Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle

by Peter Coyote

  Though the events in question occurred thirty years earlier, their resurrection and reexamination of the facts, reviewed according to the standards of a responsible adult today, required an intense, embarrassing, and diligent year of confession and self-examination to heal our relationship and their personal hurts—the smallest part of which was revising their father’s description for subsequent editions. There is no way to reveal the details of this story without violating their privacy, and there is also a risk that the story’s harmonious resolution might appear as a self-serving gloss of my behavior toward them, which was irresponsible, exploitative, and hurtful.

  I learned from this incident—later in life than I ever anticipated having to learn something of this magnitude—that unacknowledged wounds do not heal. Their letters, sharp as paper cuts, scarred me as unequivocally and painfully as a brand. Whatever hurt they may have transferred to me, they had carried worse within themselves for thirty years until they had been heard and acknowledged. I have no wish to be coy, but that’s all the detail this post-cript requires to make the point of how dangerous we, each of us, can be when we are not alert to our shadowy and unexamined impulses. Not even the storyteller is exempt from consequences in the universe he creates.

  It is a reflexive impulse to assume that we are “good,” and from there everything runs downhill to the logical inference that what we do is good. It is something of a national habit. We have yet to fully acknowledge, and make adequate recompense for, our genocide of Native Americans or the two-and-a-half centuries during which we bought and sold Africans to create our national wealth, repressing every trace of their original languages and religion, destroying their family structures, and denying them education. Acknowledging that each of us contains all the positive and negative potentialities of every human who has ever lived should alert us to our own, indwelling potential to cause harm when we are careless. Danger is rarely “out there.” Sleepwalking through our negative propensities is a guarantee that we will harm others.

  Both praise and censure from others paled before the experience of opening the first shipment of books from my publisher and extracting the beautifully jacketed hardbound volumes. My friend and publisher, Jack Shoemaker, had warned me (trying to be kind) after I had submitted the final manuscript that publishing a book “would not change my life.” He meant, I think, that after the flush of enthusiasm, book tours, and reviews have passed, one returns to one’s daily rounds, usually neither famous nor wealthy. He was cautioning me against unrealistic expectations, but in my case, he was wrong.

  What he could not understand was that by holding my first published book, an early glimpsed and often denied identity as a writer had materialized as an undeniable part of myself. The fact that I was a writer was now indisputable: I was holding a book with my name on it. I might not be a great writer, but I was among the fraternity. It was a life-altering observation that did change me. I had undertaken work as an actor to win a livelihood, but also, on some level, so that I might protect what is most precious to me and not have to write “for money.” Writing is where the purest part of me touches the world. If possible, I did not want it to be tainted by the requirements of commerce, preferring, in some sense, to remain an amateur. There is an equally valid argument to make on the other shore of this decision, and I would never suggest that the work of writers who earn their keep by their craft are in any way diminished by that decision. The evidence of history would overwhelm that assertion. I am speaking to my own feelings and choices. (This is a memoir, after all.)

  In 1998, when the book was released, I had not yet met and married the woman for whom I willingly ended a lifetime of compulsive womanizing, a decision I have never revisited or regretted. My daughter had not yet received her doctorate in psychology, nor had she married her brilliant, good-humored, and talented husband. They had not yet produced my granddaughter, thereby ratcheting me up into the ranks of “those-who-are-next-to-go” by slipping a new generation underneath me. The recompense for this dizzying acceleration toward my end is, of course, the delight of being a grandfather. (As I write, my toenails are still a brilliant orange where she painted them during our last visit.) My son had not yet graduated from college and moved to make his way in New York, morphing en route from a handsome, somewhat puzzling young boy into a shrewd, mordantly funny, culturally acute young man.

  I wrote this book as much as a gift to my wife and children as I did to make sense of my own past. My son was born sixteen years after my daughter in a more stable, affluent environment. Consequently, his life has been less stamped by forces related to the times chronicled in this book. I mention my daughter and her happy family not to take personal credit for her successes, but as a positive postscript to the collective parenting she received as a Digger child.

  Memories of my own childhood are not particularly happy. Life in my household (as readers will have learned) was often tense or explosive and issues of dominance and power loomed front and center in relations with my father. I didn’t have the sort of patient, unthreatening family life which produces happy, confident children. (Though for eleven years, I was happily raised by a brilliant young black woman, her boyfriend-then-husband, and community—the subject of my next book.) My adolescence was tumultuous, and my 1960s and ’70s given over to social and political experiments where “balance” was eventually achieved only after caroming off every limit before surrendering to gravity in a Buddhist monastery.

  While many of our early experiments failed due to inexperience and excess, the country was indelibly changed by the effort and commitment of my restless peers: the planet and our reciprocal relationship with it has begun to receive recognition; more inclusive alternatives to conventional religion, therapy, medicine, spiritual practices, sexual orientation, and production of food are now widely accepted. The rights of women and people of color have been extended and expanded and have achieved enough recognition that they must be publicly acknowledged, if not always fairly applied.

  While the Diggers and Free Family no longer live communally, the extended family we created continues to thrive. My daughter remains bonded to her communal sisters; she is an “aunt” to their children and remains inextricably a member of our large tribe. We no longer wake, sleep, and work together every day, a situation I continue to experience as a deep loss, but which is lightened by a palpable sense of remaining tuned to an exclusive network which transmits knowledge about how the family is faring. Like the “beams of light” connecting us in my early dream, information and news travels over a filigree of nerves in our collective body, keeping the parts linked and mutually aware.

  Like many of her communal brothers and sisters, my daughter has consciously chosen work dedicated to health and healing. When queried about this, her answer was deeply satisfying to me:

  Our choice in careers—at least my own—is part of your legacy. We were raised to believe that it is a moral duty to try to make the world better than we found it.

  Having been poached in the broth of ideas their parents savored and debated (and sometimes talked to death), my daughter and friends developed an early comfort with them. These sharp, self-confident young folk are as fearless about expressing their political and economic beliefs as they are unabashed about pursuing fun. (Candor demands I acknowledge that some of our children did not weather our constant experimentation so well.) They are not doctrinaire, and are more graceful than their parents, having assimilated and resolved since birth the contradictions we pulled ligaments learning to straddle. My daughter’s response to this assertion was less romantic than mine:

  Many of us struggle with the same conflicts you did, but perhaps in our generation we have refined the expression [of them] . . . We hope to pass on the ability to inhabit seemingly disparate realities to our children . . . to take the middle road, eat the bowl of rice . . . try to balance material comforts [with] . . . working to ensure that compassion is reflected in our every day . . . But it is a conflict and we are constantly—
as you do—balancing our desires with the needs of the collective. We hope our children will be even more facile than we are.

  They will need these skills. It is a more seriously threatened and afflicted world than it was forty years ago or even ten years ago when the book was first published. Global warming, whose effects might have been ameliorated had they been seriously addressed ten years earlier (when Al Gore was in the White House, for instance), may now be a runaway train. Social, financial, and environmental problems are multiplying virally at the same time that we are curtailing our investment in the education of the nation’s young people, and the neglect shows. National stupidity is epidemic, irony has replaced analysis, and one wonders fervently how, from this degraded environment, wise leaders and constituencies to support them will evolve. If this sounds harsh, consider the following.

  In a series of polls over the last several years:

  Only 41% of Americans could name our three branches of government. 26% could not identify the Vice President.1

  50% of seventeen-year-olds could not express 9/100s as a percent. Only 4% could use a bus schedule. Only 12% could arrange six common fractions in order of size.2 63% thought humans lived at the same time period as dinosaurs—an error of 60 million years. 53% thought the earth revolved around the sun in a day or a month. In other words, only 47% knew it required a year. 91% could not state what a molecule was.3 21% believed the sun revolves around the earth and another 7% weren’t sure.

  Of 158 countries in the United Nations, the U.S. is 49th in literacy. 60% of the adult population has never read a book. 6% reads one a year (and it’s necessary to include Harlequin romances and self-help books to reach that figure). 120 Million adults are illiterate or read at no better than fifth-grade level.

  In 1998—The Massachusetts (not Mississippi or Alabama) Board of Education gave a literacy test for teachers pegged at the level of a high school equivalency exam. Of 1800 teachers, 59% failed.4 As a result, the Commissioner of Education announced that requirements for a passing grade would be lowered.

  Referring to such data, Morris Berman, in his book Twilight of American Culture, addressed the costs of this intellectual poverty:

  A nation in which 87% of 18-24 year olds cannot locate Iran or Iraq on a world map . . . is not merely ‘intellectually sluggish.’ It would be more accurate to call it moronic, capable of being fooled into anything.

  This diminution of critical skills occurs in the shadow of mass cultural and species extinction. Jim Hansen, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observed in a recent article in The New York Review of Books:

  If human beings follow a business-as-usual course, continuing to exploit fossil fuel resources without reducing carbon emissions . . . the eventual effects on climate and life may be comparable to those at the time of mass extinctions. Life will survive, but it will do so on a transformed planet. For all foreseeable human generations, it will be a far more desolate world than the one in which civilization developed and flourished.

  Hansen predicts that unless we succeed in cutting carbon emissions by 50% within ten years, global warming will extinct 50% of the species on earth and raise water levels up to eighty feet, with inconceivably catastrophic results for hundreds of millions of people. Salt water will intrude on many drinking water supplies and the planet’s newest wars may be over the most basic of resources. Of course, he might be wrong. But he also might not be, and would it not be precautionary to play it safe?

  In the San Francisco Chronicle (April 24, 2008), I learn that the glacier on which 800,000 Bolivians depend for their water, has dwindled from a massive 150-foot thick, rock-scouring behemoth to a “patch” nine feet high. When such folk mass at our borders searching for water, will we create a “fence” of our SUVs to keep them out? Given such facts, the quibbling, “gotcha” politics of Democrats and Republicans is to public policy as pornography is to sex. Our Congress and its paymasters are shooting craps on the deck of the Titanic.

  My generation’s counter-cultural efforts to reduce the human footprint on the planet were a critically important, correct intuition. The “poverty” of the “hippies” was actually an act of generosity towards other humans and species, the first large-scale American attempts to cut the calories of energy and quanta of “stuff” required for a fulfilling life. In his concise and chilling book, The Limits of Power, Andrew Bacevich observes that “Americans never cease to expect more” and that there is a direct connection between these expectations, the rise of the Imperial Presidency, the loss of domestic liberties, and the increased use of our professional military as an agent of Empire. “As members of a community,” he writes, “especially as members of a national community, [citizens] choose to contribute less.” The importance of our counter-cultural collective experiments outweighs whatever personal damage immaturity and excess wreaked on ourselves by substantial factors.

  Zen master Sunryu Suzuki-Roshi once said, “Everything is perfect until you compare.” I confess to difficulty achieving such repose. Compared to the culture of sleepwalkers downloading porn on their iPhones, and newspapers debating critical differences between carjack video games, while connoisseurs dress up to drink fine wines and devour the last remnants of fish plundered from the coasts of impoverished African nations, the clumsiest excesses of “the Sixties” appear enlightened.

  I don’t believe my feelings are simply geriatric mental road rage. My granddaughter is three. She has asthma that morphs frequently into pneumonia. She’s been hospitalized several times, immobilized to have needles poked into veins barely larger than my hairs so that doctors can determine why her lungs are filling with mucus. When she was last hospitalized in Oakland, California, I visited her bed, set out in a hallway and separated from other struggling, coughing children by a hanging sheet. There were no rooms left and when I inquired why, I was informed that they were suffering “an epidemic of asthma.”

  My daughter and her husband have spent weeks deprived of sleep and the shadows under their eyes track their exhaustion. They are reasonably affluent caucasians whose baby is in a bed in the hall of a well-run hospital in the San Francisco Bay Area. What do you imagine might be happening to children in the “cancer belt” of Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi, or in Hunter’s Point and Richmond, California, where the lungs of the poor are being cauterized by the smoke, ash, and chemicals crapped into their neighborhoods to spare the wealthy.

  Overfed television pundits cluck sympathetically about “the senseless violence” as ghetto murders escalate. Genteel society wonders querulously why “they” (polite-speak for “black” and “Latino”) evince so little “reverence for life,” and never intuit that people generally behave as they are treated. While we gossip about Britney’s snatch and watch the routine humiliations of reality shows, hundreds of thousands of tons of untested chemicals and unregulated emissions are being pumped into our water, soil, and air (and my granddaughter’s lungs) as if we were all inmates of a slow-motion death camp.

  If I lived in a politically neglected, toxic hot zone and all available evidence demonstrated that the system was killing me and my community, where analyses reinforced the conclusion that my people had been abandoned, you can be damned sure that I would be struggling, by any means necessary, to amass the capital to clear out. As it is, I live in a genteel suburb outside one of the richest cities in North America and still find myself in a tumultuous hospital corridor, daydreaming about blowing up the nearby Chevron refinery.

  Outside my daughter’s house, the diesel trucks, buses, and ships, the oil refinery at Port Richmond, and the coal-fired electrical generator at Hunter’s Point are force-feeding sulfides, mercury, and microscopic ash into the atmosphere as if it were a septic pit. It was for just such an expropriation of the commons that the original Diggers marched against Cromwell’s troops on St. George’s Hill in 1649.

  If the wholesale despoliation of the world and my granddaughter’s condition makes me, a moderately wealthy and successful
man, homicidal, imagine, if you dare, the quality of rage simmering among the disenfranchised, underestimated, and overlooked. Imagine in what directions their fantasies might lead and you won’t need TV thrillers to jack up your pulse. What coefficients of greed put public health on a debate-worthy par with corporate profits? What ignorant lunacy transforms water, air, soil, and human tissue into filters for toxic effluents? In the face of ignorance like this, anger is the positive pole of my emotional state.

  An entire generation predicted this historical moment and placed their lives on the line to prevent it. Whether we were called Hippies, Weathermen, Diggers, SDS, Motherfuckers, Flower Children, or runaways, we saw the future with a clarity that otherwise evaded virtually the entire political class. Now, as the markets and banks melt down and implode and Congress does its best to disguise their complicity in the deregulatory mess they’ve created, the Sixties shine brightly as an example of an alternative path we might have taken.

  Our early idea of a “counter-culture”—a sheltered place within the ribs of the dying beast of America, a refuge for those who would abandon the sinking mother ship of State—has disappeared from the contemporary landscape. You might think that I consider this a negative event, but I don’t.

  Friend and fellow Digger Freeman House once observed that “a counterculture condemns you to marginality.” I argued with him at the time, but understand now that he was correct, that the idea of a “separate reality” was a comforting confection. There were many change-oriented people in the 1960s and ’70s who may have been dissatisfied with the political and/or economic paradigms they struggled with, but had no desire to grow long hair, smoke dope, or live communally. By cleaving to an alternative culture where membership was identified by variance from the majority, we missed the opportunity to create broad social and political alliances with many who might otherwise have cooperated with us. As the Weathermen placed African Americans so in the “revolutionary vanguard” that they missed the opportunity of organizing many in the white community, and in the way that Democrats today are missing the opportunity of finding commonality with liberal Republicans and many “conservatives,” narrow, ideological provincialism blinded us to making common cause with those who differed from us. From this perspective, the dissolution of the counter-culture offers some advantages.