast and disappeared. Mortified, we left him a card thanking him, with our contact information. He texted us a little poem afterwards. It went something like this: “i got 2 hearts. one wants to be happy but the other one is beatin on that one. i got 2 brains. Ones lost. The other one is looking for that one.” He texted us a number of other thoughts afterwards, all with similar grammatical errors, but many quite beautiful. We were happy for him because over time, they got increasingly joyful.

–Fofi Littlepants

ADAM BENEDETTO — fiction

Black Square (oil on canvas) by Kazimir Malevich, c. 1923, from the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

PARIS BY BLACK

A short fiction

by Adam Benedetto

We were at the new art exhibition by the artist who used only black paint. He’s considered the most famous artist in France but I have trouble saying his name so I can never remember it. In the photo outside of the exhibition the artist stared from a poster with a look of consternation on his face as if he were looking at me while I was in the middle of fucking his wife. In the photo he was wearing a black suit, a black shirt, and a black tie.

My friend Alexander was wearing all black too, but not a suit. Jeans and a hooded sweat shirt.

Parisians.

The sun was bright. We’d decided to see the show as an excuse to quit smoking and drinking coffee in the late morning. We’d decided we needed to get outside. As we walked down Rue Saint Denis horns honked at every cross street. They were our escort to the museum.

“Why do they honk so much when it’s clear a truck is unloading. It will be a minute and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Sometimes you just can’t do anything.”

“Oui,” Alexander sd.

The noise of the horns had made us impatient. Alexander had begun to smoke faster and faster. That sense of anxiety had followed us into the museum and now we were confronted by huge black paintings.

“Alexander,” I sd, “you can hide in this painting.”

“Yes,” he said, “Oui!” he said louder understanding what I meant better after a second had passed and realizing he was wearing all black clothes, a black beard, and a black wool hat. He stood in front of a painting and tried to look like he was taking cover in it. He stood in a demure posture, as if he was trying to hide from a firing squad. People took pictures. I took one too with my camera phone. He looked around after he had posed with guilty pleasure. In his mind he’d just demeaned the mood of the place but I didn’t see it as an issue. We American’s tend to treat everything the way kids touch mud or blow bubbles into each other’s faces.

I could still smell the woman on me from the night before. It helped me like the art. It was as the artist said, “With the color black man stands before all colors – of which true emotions are born.” Yes, the narrative was all in the painting; my chatting up the stewardess during the bicycle tour, her buying more bottles of wine than we should drink, a small strip dance in my living room, me telling the rest of the party to leave as politely as I could, the police at the door, a ticket for being too loud as a receipt of a good evening. And now her scent on me in front of this black painting. The artist was right. It made me defensive. “This is the art rich people make a fuss over so they don’t have to think about poor people.”

“Who said that?”

“Me,” I sd.

“It’s really easy to make fun of this kind of art if you want to isn’t it?”

“Yes, I love it and I hate it.”

“That’s very French of you,” Alexander said.

“Thank you.”

*   *   *

At the party the next night Alexander was staying sober until his girlfriend arrived. I was talking with his friends and we were drinking gin with slices of Mandarin orange. “Do you speak French?” they asked.

“No.”

“And how long have you lived here?!”

“Look, I work all of the time. All of the time! 16 hours a day 6 days a week. And all of my friends speak English.”

“But this is not possible. It’s against French law.”

“Tell my Texan boss that. He doesn’t even pay us a French minimum wage.”

“It’s not possible. You’re in France. He has to pay you a French minimum wage.”

“I wish he did.”

“But you live in France you should speak French.”

“Jesus Christ, every fucking day it’s the same conversation… Do you want to speak only French with me? Would that be fun for you? I’d prefer to talk about ideas and have fun with you”

“Ok man, alright, ok sorry.”

I had that conversation with everyone individually until I had made friends with the 37 people at the party.

*  *   *

After the black painting exhibition we went to the surrealist show at the next gallery. There were a lot of great artists on display. Hans Belmer stood out to me because of a quote of his that basically said that he fought fascism by doing useless things.

I’d always wanted to sleep with a stewardess. I remember watching “Night Court” in the early 1980s and admiring the District Attorney for sleeping with two flight attendants. It had made a deep impression on me as a kid.

My mind wandered during the show and I found myself wishing I would have slept with the flight attendant while watching the bombing of Baghdad on TV. The events were silent and in a blue haze. Sometimes you can’t do anything and you just watch your movie unfold.

That day I’d been sitting by myself. My girlfriend was at work and my activist friends were marching in the streets of Madison in protest of a preemptive war. I found myself watching Shock and Awe by myself. I watched it long enough that I knew it was happening. Eventually it was boring. I remember very well that I turned off the TV and sat there. I was numb. A few minutes later I tuned the TV back on found myself watching the hour-long advertisement for Girls Gone Wild.

“What do you think of the show?” Alexander sd.

“It’s working.” I sd. I’d almost married that girl who’d been off at work that day but then and now there were senseless, useless, things to do. “I’m thirsty.” I sd.

“Me too.” Alexander sd.

We walked back outside and into the honking.

*   *    *

The flight attendant found me on Facebook the next day. Over my shoulder the boss demanded order. “Not on that computer. You know the rules. Use one of the other ones. Ooo… Who’s that? Shes’ cute.”

“A flight attendant,” I sd in my most matter of fact voice so it wouldn’t seem like I was bragging. I was bragging.

“You kind of like her don’t you?” he nudged me.

“No,” I sd, “I’m a surrealist.”

“Well the surrealist better move to the other computer, I need this one.”

The bicycles were lined up neatly as I walked by them with a big sign I was to hold under the Eiffel Tower so tourists could find me. When I arrived at the Eiffel Tower people who were ½ an hour early ran up to me and tried to show me their vouchers. They held the wrinkled pieces of paper at the end of their arms. I couldn’t take them from the people because I was holding the sign with both my hands. “You’re coming on the tour!” I sd, “Great.” I sd enthusiastically.

“Here’s my voucher,” the woman sd in her thick Aussie accent, “Do you need to see it?”

“Not now,” I sd, “they’ll handle all that at the office. Just sit tight. You’re doing exactly the right thing.”

“But am I on the tour?”

“Yes. We’ll go to the shop and take care of the money and get bikes in just a short while. We have to let everyone else arrive. Then we’ll go.”

“Where are the bikes?”
“At the shop. It’s a short distance away. A 7 minute walk.”

“Can I go there now?”

“It would be difficult for me to explain how to get there. You could try but I wouldn’t recommend it. We’ll go in about 25 minutes. Why do you want to go there?”

“To show them my voucher so I can get on the tour.”

“You’re on the tour. I’m going to be your guide,” I smiled. “Just sit tight. You’re doing exactly the right thing.”

The woman processed all of my short sentences and then said, “Where are you from?”

“Madison, Wisconsin. And you?”

“I’m from Australia,” she sd as if it was a place that I’d never heard of.

“Perth, right?” I sd. She nodded. “And you’re husband is a minor, and recently you’ve made a lot of new South African friends. You have English citizenship and your daughter is studying in London. You are on a short vacation and have only four weeks to visit her. The two of you are here for a quick look-about for the weekend.”

“You’re good,” she sd, “How did you know Perth.”

“I can just tell.”

“So have you always spoken French or did you learn it when you got here?”

“Oh, I don’t speak French.”

“You don’t speak French? But do you live here?”

“Yep.” I sd,  “I live here. Right over in the Second.”

“How long have you lived here?”

“Sixteen months.”

“Sixteen months and you don’t speak French? You’re in France you should speak French.”

–Adam Benedetto

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: ALLEN GINSBERG

A SUPERMARKET IN CALIFORNIA

by Allen Ginsberg

              What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for
I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache
self-conscious looking at the full moon.
              In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went
into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
              What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families
shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes!–and you, Garcia Lorca, what
were you doing down by the watermelons?

              I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
              I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the
pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
              I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.
              We strode down the open corridors together in our
solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen
delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

              Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in
an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
              (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)
              Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The
trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be
lonely.

              Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
              Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,
what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and
you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat
disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) managed to become a well known and recognized poet – a feat not accomplished by most poets today. Best known for his poem “Howl,” Ginsberg was at the center of the beat generation in the 1950s, a group that rejected mainstream American values and was at the forefront of the political and cultural changes that shifted the face of this country.

Editor’s Note: Okay, so I’m not exactly introducing you to Allen Ginsberg, if you are a human being living in the world today. But I do think that a poem that takes place in a supermarket is an appropriate selection for Thanksgiving, and I hope you will think of Walt Whitman as you peruse the aisles of Whole Foods searching for the perfect organic potato and pondering the benefits of Tofurkey vs. free range non-hormone-injected meat.

This is one of my favorite Ginsberg poems, exploring everything from consumerism to homosexuality to the relationship between poets and the generations that came before and inspired them. I highly recommend listening to Ginsberg himself read “A Supermarket in California,” aloud. You can download the mp3 for $0.99 at Amazon.com. You won’t regret it.

Want to read more by and about Allen Ginsberg?
Poets.org
The Poetry Archive
PBS – “American Masters”

SURREALISM

Portrait of André Breton by Victor Brauner, 1934.

WHAT IS SURREALISM?

by André Breton

This was first presented as a lecture in Brussels on June 1, 1934 at a public meeting organized by the Belgian Surrealists, and thereafter issued as a pamphlet.

Comrades:
The activity of our surrealist comrades in Belgium is closely allied with our own activity, and I am happy to be in their company this evening. Magritte, Mesens, Nougé, Scutenaire and Souris are among those whose revolutionary will—outside of all consideration of their agreement or disagreement with us on particular points—has been for us in Paris a constant reason for thinking that the surrealist project, beyond the limitations of space and time, can contribute to the efficacious reunification of all those who do not despair of the transformation of the world and who wish this transformation to be as radical as possible.

***

At the beginning of the war of 1870 (he was to die four months later, aged twenty-four), the author of the Chants de Maldoror and of Poésies, Isidore Ducasse, better known by the name of Comte de Lautréamont, whose thought has been of the very greatest help and encouragement to myself and my friends throughout the fifteen years during which we have succeeded in carrying a common activity, made the following remark, among many others which were to electrify us fifty years later: “At the hour in which I write, new tremors are running through the intellectual atmosphere; it is only a matter of having the courage to face them.”

1868-75: it is impossible, looking back upon the past, to perceive an epoch so poetically rich, so victorious, so revolutionary and so charged with distant meaning as that which stretches from the separate publication of the Premier Chant de Maldoror to the insertion in a letter to Ernest Delahaye of Rimbaud’s last poem, Rêve, which has not so far been included in his Complete Works. It is not an idle hope to wish to see the works of Lautréamont and Rimbaud restored to their correct historical background: the coming and the immediate results of the war of 1870. Other and analogous cataclysms could not have failed to rise out of that military and social cataclysm whose final episode was to be the atrocious crushing of the Paris Commune; the last in date caught many of us at the very age when Lautréamont and Rimbaud found themselves thrown into the preceding one, and by way of revenge has had as its consequence—and this is the new and important fact—the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution.

I should say that to people socially and politically uneducated as we then were—we who, on one hand, came for the most part from the petite-bourgeoisie, and on the other, were all by vocation possessed with the desire to intervene upon the artistic plane—the days of October, which only the passing of the years and the subsequent appearance of a large number of works within the reach of all were fully to illumine, could not there and then have appeared to turn so decisive a page in history. We were, I repeat, ill-prepared and ill-informed.

André Breton, René Hilsum, Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard posing with a copy of Dada 3, 1919.

Above all, we were exclusively preoccupied with a campaign of systematic refusal, exasperated by the conditions under which, in such an age, we were forced to live. But our refusal did not stop there; it was insatiable and knew no bounds. Apart from the incredible stupidity of the arguments which attempted to legitimize our participation in an enterprise such as the war, whose issue left us completely indifferent, this refusal was directed—and having been brought up in such a school, we are not capable of changing so much that is no longer so directed—against the whole series of intellectual, moral and social obligations that continually and from all sides weigh down upon man and crush him. Intellectually, it was vulgar rationalism and chop logic that more than anything else formed the causes of our horror and our destructive impulse; morally, it was all duties: religious, civic and of the family; socially, it was work (did not Rimbaud say: “Jamais je ne travaillerai, ô flots de feu!” and also: “La main à plume vaut la main à charrue. Quel siècle à mains! Je n’aurai jamais ma main!” [Never will I work, O torrents of flame! The hand that writes is worth the hand that ploughs! What a century of hands! I will never lift my hand!]).

The more I think about it, the more certain I become that nothing was to our minds worth saving, unless it was… unless it was, at last “l’amour la poésie,” to take the bright and trembling title of one of Paul Eluard’s books, “l’amour la poésie,” considered as inseparable in their essence and as the sole good. Between the negation of this good, a negation brought to its climax by the war, and its full and total affirmation (“Poetry should be made by all, not one”), the field was not, to our minds, open to anything but a Revolution truly extended into all domains, improbably radical, to the highest degree impractical and tragically destroying within itself the whole time the feeling that it brought with it both of desirability and of absurdity.

Many of you, no doubt, would put this down to a certain youthful exaltation and to the general savagery of the time; I must, however, insist on this attitude, common to particular men and manifesting itself at periods nearly half a century distant from one another. I should affirm that in ignorance of this attitude one can form no idea of what surrealism really stands for. This attitude alone can account, and very sufficiently at that, for all the excesses that may be attributed to us but which cannot be deplored unless one gratuitously supposes that we could have started from any other point. The ill-sounding remarks, that are imputed to us, the so-called inconsiderate attacks, the insults, the quarrels, the scandals—all things that we are so much reproached with—turned up on the same road as the surrealist poems. From the very beginning, the surrealist attitude has had that in common with Lautréamont and Rimbaud which once and for all binds our lot to theirs, and that is wartime defeatism.

I am not afraid to say that this defeatism seems to be more relevant than ever. “New tremors are running through the intellectual atmosphere; it is only a matter of having the courage to face them.” They are, in fact, always running through the intellectual atmosphere: the problem of their propagation and interpretation remains the same and, as far as we are concerned, remains to be solved. But, paraphrasing Lautréamont, I cannot refrain from adding that at the hour in which I speak, old and mortal shivers are trying to substitute themselves for those which are the very shivers of knowledge and of life. They come to announce a frightful disease, a disease followed by the deprivation of all rights; it is only a matter of having the courage to face them also. This disease is called fascism.

André Breton photograph by Man Ray, c. 1930.

Let us be careful today not to underestimate the peril: the shadow has greatly advanced over Europe recently. Hitler, Dolfuss and Mussolini have either drowned in blood or subjected to corporal humiliation everything that formed the effort of generations straining towards a more tolerable and more worthy form of existence. The other day I noticed on the front page of a Paris newspaper a photograph of the surroundings of the Lambrechies mine on the day after the catastrophe. This photograph illustrated an article titled, in quotation marks, ‘Only Our Chagrin Remains’. On the same page was another photograph—this one of the unemployed of your country standing in front of a hovel in the Parisian ‘poor zone’—with the caption Poverty is not a crime. “How delightful!” I said to myself, glancing from one picture to the other. Thus the bourgeois public in France is able to console itself with the knowledge that the miners of your country were not necessarily criminals just because they got themselves killed for 35 francs a day. And doubtless the miners, our comrades, will be happy to learn that the committee of the Belgian Coal Association intends to postpone till the day after tomorrow the application of the wage cut set for 20 May. In capitalist society, hypocrisy and cynicism have now lost all sense of proportion and are becoming more outrageous every day. Without making exaggerated sacrifices to humanitarianism, which always involves impossible reconciliations and truces to the advantage of the stronger, I should say that in this atmosphere, thought cannot consider the exterior world without an immediate shudder. Everything we know about fascism shows that it is precisely the confirmation of this state of affairs, aggravated to its furthest point by the lasting resignation that it seeks to obtain from those who suffer. Is not the evident role of fascism to re-establish for the time being the tottering supremacy of finance-capital? Such a role is of itself sufficient to make it worthy of all our hatred; we continue to consider this feigned resignation as one of the greatest evils that can possibly be inflicted upon beings of our kind, and those who would inflict it deserve, in our opinion, to be beaten like dogs. Yet it is impossible to conceal the fact that this immense danger is there, lurking at our doors, that it has made its appearance within our walls, and that it would be pure byzantinism to dispute too long, as in Germany, over the choice of the barrier to be set up against it, when all the while, under several aspects, it is creeping nearer and nearer to us.

During the course of taking various steps with a view to contributing, in so far as I am capable, to the organization in Paris of the anti-fascist struggle, I have noticed that already a certain doubt has crept into the intellectual circles of the left as to the possibility of successfully combating fascism, a doubt which has unfortunately infected even those elements whom one might have thought it possible to rely on and who had come to the fore in this struggle. Some of them have even begun to make excuses for the loss of the battle already. Such dispositions seem to me to be so dismaying that I should not care to be speaking here without first having made clear my position in relation to them, or without anticipating a whole series of remarks that are to follow, affirming that today, more than ever before, the liberation of the mind, demands as primary condition, in the opinion of the surrealists, the express aim of surrealism, the liberation of man, which implies that we must struggle with our fetters with all the energy of despair; that today more than ever before the surrealists entirely rely for the bringing about of the liberation of man upon the proletarian Revolution.

An automatic writing session. Simone Collinet-Breton, Robert Desnos and Jacques Baron are in the foreground. Max Morise, Roger Vitrac, Jacques Boiffard, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Pierre Naville, Giorgio de Chirico and Phillipe Soupault are left to right. Photograph by Man Ray, c. 1923.

I now feel free to turn to the object of this pamphlet, which is to attempt to explain what surrealism is. A certain immediate ambiguity contained in the word surrealism, is, in fact, capable of leading one to suppose that it designates I know not what transcendental attitude, while, on the contrary it expresses—and always has expressed for us—a desire to deepen the foundations of the real, to bring about an even clearer and at the same time ever more passionate consciousness of the world perceived by the senses. The whole evolution of surrealism, from its origins to the present day, which I am about to retrace, shows that our unceasing wish, growing more and more urgent from day to day, has been at all costs to avoid considering a system of thought as a refuge, to pursue our investigations with eyes wide open to their outside consequences, and to assure ourselves that the results of these investigations would be capable of facing the breath of the street. At the limits, for many years past—or more exactly, since the conclusion of what one may term the purely intuitive epoch of surrealism (1919-25)—at the limits, I say, we have attempted to present interior reality and exterior reality as two elements in process of unification, or finally becoming one. This final unification is the supreme aim of surrealism: interior reality and exterior reality being, in the present form of society, in contradiction (and in this contradiction we see the very cause of man’s unhappiness, but also the source of his movement), we have assigned to ourselves the task of confronting these two realities with one another on every possible occasion, of refusing to allow the preeminence of the one over the other, yet not of acting on the one and on the other both at once, for that would be to suppose that they are less apart from one another than they are (and I believe that those who pretend that they are acting on both simultaneously are either deceiving us or are a prey to a disquieting illusion); of acting on these two realities not both at once, then, but one after the other, in a systematic manner, allowing us to observe their reciprocal attraction and interpenetration and to give to this interplay of forces all the extension necessary for the trend of these two adjoining realities to become one and the same thing.

As I have just mentioned in passing, I consider that one can distinguish two epochs in the surrealist movement, of equal duration, from its origins (1919, year of the publication of Champs  Magnétiques) until today; a purely intuitive epoch, and a reasoning epoch. The first can summarily be characterized by the belief expressed during this time in the all-powerfulness of thought, considered capable of freeing itself by means of its own resources. This belief witnesses to a prevailing view that I look upon today as being extremely mistaken, the view that thought is supreme over matter. The definition of surrealism that has passed into the dictionary, a definition taken from the Manifesto of 1924, takes account only of this entirely idealist disposition and (for voluntary reasons of simplification and amplification destined to influence in my mind the future of this definition) does so in terms that suggest that I deceived myself at the time in advocating the use of an automatic thought not only removed from all control exercised by the reason but also disengaged from “all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.” It should at least have been said: conscious aesthetic or moral preoccupations.

During the period under review, in the absence, of course, of all seriously discouraging exterior events, surrealist activity remained strictly confined to its first theoretical premise, continuing all the while to be the vehicle of that total “non-conformism” which, as we have seen, was the binding feature in the coming together of those who took part in it, and the cause, during the first few years after the war, of an uninterrupted series of adhesions. No coherent political or social attitude, however, made its appearance until 1925, that is to say (and it is important to stress this), until the outbreak of the Moroccan war, which, re-arousing in us our particular hostility to the way armed conflicts affect man, abruptly placed before us the necessity of making a public protest. This protest, which, under the title La Révolution d’Abord et Toujours (October 1925 [Revolution Now and Forever]), joined the name of the surrealists proper to those of thirty other intellectuals, was undoubtedly rather confused ideologically; it none the less marked the breaking away from a whole way of thinking; it none the less created a precedent that was to determine the whole future direction of the movement. Surrealist activity, faced with a brutal, revolting, unthinkable fact, was forced to ask itself what were its proper resources and to determine their limits; it was forced to adopt a precise attitude, exterior to itself, in order to continue to face whatever exceeded these limits.

André Breton, Robert Desnos, Joseph Delteil, Simone Breton, Paul & Gala Eluard, Jaques Baron and Max Ernst.

Surrealist activity at this moment entered into its reasoning phase. It suddenly experienced the necessity of crossing over the gap that separates absolute idealism from dialectical materialism. This necessity made its appearance in so urgent a manner that we had to consider the problem in the clearest possible light, with the result that for some months we devoted our entire attention to the means of bringing about this change of front once and for all. If I do not today feel any retrospective embarrassment in explaining this change, that is because it seems to me quite natural that surrealist thought, before coming to rest in dialectical materialism and insisting, as today, on the supremacy of matter over mind, should have been condemned to pass, in a few years, through the whole historic development of modern thought. It came normally to Marx through Hegel, just as it came normally to Hegel through Berkeley and Hume. These latter influences offer a certain particularity in that, contrary to certain poetic influences undergone in the same way, and accommodated to those of the French materialists of the eighteenth century, they yielded a residuum of practical action. To try and hide these influences would be contrary to my desire to show that surrealism has not been drawn up as an abstract system, that is to say, safeguarded against all contradictions. It is also my desire to show how surrealist activity, driven, as I have said, to ask itself what were its proper resources, had in some way or another to reflect upon itself its realization, in 1925, of its relative insufficiency; how surrealist activity had to cease being content with the results (automatic texts, the recital of dreams, improvised speeches, spontaneous poems, drawings and actions) which it had originally planned; and how it came to consider these first results as being simply so much material, starting from which the problem of knowledge inevitably arose again under quite a new form.

As a living movement, that is to say a movement undergoing a constant process of becoming and, what is more, solidly relying on concrete facts, surrealism has brought together and is still bringing together diverse temperaments individually obeying or resisting a variety of bents.

The determinant of their enduring or short-lived adherence is not to be considered as a blind concession to an inert stock of ideas held in common, but as a continuous sequence of acts which, propelling the doer to more or less distant points, forces him for each fresh start to return to the same starting-line. These exercises not being without peril, one man may break a limb or—for which there is no precedent—his head, another may peaceably submerge himself in a quagmire or report himself dying of fatigue. Unable as yet to treat itself to an ambulance, surrealism simply leaves these individuals by the wayside. Those who continue in the ranks are aware of course of the casualties left behind them. But what of it? The essential is always to look ahead, to remain sure that one has not forfeited the burning desire for beauty, truth and justice, toilingly to go onwards towards the discovery, one by one, of fresh landscapes, and to continue doing so indefinitely and without coercion to the end, that others may afterwards travel the same spiritual road, unhindered and in all security. Penetration, to be sure, has not been as deep as one would have wished. Poetically speaking, a few wild, or shall we say charming, beasts whose cries fill the air and bar access to a domain as yet only surmised, are still far from being exorcized. But for all that, the piercing of the thicket would have proceeded less tortuously, and those who are doing the pioneering would have acquitted themselves with unabating tenacity in the service of the cause, if, between the beginning and the end of the spectacle which they provide for themselves and would be glad to provide for others, a change had not taken place.

Photo booth photograph of André Breton, c. 1929

In 1934, more than ever before, surrealism owes it to itself to defend the postulate of the necessity of change. It is amusing, indeed, to see how the more spiteful and silly of our adversaries affect to triumph whenever they stumble on some old statement we may have made and which now sounds more or less discordantly in the midst of others intended to render comprehensible our present conduct. This insidious manoeuvre, which is calculated to cast a doubt on our good faith, or at least on the genuineness of our principles, can easily be defeated.

The development of surrealism throughout the decade of its existence is, we take it, a function of the unrolling of historical realities as these may be speeded up between the period of relief which follows the conclusion of a peace and the fresh outbreak of war. It is also a function of the process of seeking after new values in order to confirm or invalidate existing ones. The fact that certain of the first participants in surrealist activity have thrown in the sponge and have been discarded has brought about the retiring from circulation of some ways of thinking and the putting into circulation of others in which there were implicit certain general dissents on the one hand and certain general assents on the other. Hence it is that this activity has been fashioned by the events. At the present moment, contrary to current biased rumour according to which surrealism itself is supposed, in its cruelty of disposition, to have sacrificed nearly all the blood first vivifying it, it is heartening to be able to point out that it has never ceased to avail itself of the perfect teamwork of René Crevel, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, Benjamin Péret, Man Ray, Tristan Tzara, and the present writer, all of whom can attest that from the inception of the movement—which is also the date of our enlistment in it—until now, the initial principle of their covenant has never been violated. If there have occurred differences on some points, it was essentially within the rhythmic scope of the integral whole, in itself a least disputable element of objective value.

The others, they whom we no longer meet, can they say as much? They cannot, for the simple reason that since they separated from us they have been incapable of achieving a single concerted action that had any definite form of its own, and they have confined themselves, instead, to a reaction against surrealism with the greatest wastage to themselves—a fate always overtaking those who go back on their past. The history of their apostasy and denials will ultimately be read into the great limbo of human failings, without profit to any observer—ideal yesterday, but real today—who, called upon to make a pronouncement, will decide whether they or ourselves have brought the more appreciable efforts to bear upon a rational solution of the many problems surrealism has propounded.

Although there can be no question here of going through the history of the surrealist movement—its history has been told many a time and sometimes told fairly well; moreover, I prefer to pass on as quickly as possible to the exposition of its present attitude—I think I ought briefly to recall, for the benefit of those of you who were unaware of the fact, that there is no doubt that before the surrealist movement properly so called, there existed among the promoters of the movement and others who later rallied round it, very active, not merely dissenting but also antagonistic dispositions which, between 1915 and 1920, were willing to align themselves under the signboard of Dada.

André Breton at a Dada festival in Paris, March 27, 1920, wearing a slogan “In order to love something you need to have seen and heard it for a long time bunch of idiots” by Francis Picabia.

Post-war disorder, a state of mind essentially anarchic that guided that cycle’s many manifestations, a deliberate refusal to judge—for lack, it was said, of criteria—the actual qualifications of individuals, and, perhaps, in the last analysis, a certain spirit of negation which was making itself conspicuous, had brought about a dissolution of the group as yet inchoate, one might say, by reason of its dispersed and heterogeneous character, a group whose germinating force has nevertheless been decisive and, by the general consent of present-day critics, has greatly influenced the course of ideas. It may be proper before passing rapidly—as I must—over this period, to apportion by far the handsomest share to Marcel Duchamp (canvases and glass objects still to be seen in New York), to Francis Picabia (reviews “291″ and “391″), Jacques Vaché (Lettres de Guerre) and Tristan Tzara (Twenty-five Poems, Dada Manifesto 1918).

Strangely enough, it was round a discovery of language that there was seeking to organize itself in 1920 what—as yet on a basis of confidential exchange—assumed the name of surrealism, a word fallen from the lips of Apollinaire, which we had diverted from the rather general and very confusing connotation he had given it. What was at first no more than a new method of poetic writing broke away after several years from the much too general theses which had come to be expounded in the Surrealist Manifesto—Soluble Fish, 1924, the Second Manifesto adding others to them, whereby the whole was raised to a vaster ideological plane; and so there had to be revision.

In an article, “Enter the Mediums,” published in Littérature, 1922, reprinted in Les Pas Perdus, 1924, and subsequently in the Surrealist Manifesto, I explained the circumstance that had originally put us, my friends and myself, on the track of the surrealist activity we still follow and for which we are hopeful of gaining ever more numerous new adherents in order to extend it further than we have so far succeeded in doing. It reads:

It was in 1919, in complete solitude and at the approach of sleep, that my attention was arrested by sentences more or less complete, which became perceptible to my mind without my being able to discover (even by very meticulous analysis) any possible previous volitional effort. One evening in particular, as I was about to fall asleep, I became aware of a sentence articulated clearly to a point excluding all possibility of alteration and stripped of all quality of vocal sound; a curious sort of sentence which came to me bearing—in sober truth—not a trace of any relation whatever to any incidents I may at that time have been involved in; an insistent sentence, it seemed to me, a sentence I might say, that knocked at the window.

I was prepared to pay no further attention to it when the organic character of the sentence detained me. I was really bewildered. Unfortunately, I am unable to remember the exact sentence at this distance, but it ran approximately like this: “A man is cut in half by the window.” What made it plainer was the fact that it was accompanied by a feeble visual representation of a man in the process of walking, but cloven, at half his height, by a window perpendicular to the axis of his body. Definitely, there was the form, re-erected against space, of a man leaning out of a window. But the window following the man’s locomotion, I understood that I was dealing with an image of great rarity. Instantly the idea came to me to use it as material for poetic construction. I had no sooner invested it with that quality, than it had given place to a succession of all but intermittent sentences which left me no less astonished, but in a state, I would say, of extreme detachment.

André Breton and Paul Eluard at a fair. Attributed to André Kertesz, c. 1930.

Preoccupied as I still was at that time with Freud, and familiar with his methods of investigation, which I had practised occasionally upon the sick during the War, I resolved to obtain from myself what one seeks to obtain from patients, namely a
monologue poured out as rapidly as possible, over which the subject’s critical faculty has no control—the subject himself throwing reticence to the winds—and which as much as possible represents spoken thought. It seemed and still seems to me that the speed of thought is no greater than that of words, and hence does not exceed the flow of either tongue or pen.

It was in such circumstances that, together with Philippe Soupault, whom I had told about my first ideas on the subject, I began to cover sheets of paper with writing, feeling a praiseworthy contempt for whatever the literary result might be. Ease of achievement brought about the rest. By the end of the first day of the experiment we were able to read to one another about fifty pages obtained in this manner and to compare the results we had achieved. The likeness was on the whole striking. There were similar faults of construction, the same hesitant manner, and also, in both cases, an illusion of extraordinary verve, much emotion, a considerable  assortment of images of a quality such as we should never have been able to obtain in the normal way of writing, a very special sense of the picturesque, and, here and there, a few pieces of out and out buffoonery.

The only differences which our two texts presented appeared to me to be due essentially to our respective temperaments, Soupault’s being less static than mine, and, if he will allow me to make this slight criticism, to his having scattered about at the top of certain pages—doubtlessly in a spirit of mystification—various words under the guise of titles. I must give him credit, on the other hand, for having always forcibly opposed the least correction of any passage that did not seem to me to be quite the thing. In that he was most certainly right.

It is of course difficult in these cases to appreciate at their just value the various elements in the result obtained; one may even say that it is entirely impossible to appreciate them at a first reading. To you who may be writing them, these elements are, in appearance, as strange as to anyone else, and you are yourself naturally distrustful of them. Poetically speaking, they are distinguished chiefly by a very high degree of immediate absurdity, the peculiar quality of that absurdity being, on close examination, their yielding to whatever is most admissible and legitimate in the world: divulgation of a given number of facts and properties on the whole not less objectionable than the others.

The word “surrealism” having thereupon become descriptive of the generalizable undertaking to which we had devoted ourselves, I thought indispensable, in 1924, to define this word once and for all:

SURREALISM, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express, verbally, in writing, or by other means, the real process of thought. Thought’s dictation, in the absence of all control exercised by the reason and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.

ENCYCL. Philos. Surrealism rests in the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association neglected heretofore; in the omnipotence of the dream and in the disinterested play of thought. It tends definitely to do away with all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in the solution of the principal problems of life. Have professed absolute surrealism: Messrs. Aragon, Baron, Boiffard, Breton, Carrive, Crevel, Delteil, Desnos, Eluard, Gérard, Limbour, Malkine, Morise, Naville, Noll, Péret, Picon, Soupault, Vitrac.

These till now appear to be the only ones…. Were one to consider their output only superficially, a goodly number of poets might well have passed for surrealists, beginning with Dante and Shakespeare at his best. In the course of many attempts I have made towards an analysis of what, under false pretences, is called genius, I have found nothing that could in the end be attributed to any other process than this.

There followed an enumeration that will gain, I think, by being clearly set out thus:

Young’s Night Thoughts are surrealist from cover to cover. Unfortunately, it is a priest who speaks; a bad priest, to be sure, yet a priest.
Heraclitus is surrealist in dialectic.
Lully is surrealist in definition.
Flamel is surrealist in the night of gold.
Swift is surrealist in malice.
Sade is surrealist in sadism.
Carrier is surrealist in drowning.
Monk Lewis is surrealist in the beauty of evil.
Achim von Arnim is surrealist absolutely, in space and time
Rabbe is surrealist in death.
Baudelaire is surrealist in morals.
Rimbaud is surrealist in life and elsewhere.
Hervey Saint-Denys is surrealist in the directed dream.
Carroll is surrealist in nonsense.
Huysmans is surrealist in pessimism.
Seurat is surrealist in design.
Picasso is surrealist in cubism.
Vaché is surrealist in me.
Roussel is surrealist in anecdote. Etc.

They were not always surrealists—on this I insist—in the sense that one can disentangle in each of them a number of preconceived notions to which—very naively!—they clung. And they clung to them so because they had not heard the surrealist voice, the voice that exhorts on the eve of death and in the roaring storm, and because they were unwilling to dedicate themselves to the task of no
more than orchestrating the score replete with marvellous things. They were proud instruments; hence the sounds they produced were not always harmonious sounds.

André Breton, Salvador Dali, René Crevel and Paul Eluard, 1930.

We, on the contrary, who have not given ourselves to processes of filtering, who through the medium of our work have been content to be the silent receptacles of so many echoes, modest registering machines that are not hypnotized by the pattern that they trace, we are perhaps serving a yet much nobler cause. So we honestly give back the talent lent to us. You may talk of the “talent” of this yard of platinum, of this mirror, of this door and of this sky, if you wish.

We have no talent…

The Manifesto also contained a certain number of practical recipes, entitled: “Secrets of the Magic Surrealist Art,” such as the following:

Written Surrealist Composition or First and Last Draft

Having settled down in some spot most conducive to the mind’s concentration upon itself, order writing material to be brought to you. Let your state of mind be as passive and receptive as possible. Forget your genius, talents, as well as the genius and talents of others. Repeat to yourself that literature is pretty well the sorriest road that leads to everywhere. Write quickly without any previously chosen subject, quickly enough not to dwell on, and not to be tempted to read over, what you have written. The first sentence will come of itself; and this is self-evidently true, because there is never a moment but some sentence alien to our conscious thought clamours for outward expression. It is rather difficult to speak of the sentence to follow, since it doubtless comes in for a share of our conscious activity and so the other sentences, if it is conceded that the writing of the first sentence must have involved even a minimum of consciousness. But that should in the long run matter little, because therein precisely lies the greatest interest in the surrealist exercise. Punctuation of course necessarily hinders the stream of absolute continuity which preoccupies us. But you should particularly distrust the prompting whisper. If through a fault ever so trifling there is a forewarning of silence to come, a fault let us say, of inattention, break off unhesitatingly the line that has become too lucid. After the word whose origin seems suspect you should place a letter, any letter, l for example, always the letter l, and restore the arbitrary flux by making that letter the initial of the word to follow.

I shall pass over the more or less correlated considerations which the Manifesto discussed in their bearing on the possibilities of plastic expression in surrealism. These considerations did not assume a relatively dogmatic turn with me till afterwards in Surrealism and Painting (1928).

I believe that the real interest of the Manifesto—there was no lack of people who were good enough to concede interest, for which no particular credit is due to me because I have no more than given expression to sentiments shared with friends, present and former—rests only subordinately on the formula above given. It is rather confirmatory of a turn of thought which, for good or ill, is peculiarly distinctive of our time. The defense originally attempted of that turn of thought still seems valid to me in what follows:

We still live under the reign of logic… But the methods of logic are applied nowadays only to the resolution of problems of secondary interest. The absolute rationalism which is still the fashion does not permit consideration of any facts but those strictly relevant to our experience. Logical ends, on the other hand, escape us. Needless to say that even experience has had limits assigned to it. It revolves in a cage from which it becomes more and more difficult to release it. Even experience is dependent on immediate utility, and common sense is its keeper. Under color of civilization, under pretext of progress, all that rightly or wrongly may be regarded as fantasy or superstition has been banished from the mind, all uncustomary searching after truth has been proscribed. It is only by what must seem sheer luck that there has recently been brought to light an aspect of mental life—to my belief by far the most important—with which it was supposed that we no longer had any concern. All credit for these discoveries must go to Freud. Based on these discoveries a current of opinion is forming that will enable the explorer of the human mind to continue his investigations, justified as he will be in taking into account more than mere summary realities. The imagination is perhaps on the point of reclaiming its rights. If the depths of our minds harbor strange forces capable of increasing those on the surface, or of successfully contending with them, then it is all in our interest to canalize them, to canalize them first in order to submit them later, if necessary, to the control of the reason. The analysts themselves have nothing to lose by such a proceeding. But it should be observed that there are no means designed a priori for the bringing about of such an enterprise, that until the coming of the new order it might just as well be considered the affair of poets and scientists, and that its success will not depend on the more or less capricious means that will be employed. I am resolved to deal severely with that hatred of the marvellous which is so rampant among certain people, that ridicule to which they are so eager to expose it. Let us speak plainly: The marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvellous is beautiful; indeed,  nothing but the marvelous is beautiful.

What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer a fantastic; there is only the real.

Benjamin Péret, André Breton and two friends, 1935.

Interesting in a different way from the future of surrealist technics (theatrical, philosophical, scientific, critical) appears to me the application of surrealism to action. Whatever reservations I might be inclined to make with regard to responsibility in general, I should quite particularly like to know how the first misdemeanors whose surrealist character is indubitable will be judged. When   surrealist methods extend from writing to action, there will certainly arise the need of a new morality to take the place of the current one, the cause of all our woes.

The Manifesto of Surrealism has improved on the Rimbaud principle that the poet must turn seer. Man in general is going to be summoned to manifest through life those new sentiments which the gift of vision will so suddenly have placed within his reach:

Surrealism, as I envisage it, asserts our absolute nonconformism so clearly that there can be no question of claiming it as witness when the real world comes up for trial. On the contrary, it can but testify to the complete state of distraction which we hope to attain here below… Surrealism is the “invisible ray” that shall enable us one day to triumph over our enemies. “You tremble no more, carcass.” This summer the roses are blue; the wood is made of glass. The earth wrapped in its foliage has as little effect on me as a ghost. Living and ceasing to live are imaginary solutions. Existence lies elsewhere.

Surrealism then was securing expression in all its purity and force. The freedom it possesses is a perfect freedom in the sense that it recognizes no limitations exterior to itself. As it was said on the cover of the first issue of La Révolution Surréaliste, “it will be necessary to draw up a new declaration of the Rights of Man.” The concept of surreality, concerning which quarrels have been sought with us repeatedly and which it was attempted to turn into a metaphysical or mystic rope to be placed afterwards round our necks, lends itself no longer to misconstruction, nowhere does it declare itself opposed to the need of transforming the world which henceforth will more and more definitely yield to it.

As I said in the Manifesto I believe in the future transmutation of those two seemingly contradictory states, dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality, of surreality, so to speak. I am looking forward to its consummation, certain that I shall never share in it, but death would matter little to me could I but taste the joy it will yield ultimately.

Aragon expressed himself in very much the same way in Une Vague de rêves (1924):

It should be understood that the real is a relation like any other; the essence of things is by no means linked to their reality, there are other relations besides reality, which the mind is capable of grasping and which also are primary, like chance, illusion, the fantastic, the dream. These various groups are united and brought into harmony in one single order, surreality… This surreality—a relation in which all notions are merged together—is the common horizon of religions, magic, poetry, intoxications, and of all life that is lowly—that trembling honeysuckle you deem sufficient to populate the sky with for us.

And René Creval, in L’Esprit contre la raison (1928):

The poet does not put the wild animals to sleep in order to play the tamer, but, the cages wide open, the keys thrown to the winds, he journeys forth, a traveller who thinks not of himself but of the voyage, of dream beaches, forests of hands, soul-endowed animals, all undeniable surreality.

I was to sum up the idea in Surrealism and Painting (1928):

All that I love, all that I think and feel inclines me towards a particular philosophy of immanence according to which surreality will reside in reality itself and will be neither superior nor exterior to it. And conversely, because the container shall be also the  contained. One might almost say that it will be a communicating vessel placed between the container and the contained. That is to say, I resist with all my strength temptations which, in painting and literature, might have the immediate tendency to withdraw thought from life as well as place life under the aegis of thought.

After years of endeavor and perplexities, when a variety of opinions had disputed amongst themselves the direction of the craft in which a number of persons of unequal ability and varying powers of resistance had originally embarked together, the surrealist idea recovered in the Second Manifesto all the brilliancy of which events had vainly conspired to despoil it. It should be emphasized that the First Manifesto of 1924 did no more than sum up the conclusions we had drawn during what one may call the heroic epoch of surrealism, which stretches from 1919 to 1923. The concerted elaboration of the first automatic texts and our excited reading of them, the first results obtained by Max Ernst in the domain of “collage” and of painting, the practice of surrealist “speaking” during the hypnotic experiments introduced among us by René Crevel and repeated every evening for over a year, incontrovertibly mark the decisive stages of surrealist exploration during this first phase. After that, up till the taking into account of the social aspect of the problem round about 1925 (though not formally sanctioned until 1930), surrealism began to find itself a prey to characteristic wranglings. These wranglings account very clearly for the expulsion orders and tickets-of-leave which, as we went along, we had to deal out to certain of our companions of the first and second hour. Some people have quite gratuitously concluded from this that we are apt to overestimate personal questions. During the last ten years, surrealism has almost unceasingly been obliged to defend itself against deviations to the right and to the left. On the one hand we have had to struggle against the will of those who would maintain surrealism on a purely speculative level and treasonably transfer it on to an artistic and literary plane (Artaud, Desnos, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Vitrac) at the cost of all the hope for subversion we have placed in it; on the other, against the will of those who would place it on a purely practical basis, available at any moment to be sacrificed to an ill-conceived political militancy (Naville, Aragon)—at the cost, this time, of what constitutes the originality and reality of its researches, at the cost of the autonomous risk that it has to run. Agitated though it was, the epoch that separates the two Manifestos was none the less a rich one, since it saw the publication of so many works in which the vital principles of surrealism were amply accounted for. It
suffices to recall particularly Le Paysan de Paris and Traité du style by Aragon, L’Esprit contre la raison and Etes-vous fous by René Creval, Deuil pour deuil by Desnos, Capitale de la douleur and L’Amour la poésie by Eluard, La Femme 100 têtes by Ernst, La Révolution et les intellectuels by Naville, Le Grand Jeu by Péret, and my own Nadja. The poetic activity of Tzara, although claiming until 1930 no
connection with surrealism, is in perfect accord with ours.

We were forced to agree with Pierre Naville when he wrote:

Surrealism is at the crossroads of several thought movements. We assume that it affirms the possibility of a certain steady downward readjustment of the mind’s rational (and not simply conscious) activity towards more absolutely coherent thought, irrespective of what direction that thought may take; that is to say, that it proposes, or would at least like to propose, a new solution of all problems but chiefly moral. In that sense, indeed, it is epoch-making. That is why one may express the essential characteristic of surrealism by saying that it seeks to calculate the quotient of the unconscious by the conscious.

Paul Eluard, André Breton and Robert Desnos at a fair in Montmartre.

It should be pointed out that in a number of declarations in La Révolution et les Intellectuals. Que peuvent faire les surréalistes? (1926), [Pierre Naville] demonstrated the utter vanity of intellectual bickerings in the face of the human exploitation which results from the wage-earning system. These declarations gave rise amongst us to considerable anxiety and, at tempting for the first time to justify surrealism’s social implications, I desired to put an end to it in Légitime Défense. This pamphlet set out to demonstrate that there is no fundamental antinomy in the basis of surrealist thought.

In reality, we are faced with two problems, one of which is the problem raised, at the beginning of the twentieth century, by the discovery of the relations between the conscious and the unconscious. That was how the problem chose to present itself to us. We were the first to apply to its resolution a particular method, which we have not ceased to consider both the most suitable and the most likely to be brought to perfection; there is no reason why we should renounce it. The other problem we are faced with is that of the social action we should pursue.

We consider that this action has its own method in dialectical materialism, and we can all the less afford to ignore this action since, I repeat, we hold the liberation of man to be the sine qua non condition of the liberation of the mind, and we can expect this liberation of man to result only from the proletarian revolution.

These two problems are essentially distinct and we deplore their becoming confused by not remaining so. There is good reason, then, to take up a stand against all attempts to weld them together and, more especially, against the urge to abandon all such researches as ours in order to devote ourselves to the poetry and art of propaganda. Surrealism, which has been the object of brutal and repeated summonses in this respect, now feels the need of making some kind of counter-attack. Let me recall the fact that its very definition holds that it must escape, in its written manifestations, or any others, from all control exercised by the reason. Apart from the puerility of wishing to bring a supposedly Marxist control to bear on the immediate aspect of such manifestations, this control cannot be envisaged in principle. And how ill-boding does this distrust seem, coming as it does from men who declare themselves Marxists, that is to say possessed not only of a strict line in revolutionary matters, but also of a marvelously open mind and an insatiable curiosity! This brings us to the eve of the Second Manifesto. These objections had to be put an end to, and for that purpose it was indispensable that we should proceed to liquidate certain individualist elements amongst us, more or less openly hostile to one another, whose intentions did not, in the final analysis, appear as irreproachable, nor their motives as disinterested, as might have been desired. An important part of the work was devoted to a statement of the reasons which moved surrealism to dispense for the future with certain collaborators. It was attempted, on the same occasion, to complete the specific method of creation proposed six years earlier, and, as thoroughly as possible, to set surrealist ideas in order.

In spite of the particular courses followed by former or present adherents of surrealism, everyone must admit that the drift of surrealism has always and chiefly been towards a general and emphatic crisis in consciousness and that only to the extent to which this is or is not accomplished can decide the historical success or failure of the movement. From the intellectual point of view, it was and still is a question of exposing by every available means, and to learn at all costs to identify, the facticious character of the old antinomies hypocritically calculated to hinder any unusual agitation on the part of man, were it only a faint understanding of the means at his dispocal and to inspire him to free himself somewhat from the universal fetters. The horror of death, the pantomime of the beyond, the shipwreck of the most beautiful reason in sleep, the overpowering curtain of the future, the towers of Babel, the mirrors of inconstancy, the insuperable silver wall splashed with brains, all these startling images of human catastrophe are perhaps, after all, no more than images.

Everything leads to the belief that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low, are not perceived as contradictions. It would be vain to attribute to surrealism any other motive than the hope of determining this point. It is clear, moreover, that it would be absurd to ascribe to surrealism either a purely destructive or a purely constructive character—the point at issue being precisely this: that construction and destruction can no longer be brandished against each other. It becomes clear also that surrealism is not at all interested in taking into account what passes alongside it under the guise of art or even antiart; of philosophy or anti-philosophy; of anything, in a word, that has not for its ultimate end the conversion of being into a jewel, internal and unseeing, with a soul that is neither of ice nor of fire. What, indeed, could they expect of surrealism, who are still anxious about the position they may occupy? On this mental plane from which one may for oneself alone embark on the perilous, but, we think, supreme reconnaissance—on this plane the footsteps of those who come or go are no longer of any importance, because these steps occur in a region where, by definition, surrealism possesses no listening ear. It is not desirable that surrealism should be dependent on the whim of this or that group of persons. If it declares itself capable of uprooting thought from an increasingly cruel serfdom, of bringing it back to the path of total comprehension, of restoring to its original purity, it is indeed no more than right that it should be judged only by what it has done and by what it has still to do in the fulfillment of its promise…

From 1930 until today the history of surrealism is that of successful efforts to restore to it its proper becoming by gradually removing from it every trace both of political opportunism and of artistic opportunism. The review La Révolution Surréaliste, (12 issues) has been succeeded by another, Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution (6 issues). Owing particularly to influences brought to bear by new elements, surrealist experimenting. which had for too long been erratic, has been unreservedly resumed; its perspectives and its aims have been made perfectly clear; I may say that it has not ceased to be carried on in a continuous and enthusiastic manner. This experimenting has regained momentum under the master-impulse given to it by Salvador Dali, whose exceptional interior “boiling” has been for surrealism, during the whole of this period, an invaluable ferment. As Guy Mangeot has very rightly pointed out in his History of Surrealism, published recently by René Henriquez, Dali has endowed surrealism with an instrument of primary importance, in particular the paranoiac-critical method, which has immediately shown itself capable of being applied with equal success to painting, poetry, the cinema, to the construction of typical surrealist objects, to fashions, to sculpture and even, if necessary, to all manner of exegesis.

Leon Trotsky, Diego Rivera and André Breton, 1938. Photo by Fritz Bach.

He first announced his convictions to us in La Femme Visible (1930):

I believe the moment is at hand when, by a paranoiac and active advance of the mind, it will be possible (simultaneously with    automatism and other passive states) to systematize confusion and thus to help to discredit completely the world of reality.

In order to cut short all possible misunderstandings, it should perhaps be said: “immediate” reality.

Paranoia uses the external world in order to assert its dominating idea and has the disturbing characteristic of making others accept this idea’s reality. The reality of the external world is used for illustration and proof, and so comes to serve the reality of one’s mind.

In the special ‘Surrealist Intervention’ number of Documents 34, under the title ‘Philosophic Provocations’, Dali undertakes today to give his thought a didactic turn. All uncertainty as to his real intentions seems to me to be swept away by these definitions:

Paranoia: Delirium of interpretation bearing a systematic structure.
Paranoiac-critical activity: Spontaneous method of “irrational knowledge” based on the critical and systematic objectification of delirious associations and interpretations.
Painting: Handmade color “photography” of “concrete irrationality” and of the imaginative world in general.

Sculpture: Modeling by hand of “concrete irrationality” and of the imaginative world in general.

Etc…

In order to form a concise idea of Dali’s undertaking, one must take into account the property of uninterrupted becoming of any object of paranoiac activity, in other words of the ultra-confusing activity rising out of the obsessing idea. This uninterrupted becoming allows the paranoiac who is the witness to consider the images of the external world unstable and transitory, or suspect; and what is so disturbing is that he is able to make other people believe in the reality of his impressions. One aspect, for instance, of the multiple image occupying our
attention being a putrefied donkey, the ‘cruel’ putrefaction of the donkey can be considered as ‘the hard and blinding flash of new gems’. Here we find ourselves confronted by a new affirmation, accompanied by formal proofs, of the omnipotence of desire, which has remained, since the beginning, surrealism’s sole act of faith. At the point where surrealism has taken up the problem, its only guide has been Rimbaud’s sibylline pronouncement: “I say that one must be a seer, one must make oneself a seer”. As you know, this was Rimbaud’s only means of reaching the unknown. Surrealism can flatter itself today that it has discovered and rendered practicable many other ways leading to the unknown. The abandonment to verbal or graphic impulses and the resort to paranoiac-critical activity are not the only ones, and one may say that, during the last four years of surrealist activity, the many others that have made their appearance allow us to affirm that the automatism from which we started and to which we have unfailingly returned does in fact constitute the crossroads where these various paths meet. Among those we have partly explored, and on which we are only just beginning to see ahead, I should single out simulation of mental diseases (acute mania, general paralysis, dementia praecox), which Paul Eluard and I practiced in The Immaculate Conception (1930), undertaking to prove that the normal man can have access to the provisorily condemned places of the human mind; the manufacture of objects functioning symbolically, started in 1931 by the very particular and quite new emotion aroused by Giocometti’s object ‘The Hour of Traces’; the analysis of the interpenetration of the states of sleep and waking, tending to make them depend entirely on one another and even condition one another in certain affective states, which I undertook in The Communicating Vessels; and finally, the taking into consideration of the recent researches of the Marburg school (to which I drew attention in an article published in Minotaure, ‘The Automatic Message’) whose aim is to cultivate the remarkable sensorial dispositions of children, enabling them to change any object whatever, into no matter what, simply by looking at it fixedly.

Nothing could be more coherent, more systematic or more richly yielding of results, than this last phase of surrealist activity, which has seen the production of two films by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’or; the poems of René Char; L’Homme approximatif, où boivent les loups and L’Antitête by Tristan Tzara; Le Clavecin de Diderot and Les Pieds dans le plat by René Crevel; La
Vie immédiate by Eluard; the very precious visual commentaries by Valentine Hugo on the works of Arnim and Rimbaud; the most intense part of the work of Yves Tanguy; the inspired sculpture of Alberto Giocometti; the coming together of Georges Hugnet, Gui Rosey, Pierre Yoyotte, Roger Caillois, Victor Brauner and Balthus. Never has so precise a common will united us. I think I can most clearly express this will by saying that today it applies itself to “bring about the state where the distinction between the subjective and the objective loses its necessity and its value”.

Hopi Kachina doll from André Breton’s collection.

Surrealism, starting fifteen years ago with a discovery that seemed only to involve poetic language, has spread like wildfire, on pursuing its course, not only in art but in life. It has provoked new states of consciousness and overthrown the walls beyond which it was immemorially supposed to be impossible to see; it has—as is being more and more generally recognized—modified the sensibility, and taken a decisive step towards the unification of the personality, which it found threatened by an ever more profound dissociation. Without attempting to judge what direction it will ultimately take, for the lands it fertilizes as it flows are those of surprise itself, I should like to draw your attention to the fact that its most recent advance is producing a fundamental crisis of the “object.” It is essentially upon the object that surrealism has thrown most light in recent years. Only the very close examination of the many recent speculations to which the object has publicly given rise (the oneiric object, the object functioning symbolically, the real and virtual object, the moving but silent object, the phantom object, the discovered object, etc.), can give one a proper grasp of the experiments that surrealism is engaged in now. In order to continue to understand the movement, it is indispensable to focus one’s attention on this point.

***

I must crave your indulgence for speaking so technically, from the inside. But there could be no question of concealing any aspect of the persuasions to which surrealism has been and is still exposed. I say that there exists a lyrical element that conditions for one part the psychological and moral structure of human society, that has conditioned it at all times and that will continue to condition it. This lyrical element has until now, even though in spite of them, remained the fact and the sole fact of specialists. In the state of extreme tension to which class antagonisms have led the society to which we belong and which we tend with all our strength to reject, it is natural and it is fated that this solicitation should continue, that it should assume for us a thousand faces, imploring, tempting and eager by turns. It is not within our power, it would be unworthy of our historic role to give way to this solicitation. By surrealism we intend to account for nothing less than the manner in which it is possible today to make use of the magnificent and overwhelming spiritual legacy that has been handed down to us. We have accepted this legacy from the past, and surrealism can well say that the use to which it has been put has been to turn it to the routing of capitalist society. I consider that for that purpose it was and is still necessary for us to stand where we are, to beware against breaking the thread of our researches and to continue these researches, not as literary men and artists, certainly, but rather as chemists and the various other kinds of technicians.

To pass on to the poetry and art called (doubtless in anticipation) proletarian: No. The forces we have been able to bring together and which for fifteen years we have never found lacking, have arrived at a particular point of application: the question is not to know whether this point of application is the best, but simply to point out that the application of our forces at this point has given us up to an activity that has proved itself valuable and fruitful on the plane on which it was undertaken and has also been of a kind to engage us more and more on the revolutionary plane. What it is essential to realize is that no other activity could have produced such rich results, nor could any other similar activity have been so effective in combating the present form of society. On that point we have history on our side.

A comrade, Claude Cahun, in a striking pamphlet published recently: Les Paris Sont Ouverts, a pamphlet that attempts to predict the future of poetry by taking account both of its own laws and of the social bases of its existence, takes Aragon to task for the lack of rigor in his present position (I do not think anyone can contest the fact that Aragon’s poetry has perceptibly weakened since he abandoned surrealism and undertook to place him self directly at the service of the proletarian cause, which leads one to suppose that such an undertaking has defeated him and is proportionately more or less unfavorable to the Revolution)…. It is of particular interest that the author of Les Paris Sont Ouverts has taken the opportunity of expressing himself from the “historic” point of view. His appreciation is as follows:

The most revolutionary experiment in poetry under the capitalist regime having been incontestably, for France and perhaps for Europe the Dadaist-surrealist experiment, in that it has tended to destroy all the myths about art that for centuries have permitted the ideologic as well as economic exploitation of painting, sculpture, literature, etc. (e.g. the frottages of Max Ernst, which, among other things, have been able to upset the scale of values of art-critics and experts, values based chiefly on technical perfection, personal touch and the lastingness of the materials employed), this experiment can and should serve the cause of the liberation of the proletariat. It is only when the proletariat has become aware of the myths on which capitalist culture depends, when they have become aware of what these myths and this culture mean for them and have destroyed them, that they will be able to pass on to their own proper development. The positive lesson of this negating experiment, that is to say its transfusion among the proletariat, constitutes the only valid revolutionary poetic propaganda.

André Breton photograph by Manuel Álvarez Bravo.

Surrealism could not ask for anything better. Once the cause of the movement is understood, there is perhaps some hope that, on the plane of revolutionary militantism proper, our turbulence, our small capacity for adaptation, until now, to the necessary rules of a party (which certain people have thought proper to call our “blanquism”), may be excused us. It is only too certain that an activity such as ours, owing to its particularization, cannot be pursued within the limits of any one of the existing revolutionary organizations: it would be forced to come to a halt on the very threshold of that organization. If we are agreed that such an activity has above all tended to detach the intellectual creator from the illusions with which bourgeois society has sought to surround him, I for my part can only see in that tendency a further reason for continuing our activity.

None the less, the right that we demand and our desire to make use of it depend, as I said at the beginning, on our remaining able to continue our investigations without having to reckon, as for the last few months we have had to do, with a sudden attack from the forces of criminal imbecility. Let it be clearly understood that for us, surrealists, the interests of thought can not cease to go hand in hand with the interests of the working class, and that all attacks on liberty, all fetters on the emancipation of the working class and all armed attacks on it cannot fail to be considered by us as attacks on thought likewise.

I repeat, the danger is far from having been removed. The surrealists cannot be accused of having been slow to recognize the fact, since, on the very next day after the first fascist coup in France, it was they amongst the intellectual circles who had the honor of taking the initiative in sending out an Appel à la lutte [a call to struggle], which appeared on February 10th, 1934, furnished with twenty-four signatures. You may rest assured, comrades, that they will not confine themselves, that already they have not confined themselves, to this single act.

–André Breton

ADAM BENEDETTO

IN BERLIN FOR THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE FALL OF THE WALL

by Adam Benedetto

Rain. It’s the first word to come to mind because we stood in a cold rain for hours to witness the events yesterday night. At the Brandenburg Gates there were thousands of people who decided to witness the anniversary of the fall. The heads of state were all there, the supposed head of Russia (not Putin, the other guy), Secretary of State Clinton, French President Sarkozy, Mikhail Gorbachev, and many more. It was a big event and it was an event that I came to with a feeling of excitement and celebration.

But the tone of the affair was not one of excitement but of mourning. November 9th is not only an anniversary for the fall but an anniversary of when Jews were first targeted in Germany in 1938. For that reason there is rarely a celebration of the Fall of the Wall. And for that reason the mood of then evening was both one of joy and one of somber remembrance.

The night began with an orchestra playing while a piece was read about Jewish deportations. It dramatically changed the mood of the crowd which up to that time had been pretty up beat. From there the heads of state began to try and put a perspective on the wall.

For me, Gorbachev was the most interesting speaker because not only did he have a lot to do with the fall of the wall he has been an important political agitator against the Putin Regime. Gorbachev owns the muckraking newspaper whose reporters have been murdered by government assassins. (I highly recommend reading this interview with him done by The Nation.)

For that reason I was excited to hear him speak. There has been a lot of discussion over who was responsible for the fall of the wall. Regan’s name is always brought up and Gorbachev’s too. But I think it’s foolish to associate Regan with the fall of The Wall. That’s looking at history through too narrow of a lens. I think Gorbachev understands the most basic principle of history and that is that movements happen as a result of people.

Earlier in the day I spent some time in Alexanderplatz where they had set up huge walls that were covered with historical photographs and stories. The impression that truly captured me, even to an emotional extent, was how many young people were in the pictures. So many young people began working in Environmental efforts, documenting violations of human rights, and setting up underground presses that you can’t help but notice that it’s mostly kids in their early twenties that were photographed.

I’ve always said that I do not believe people over 30 should have the right to vote and being 34 I still stand by that. I often times wonder if Greed comes from Age or if it’s just because older people have the ability to misuse the positions they keep. For me I’m a fan of student rebellions and so before I will ever give credit to Ronald Regan I believe it was those young people who were demanding a better world than that which was left to them that brought the wall down.

And so it rained and the speakers spoke and eventually a row of giant dominoes that had been painted by all sorts of different groups and signed by different people were knocked down. Then Jon Bon Jovi played. He was probably the youngest speaker and he’s no spring chicken and so for me the lack of young people involved in the events left something to be desired.

This morning I spent walking along a giant stretch of wall where artists from all over the world painted it. I walked from East to West Berlin and considered how crippling it must have been on the psychology of the people during those times. And then I thought about the nature of walls and thought of Israel and Palestine, of Mexico and America, of Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and such… It seems like as big a lesson as Berlin was for the world people just don’t get it. Less walls, not more. Is it that difficult to understand? Howard Zinn once said to me, “Someday nationalism will be seen as any other “ism” be it racism or sexism… Someday people will see it as barbaric that an invisible line separated one group of people from clean water, decent
food, and good lives.”

Well put. Real or imaginary they must continue to come down.

I hope young people continue to demand more from history than we have left them and that the spray painting that covered the wall, that adorns every vertical space in this city, continue to spread its revolutionary message though out the world. It’s beautiful and why I’m really enjoying the spirit of this place.

Peace.

–Adam Benedetto

HITCHHIKING & TRAINHOPPING–Part VI

THE CONFESSIONS OF FOFI LITTLEPANTS

PART VI

by Fofi Littlepants

VI. SOCIETY II ~ IDENTITY

What a person sees and experiences in a particular lifetime is invariably affected by a complex interplay of internal and external factors. One views the world through one’s own eyes and mental constructs, and engages in it through personal choices and actions. But the internal interacts with, and is inevitably influenced by, the external: Angela Davis talked about the “intensely social character of [our] interior lives.” What you see of the surrounding society depends on your internal orientation, as well as your external characteristics and your role within the society as they are societally determined; the options for action available to you, and how the society reacts to the choices you have made, are similarly circumscribed.

In our journey across the country, it became clear to Joey and I that certain aspects of identity ~ whether personally chosen or externally attributed ~ continue to be important defining factors in American life. These included class, race, gender, national origin, and immigration status. I’m sure this isn’t big news for anyone ~ the United States was founded on a framework laid to protect the privilege of white, propertied men while excluding others, and much of the history of activism in the country has had to (and continues to) be targeted toward remedying this.

***

During this trip, one way we experienced the world was in our incarnation as hitchhikers. (I won’t try to speak about how a trainhopper experiences life, because I never really became one.) At the same time, we were locked into certain gender, racial and other categorizations ~ Joey and I were both female; Joey would normally be classified as “white” and I as “Asian-American”. What class designation we should be ascribed was a bit confusing because we were living on a low income and engaged in some “poor” behaviors like squatting, but in reality we had middle class backgrounds and resources. We were both U.S. citizens, and while we both had foreign roots, we probably “seemed American” in that we spoke fluent English with a standard American accent (but for me, simply being Asian American probably was considered a mark of foreign-ness anyway.)

It is impossible to understand our journeys without these factoids.

***

Hitchhikers are generally assumed by the mainstream to be poor and fringe, and that’s how many people perceived Joey and me (at least initially, until they found out we had degrees and jobs). Their reactions to us revealed some insights into their attitudes about poverty and marginality.

As I said before, the reactions we got when we were trying to get rides or when we walked or sat around with our backpacks varied: some people scowled, others ignored; others laughed and some stopped to proffer rides or help. In addition, quite a few people offered to give us money, and some people just tried to give us moral support.

I do have the impression that the most kindness we received was from working class people ~ that’s who tended to give us rides, offer us money and friendship. We noticed that the people in nicer cars seemed to be the ones that expertly avoided eye contact, and the coldest direct responses we got were usually from people operating in a business context.

For instance, at an internet café we went to in a conservative town, we were obviously not very welcome ~ the people served us the bagels and tea that we ordered, but avoided our eyes and conversation and didn’t respond to our cheerful “hi!”s and “bye!”s. This was so even though it was supposed to be “alternative”, and we went back there for four days in a row. It seemed that they were either afraid of us, or were pointedly being cold so we would not come back.

We got kicked out of gas stations and truck stops, and even the sidewalks in front of them, by the people that owned the establishments or worked there. They presumably threw us out in order to protect private property interests ~ perhaps to prevent us from panhandling or soliciting customers, or lowering property value by simply being an eyesore. It may be that if we had met some of those people in another context (especially those that just worked at those places rather than owned them), perhaps they would have been nice enough, but clearly within the corporate capitalist business zones, straggly (presumably poor) hitchhikers were not allowed. These people were more interested in persecuting us than the cops.

***

Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in an Op-Ed published in the New York Times in August 2009 about the increasing criminalization of the poor in the United States. She commented that “if you are truly, deeply, in-the-streets poor, you’re well advised not to engage in any of the biological necessities of life ~ like sitting, sleeping, lying down or loitering.” She identifies a whole range of laws and policies that are increasingly targeting poor people, such as vagrancy and trespassing laws which subject homeless people to arrest. She recounts heartbreaking and perverse stories on the impact of these laws ~ for instance, she tells of a homeless man that got dragged out a shelter and put in jail because he had an outstanding warrant for “criminal trespassing” because he had gotten arrested before for sleeping on the street; this made him lose his spot at the shelter, so now he is sleeping on the streets again (and is vulnerable to more arrests.) Ehrenreich argues that it is essentially becoming a crime in many parts of the U.S. to be poor ~ activities that poor people engage in or benefit from are outlawed so that poor people are criminalized. (FN 1)

Within this context, it was striking to Joey and I that we didn’t get subjected to more persecution and harassment than we did. We were engaged in the biological necessities of life like sitting, sleeping, and loitering in a very low-income way: we sat around on the sidewalk and at truck stops, camped clandestinely under bridges and parks, and tried to get rides on the side of freeways. But amazingly, we never got arrested. And we came face to face with cops and railroad security at least eight times. But instead of arresting us, cops positively helped us. Twice we were given rides in police cars. In the times that we were questioned by police for hitchhiking because it was illegal, we were told ~ almost apologetically ~ that hitchhiking was prohibited and that we should get out of sight.

So was Ehrenreich wrong? Are cops actually nice and nurturing to the poor?

I don’t think all cops are abusive, but I don’t think they’re all nice to poor people either. What I believe, based on the totality of our experience, was that we didn’t get arrested because of a combination of the fact that we were not actually poor, and, we were not perceived to be permanently poor.

Poverty is a multi-faceted marsh that is mixed from a whole host of deprivations, inequality and stigma. A good practical indicator of poverty is not your income but the extent to which your life choices are restricted ~ people are poor if they don’t have the option of meeting their basic needs, getting a higher paying job or one with dignity or fulfilment, sending their kids to safe schools, going to see the doctor when they need to, going on vacation every year (or ever), etc.

For myself, though I was working for a pathetic part-time non-profit income, I had already sucked up quite a lot of societal resources in education, and had a very high earning potential if I wanted to be a corporate hack. I didn’t want to be a corporate hack, but I had the choice not to be ~ even with my paltry salary I could buy enough food to eat, had health insurance, and was traipsing around the country for fun. So even though I slept by a dumpster one night in Dallas, it would be an insult to poor people to call myself poor.

When we ran into cops, we didn’t have the strikes that many poor people already have against them that mires them on a road to criminalization. All the cops that stopped us asked for our IDs and did a background check on us. We didn’t have prior criminal records ~ I bet if we had, we would have been much, much more likely to get arrested for trespassing, hitchhiking, loitering, soliciting, or whatever. And having prior criminal records, even for children, is of course correlated with being poor. Ehrenreich talks about how in New York, if a child visits a friend or relative in a public housing project without an ID, he or she could get arrested for trespassing; in Los Angeles, many poor teenagers get arrested for truancy, but 80% of the “truants” are merely late to school because of a crappy bus system.

Class privilege and disadvantage run deep, one indication being that wealthy and middle class people can even engage in the same behaviors for which poor people get criminalized, but not suffer the same consequences. In stark contrast to high numbers of arrests and criminal convictions of poor kids for things as innocent as being late to school, I remember that when I was growing up, lots of my ritzy private school friends were stopped by cops ~ for skipping school, drunk driving, drugs, stealing bikes, etc. ~ but none that I recall were ever convicted of any crimes because the cops many times didn’t even arrest them, and if they did, their parents got a lawyer who got the charges dropped.

Similarly, Joey and I could engage in poor behaviors without sufffering poor consequences because we were actually not poor. We were also able to glide through our encounters with the police, because we had the self-assurance that comes from being “empowered” and “middle class” ~ we weren’t afraid of law enforcement authorities because we had knowledge enough of our rights and how to defend them; we also had friends (lawyers and otherwise) who we could call if we needed help or bail money. (We also probably didn’t get arrested because there was probably quite a bit of male paternalism involved, more on this later.)

In addition, while many people thought we were poor, I don’t think they thought we were absolutely, irreparably, down-and-out poor. I have the sense that this was important. I’ve noticed before that when someone looks really dirt poor and hopeless (or angry) and asks for money, they tend to get less offers for assistance than do persons who seem cleaner and more enterprising (or better versed on how to cajole middle class sympathies). It might be because middle class people can be positively afraid of someone that looks really poor, and/or, I think some middle class people don’t like to help out people that seem permanently poor.  They’re willing to help people a bit, with a small problem, but they don’t like the idea that wealthier people have a permanent obligation to the poor, and, they especially don’t like that idea that poor people should be angry about getting the short end of the stick. This is after all the U.S. of A., and we must all pull ourselves up by own bootstraps. I find this rather paradoxical, because this means that the poorest of the poor, who are often hemmed in most tightly by structural inequality, would be left to drown.

It was clear that some people stopped to offer us help because they thought we were temporarily poor ~ some people asked us if our cars had broken down, but most of the time people thought we were quite young and/or students. (By the way, I’m far from being that young, but people seemed to think I was.) So it could be that many of the people thought it was okay and worthwhile to help us out, since someday we would surely become grown-up, contributing members of society. Whereas if people thought we were really, permanently poor, they might have just told us to go out and get a job. Once we got picked up in the park by a group of pastors who trolled the city streets looking for troubled youths, and got to stay at one of their houses for two days on condition that we go to church on Sunday. (Kids can be reformed.) (But those specific pastors also help adults too; though I think they wouldn’t have let us stay at one of their houses if they didn’t think we were so young.)

Further, we probably got extra help because when we had contact with “middle class” people, we knew how to talk and interact with them. Interestingly, with the pastor that let us stay at his house, we were initially told that we would have to stay out in the trailer out back, but when we got to the house and met the family, the wife ushered us into an extra bedroom within the beautiful house ~ I think it’s because we seemed “okay” (i.e. non-threatening), which may essentially have been because we had middle class mannerisms. (I’m not saying that these people were mean to poor people ~ clearly they were very noble spirits that had dedicated their lives to helping others (with a special focus on youths). But I know from experience that most (probably all) “middle class” people, no matter how much they (we) believe ideologically that “poor people” have inherent dignity or equal rights, have a hard time really treating people that are in poverty without some level of discrimination. I don’t pretend I can be exempted from this category.)

Another reason that we didn’t get targeted or criminalized alot is probably because we weren’t of the “wrong color” that is stereotyped as being poor and marginal, which puts people at higher risk of arbitrary arrest. Ehrenreich writes that “By far the most reliable way to be criminalized by poverty is to have the wrong-color skin”: for people with the “suspicious combination of being both dark-skinned and poor”, criminalization and harassment by the police is rampant. And if you have the “wrong-color skin”, you don’t even have to be poor to be criminalized ~ the arrest of black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. in July 2009 when entering his own home was just one or many examples.

***

During this trip, we got plenty of evidence that race matters.

If anyone thought that the election of Obama signaled the end to discriminatory attitudes against black people in the United States, they are lamentably mistaken. Racism is alive and well, and a number of people said openly racist remarks about African Americans in our presence that we found quite shocking. I don’t think those people would have been saying that if we had been black. Or they probably would just not have picked us up.

It’s quite possible that we survived this entire trip unscathed because we were not the “wrong colour” (though most of this was probably riding on Joey’s whiteness.) At the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, we read about how on June 5, 1966, James Meredith, outraged by the fact that blacks could travel abroad but not feel safe in the South, started a solitary March Against Fear (the March was also to encourage blacks to vote.) He set out to walk the 220 miles from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi in order to show that it should, and could be done. He was shot and wounded on the second day. (The march was continued in Meredith’s name by civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael. On June 16, Carmichael was arrested; in Canton, Mississippi, the march was attacked and tear-gassed by police. But on June 26, the march finally entered Jackson, with 15,000 people and with Meredith, who had rejoined the March on June 25.)

Have things changed that much since then? The African Americans friends I have seem to be much more cautious about traveling than I am. A friend in California would tell me that she didn’t want to meet up at night, not because she was afraid of crime, but because she was afraid of cops. (She would travel quite a bit abroad though ~ she was mostly paranoid about being in the United States as a black person, which was James Meredith’s point.) The African African friends I visited during this trip, whether in the North, South, or the East, all seemed very worried and inquired about our safety; some shared some scary stories about racial encounters they had had in the South. One was on the verge of driving us all the way from Chicago to Texas.

Not that there isn’t racism in other places, but we did notice that the South was on a different scale altogether. I visited an African American friend in Little Rock, Arkansas, who was from there but had moved away a long time go, and was only back briefly to visit her family. She hated the South, she said, because people see things only in terms of black and white, and if you’re black you’re locked into a box, which in the South is not very big. Racial discrimination and segregation were still widespread; she told us a story about how some schools in the South still have two proms ~ the white kids have one, and the black kids have one. This was allowed because they were privately organized. She said that she had read that Morgan Freeman had offered to pay for such a school to have an integrated prom, but the offer was refused.

The tension in the South between local racial attitudes and federal mandates for equal treatment was obvious. In Little Rock, Arkansas, Central High School, where federal troops landed to enforce the desegregation orders issued in Brown v. Board of Education, has been designated a national historic site and has a beautiful, extensively researched and documented exhibit on the desegregation decisions as well as the history of broader efforts to expand Constitutional rights to those beyond white, propertied men. But we noticed that the Memorial was not listed on most local tourist maps.

The National Civil Rights Museum, built on the site where Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, provides an extensive (and sometimes overwhelming) amount of information on the civil rights struggle. Meanwhile, a memorial looks out over the Mississippi River a few miles away, commemorating the Confederate naval defeat in 1862 that led to the “U.S. invasion” and “occupation” of Tennessee. The plaque, erected by groups including the West Tennessee Historical Society and the “Sons of Confederate Veterans”, is dated April 2008.

And of course, federal authorities can’t paint themselves as always acting as the defenders of civil and human rights either ~ the entire history of the civil rights struggle shows this. And both federal and local law enforcement, as the arm that implements societal attitudes, has reflected a lot of racism in a racist society. One interesting exhibit at the National Civil Rights Museum provides data from three separate inquiries into the MLK assassination (the 1997 House Select Committee on Assassinations, the U.S. Justice Department Civil Rights Commission of 2000 appointed by Reno, and the civil suit filed by the King family with William Pepper against Loyd Jowers), examining evidence that the FBI, CIA, Memphis Police and others were involved.

Within this extraordinary context, one of the most surreal demonstrations in our trip of how much race mattered was when a cop pulled over where Joey was sitting with her backpack on the side of a gas station outside of Chicago. I was by the pumps asking for rides, and when I saw the police car, I ran over because I was afraid she was getting arrested. But astoundingly, the cop was not questioning her on suspicions of loitering, vagrancy or criminal intent, but instead was asking her if she was lost! “This is a dangerous neighborhood”, he said: i.e., it was poor and predominantly black, and she was white. Surely the situation would have played out differently if she had been a black youth sitting with a backpack at a gas station in a predominantly white neighborhood. He offered us a ride, and actually dropped us off at the right freeway entrance.

***

Racism of course is not limited to African Americans. A Mexican truck driver, “Lorenzo”, told us that he used to get stopped incessantly by the police. Trucks have to go through scales that check that the cargo is not overweight, and he said he would always get tickets. Sometimes the cops didn’t even try to hide that they were out to harass him. An officer in Wyoming once pulled him over; when he asked what was wrong, the officer told him, “Well, I’m going to find out.” Another Central American man that did business in several Plains states also confirmed the same ~ he was constantly getting pulled over by cops. (Though of course, there is a color hierarchy for Latin Americans, with the darker-skinned people being treated worse than the lighter-skinned people, sometimes even by other Latinos/as.)

Lorenzo also told us that he would hear racist comments by truckers over the CB radio (we had also heard a number of such comments during the course of various rides.) He said he used to get enraged at this type of thing and shout things back into the CB, but now he lets it go. He has learned to laugh at it, and sometimes he uses it to his advantage. When the swine flu broke out, it was originally referred to as “Mexican flu” because it was first identified in Mexico. When word of the scare hit the press, he felt it before hearing about it on the news: he walked into a truck stop restaurant, and six white truckers sitting in the corner looked at him, then walked out. Now, when he gets pulled over, he hands over the paperwork and asks “What’s the problem, officer?”, and then proceeds to descend innocently into an uncontrollable coughing fit. The officers invariably throw the paperwork back at him hurriedly and wave him away, he said.

We were also witness to overt racism against American Indians, which I discussed partially (but not fully) in Section V. I don’t want to repeat all the things we heard and saw here ~ they made us very sad.

***

How “wrong” of a color I was as an Asian American person is unclear. Mari Matsuda spoke a long time ago about how Asian Americans, in a racial hierarchy that places white at the top and dark at the bottom, are somewhere in the middle. (FN2) How they are treated can be schizophrenic ~ they are subject to discrimination (like glass ceilings and discrimination based on language or national origin), but have also been held up by whites as a “model minority” (coined by Reagan, to claim that other “minorities” like blacks and latinos/as had only themselves to blame for high incidences of poverty (never mind things like slavery, institutional racism, and discriminatory immigration laws.) Some advocates allege this was a tactic to put wedges between communities of color.)

At the moment, things are definitely tougher for South and Southeast Asians, who are often darker than East Asians, and are more associated with Islam. South Asians in particular been targeted for severe discrimination and violence since September 11^th supposedly because they were Muslim and so must of course automatically have some mysterious genetic affinity to terrorism (even though not all South Asians are Muslim, and of course Islam ≠ terrorism.)

I didn’t personally witness a lot of overt racism against Asian Americans during this journey, I think both because people didn’t say all that they thought in my presence (I could tell that one biker was about to go off on “those Chinese that are ruining the U.S.” but then stopped himself because I was there), and also probably because the people with strong anti-Asian sentiments just didn’t pick us up.

Also, maybe the mildly racist people (and cops) thought that I was “okay” because I was hanging out with a white girl. It was probably also important that I spoke English, without an accent ~ Asian people are subject to the same type of accent and national origin discrimination as Latinos/as and Arabs (and other foreigners). Our Korean trucker friends seemed to undergo a lot of discrimination because of their accented English. It was kind of sad because they kept apologizing to us for their “bad English”, and seemed so happy that we were talking to them at all ~ we could only guess that it was an indication of how mean other people they meet on the road must be to them, and perhaps of how little contact they had with “Americanized” people. (They showed us a bunch of photos of all their friends, and they all seemed to be immigrants.) We also met other immigrant and refugee truckers, who we could tell didn’t get treated too well in the traditional tattoed white trucker circuit.

It may be that Joey’s whiteness alone saved us (or maybe just me) from arbitrary arrest and the KKK. If I, as an Asian American person, had been traveling with one of my African American friend in the South, we might be rotting in jail right now or worse. In areas that were predominantly white, it might also be that Joey’s whiteness helped us get rides. We actually got picked up by someone that we eventually thought might be a former or current member of the KKK ~ I remember he stopped for Joey, and I just hopped in afterwards. (He didn’t drive us into the woods and kill us though; while demonstrating a jarring amount of aggression and profanity, he was actually kind of nice to us in his own way (more on this in Part VII).) And my non-whiteness probably dragged down our possibility of getting rides in some places ~ as I mentioned in Part V, some people thought I was American Indian, and this might be the reason that many white people in South Dakota, where there is a lot of racism against Native Americans, were not very nice to us.

***

It’s also possible that if I had been traveling with a Latina or Asian friend, we might be in immigration detention on our way to getting deported, or being hunted down by the Minute Men.

For immigrants and foreigners, in particular for Latinas/os, Arabs and Asians (particularly for South Asians), national origin (and race) is a basis by which individuals (and entire communities) are increasingly targeted and criminalized, and subject to abuses and human rights violations including racial profiling, arbitrary detention, physical abuse, raids, religious discrimination, hate crimes, and violations of due process. (FN3) This is true whether or not they are “documented”, but of course people who don’t have the right papers are designated “Illegal” i.e.  subhuman, and at even higher risk of human rights violations.

One man that gave us a ride said he was undocumented, and that he lived in constant fear. A friend of Joey’s wanted to join us for a few days in New York, but in the end was afraid to try to get on a plane and face airport security, because he was an asylee and his papers showing his legal residence were taking so long to process (a common problem for immigrants, asylees and refugees.)

That Joey and I were wandering around without the burden of this kind of fear was another form of privilege we had inherited. We both had U.S. citizenship, though we both have significant foreign roots ~ both of our mothers are foreign nationals; in addition, for me my father was a son of immigrants, and I was actually born outside of the U.S. This amount of “foreign-ness” (and less) would have been enough to subject us to extreme harassment had we been of the severely targeted nationalities, but we weren’t ~ Joey’s mom was white European, and my parents were both East Asian. We also spoke fluent, “accentless” English, so were not subjected to accent discrimination as many immigrants (even those who are U.S. citizens) are.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the cops, when they called in to check our IDs, were trying to identify whether or not we were U.S. citizens, at least for me. I’m not sure if police databases were able to confirm this kind of information. And, I would bet that if they couldn’t, and we seemed more “foreign” than we were, we would have been detained for immigration checks. Or maybe if I wasn’t with Joey, I would have been detained anyways regardless of how foreign or non-foreign I appeared, by the police or some wacko vigilante group.

***

Another salient feature of our identity that had an untold effect on our journeys, of course, was that of gender. We invariably got comments about how surprising it was that two women were traveling in this manner, and constant admonitions to be careful. Many people additionally treated us like we needed to be chastised and/or rescued. A few people asked us if our boyfriends knew we were traveling about in this manner (i.e., whether we had their permission.)

While we found this kind of gender myopia annoying, we also recognized that we were benefitting from it ~ we were able to hitchhike so easily because nobody was afraid of us and because many thought it was okay to help us because we were women (women after all must be the same as children ~ they need to be taken care of. If we had been men, there probably would have been more judgmentalism ~ I bet some of the people that picked us up would have told male hitchhikers to go get a job and a car.)

It was telling that most of the rides that we got were from men (though a handful of women did pick us up). And I’m pretty sure that when we put our hair down, we got rides easier (with our hair up we looked liked boys from a distance). Some people explicitly told us that they never pick up men, whether it’s one man or a man traveling with a woman, and never, ever multiple men.

And the cops and railroad security we ran into were all men. They probably didn’t arrest us both because they probably thought we were too female and little to actually be dangerous (a number of men, including a former probation officer, told us they were worried about us because we were “small”), and, because gender relations provide that men in manly professions such as police officering should protect helpless/hapless women. (Indeed, in our confrontations with the police, we found we didn’t have to brandish our “empowered” knowledge of the law or our civil rights much of the time, because an easier (and probably more effective) alternative was the more subtle and  subversive “female” defensive weapon ~ Acting Stupid (“Oh really, this is illegal?? We had no idea, sorry officer!”) (Though admittedly this might have been a bit unethical because it both manipulates and reinforces gender inequality…)

Some guys expressed some flattering respect for our courage, although, that might have been because just because they thought women don’t normally exhibit a lot of courage in the first place. A number of men told us, “You’ve got balls!” which I’m sure was well-meaning but reminded me of what Simone de Beauvoir wrote sixty years ago, that “[M]an is defined as a human being and a woman as a female ~ whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.”

I have to say that many of the most uptight, scared looking people that ignored us were women (they tended to be slightly older, white, and driving nice cars.) I chalk this up to socialization, in which women are led to believe that they should be afraid of many things. But we were happy that we had some women pick us up ~ they included a sculptor, a traveling nurse, a co-dependent mom in recovery from various addictions, a prison guard, and a former hitchhiker with lupus. The prison guard seemed especially enthused to have us ~ we can only guess that it was because she was happy to see fellow women out there doing things that the world thought was too rough and dirty for “girls”. But a female truck driver, another woman in a “man’s profession”, took the other route to equality ~ in response to repeated pleas broadcast by a chivalrous trucker over his CB radio to trucks miles around in search of someone who would “help out some girls that need a ride”, she eventually shouted back crankily over the airwaves, “Tell them to buy a bus ticket!” (I guess she didn’t see any need for paternalistic babying of women.)

***

Age is another factor of identity that probably significantly affected our experience. I think that had people been aware of how old I was, our experience would have been different. Joey is in her twenties but I’m well in my thirties ~ an age at which responsible adults should have bought a house, a car, gotten married, pumped out 2.5 kids, built up a sizable 401(k), and gotten life insurance. I don’t personally think I look that young, but the people we ran into seemed to ~ as I mentioned, most thought we were college students, but some people asked us if we were teenagers (!) ~ I can only guess that they were blinded by the backpack and the ratty clothes. (Actually, I confess that I ended up yanking out some of the gray hairs that were starting at my temples, because I thought it would be easier for us to get rides, so I guess I encouraged this.) The fact that people thought we were young, especially combined with the fact that we were women, put us in a category to be fetted and protected (and driven around.)

I’m not gay so I can’t speak on how open homosexuality would have affected our trip, but I’m sure it would have ~ along with open racist remarks, we heard a bunch of homophobic comments. I did also find it notable that very few people even asked whether me and Joey were a gay couple, despite the fact that we were traveling together non-stop for months, including sleeping together in the same pup tent; this is surely a clear indicator of heterosexism.

I also can’t speak on religious discrimination because I had no visible religion that is subjected to persecution; but I bet that if we had had some obvious heretical non-Christian religious feature like a headscarf indicating Muslim-ness, we would have been subjected to religious (and probably racial) discrimination and maybe violence. And discrimination based on Jewish and Catholic identity also continues of course; one twisted example we heard of was a story that one of the truckers told us, about how someone from the KKK was recruiting him relentlessly, but suddenly stopped talking to him; he found out later that it was because the KKK guy found out he was Catholic.

***

But we did also perceive signs of change of old discriminatory attitudes. For example, my friend from Arkansas that had told us about the segregated proms, said that Morgan Freeman’s offer to fund an integrated prom had been refused, but the opposition had come primarily from the parents. The young people were not against it. And I was happy to hear a trucker, who might have been that old-school type of parent, tell us (proudly) about how he and his friends were shamed a few years ago by his teenage son, who stepped out of his baseball game to stand up to them publicly and tell them to stop making racist comments about the opposing team. The man admitted that he had held racist beliefs for most of his life, but that times were changing.

And of course, even the mere fact that Joey and I were not arrested, kidnapped, accused of witchcraft, hanged, stoned, or committed to an insane asylum as females on the loose without men is an indication that women have more freedom now than not too long ago. We also heard about other intrepid female travelers, and met and hung out with women who were engaged in activities that would have been considered unimaginable before ~ female truckers, bikers, a prison guard, a computer programmer, business owners, a union leader, a university professor, professional artists, etc.

***

And of course the other question is, aside from what society attributes onto me as identifying characteristics, how do I self-identity? I don’t think I’ve completely figured that out. I’m personally proud and happy to be a woman, Asian American, and an immigrant, and think those identities don’t have to be bounded by any particular limitations. But I also have a vague notion, which I can’t yet articulate or even grasp fully, that the essence of every human being and spirit may constitute a supremely complex and unknowably unique universe that stretches over multiple dimensions. And the nature of a person and reality go vastly beyond these small labels and categories that people tend to be so good at pegging each other with.

But, getting back to our discussion on the limited material dimension in which this journey took place, I wish I could say that Joey and I showed ourselves to be free, independent, courageous women. We are, kind of, but not as much as some people thought ~ in examining everything within its social context, I don’t think we can make very grand claims ~ I can appear brave because I wasn’t facing all the dangers that other people with higher-risk characteristics would have. Travel is a luxury and it was clear we could afford it based on the reservoir of privileges that inhered to us.

HOWEVER, I don’t want to paint a picture that would discourage persons with characteristics different from ours from traveling. I’m just explaining what I think are some societal circumstances that affected our trip in order to give a contextualized vision of it.

For every individual, he or she will have characteristics that are advantageous in some ways and “higher-risk” in other ways. Even for a particular characteristic that in a certain historical moment may put a person at higher risk with certain sectors (such as being a “person of color” in a conservative white town), that same characteristic will at the same time bring other advantages (and has inherent value in any case regardless of whatever advantage/disadvantage). For instance, all ethnic and racial communities have their own unique networks and resources, and often help each other; members of those groups have access to the richness of those resources that outsiders don’t have. (And, it should be noted that all ethnic and racial groups also engage in some form of stereotyping and discrimination against non-members (and probably against members too…))

While we did get rides from Latino/a, African American, South Asian, and Southeast Asian people, as well as Native Americans and Muslims (those groups that I identified as being at higher risk of harassment), I imagine that if we had been members of those communities, we probably would have gotten even more rides and more support. We saw a demonstration of this in Virginia, where we waited around hours and hours for a ride. In the middle of this waiting around, a man approached us, asking us in Spanish for help to get a ride (to Chicago!) He looked like perhaps he had just crossed over the border ~ he was scratched up all over his body, and was carrying just a small bundle in a plastic bag. We tried to help him out but we weren’t really sure it would be possible ~ we were having a hard time ourselves, and we couldn’t fathom how he was going to get a ride, being a man, looking all scratched up, and speaking no English. In the end, our advice to him was (quite ironically) to catch a bus (!), but, to our amazement, he found a ride quicker than we did, from a Latino man with a car full of kids (who hadn’t offered to pick us up). So I felt stupid for having been a naysayer based only on my limited understanding. It was a reminder that every individual engages with the world in a unique way, and you can never tell anyone that something is impossible.

I also don’t want to succumb anemically to talking about identity as being defined solely by the societal attributions linked to the “-isms”. James Baldwin said, “I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.” I agree, and it’s only because of limitations in time and space that I don’t talk about the many other aspects of identity that I think exist.

I do want to mention one potential characterization that might be added to my various layers of identity. I don’t think I’m in the classic hippie or dharma bum style, so I toyed with some other words: one is “huppie” ~ meaning some kind of combination of hippie and yuppie ~ a lefty tree hugger without the blazing tie-dye or ingestion of shrooms, and urban and professional (i.e. armed with a laptop and Blackberry) but without the self-serving political views and addiction to suburban shopping. Though really what I probably liked most about the word is that it reminds me of the puppy that Harry Cat, the friend of Tucker Mouse in The Cricket in Times Square, brings home in the sequel. The Cat and Mouse name him “Huppy” (for “Harry Cat’s Pet Puppy”), and care for it together until the little puppy eats so much that his butt gets too big to squeeze into the drainpipe that they all live in.

Marisa Monte sings, “Sou pequenina e também gigante” (I am very little and also gigantic). And perhaps like her and Huppy, Joey and I were too, as we all must be, each in our own way.

–Fofi Littlepants

FOOTNOTES

1 – Barbara Ehrenreich, “Is It Now A Crime to be Poor?” (Op-Ed), New York Times, August 8, 2009.

2 – Mari Matsuda, “We Will Not Be Used”, Where is Your Body? And Other Essays on Race, Gender and Law, at 149.

3 – See for instance, the Hurricane Project reports by the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, which documents hundreds of human rights violations against immigrants, www.nnirr.org.