“The world is—Put that down right now!—too much with us!”
I listened, slowly grasping a revolutionary variation on a poetic form, one that I would remember forever.
“Little we see in Nature—Shut that door!—that is ours.”
The world is too much with us, I thought. So put that down right now! Though (confused, heartbroken, lamebrain) I shall still compare thee to a summer’s day.
two
There was a meeting of the Women’s Bail Fund the next day. I arrived late, and a familiar argument about raising money was in progress as I came in the door. All of the Fund’s project cash flowed from general contributions and the occasional bake sale or bike wash—or the odd embarrassing trust fund. The apartment where the meeting was held faced west into the sun setting slowly over the Hudson River. The windows and walls blazed with bright red light spilling over onto the earnest faces of the women of the Fund. I had not been a member of the group for very long, but I’d closely studied my fellow Bailers’ severe yet comradely demeanor. As I came in the door, I adjusted my expression to conform to the topography of the faces turning toward me. Each face seemed custodian of a guarded yet enlightened look, sprung from our ideology—which itself sprang from a synthesis of dialectical materialism and a hand-cranked pop-cultural nationalism: a critique of Pink Floyd, a “symbolic” recipe for black-and-white cookies, a review of our commitment to mobilizing the U.S. proletariat and freeing those whom the courts had wronged, victims of racism and injustice.
The apartment was on the twelfth floor of a Columbia-owned building and looked out over other buildings landlorded by the university. Many of the Bail Fund members were grad students or alumnae of Columbia, unlike me. I’d gone to grad school in San Francisco—but I was from the Midwest. I had not yet lost my Minnesota combination of overenthusiasm and shyness; to my chagrin, I often blushed. Yet during the years I’d lived in California, I’d acquired what I liked to think was tough-mindedness. Enthralled by words, by everything literary, I had worked against my own elitism, studying Marcuse and Fanon and Ortega y Gasset. I’d arrived at San Francisco State and Berkeley the year after the San Francisco Tactical Squad beat up and gassed students on campus, and later I had marched at People’s Park. I signed up for a course in the Revolution taught by a radical Berkeley professor. But the professor had laughed bitterly as he looked out at our faces.
“There will never be a revolution here in America,” he’d begun, and smiled at our shocked expressions. “And why? Because everyone wants the next rung up in the middle class—a better car, a bigger barbecue. They want automatic garage door openers, do you follow? Television clickers and remote-control bombs. Marx tells us that in order to live we must enter history. But America no longer lives in history—America has acquired remote access.”
I glanced around. Remote access. Usually I felt comfortable at Bail Fund meetings, but not today. Usually the level of attention of the Women’s Bail Fund to the suffering world, manifested as passionate concern and compassion for lost causes, for the oppressed, made me feel at home. Today I felt, with terrible inevitability, the argument about funds exhausting itself and beginning to turn, gradually, to me.
Remote access. To appear close but to remain removed while effecting change. Like the Bail Fund, I thought disloyally. Money raised in safety for our idealistic anarchical purposes: wrinkled bills and sweaty coins slid under a barred window, quick metal-tipped counting fingers drawing the blood-price in. Then a stranger, an unknown woman, slumped in a cage, tapped on the shoulder and beckoned to. You free, bitch. I believed that each of us desired justice, even if it was random unexamined justice. Yet I could not turn away from images that popped uninvited into my thoughts as I glanced around the room. Some of my fellow members looked peculiarly revved-up, even blood-hungry. Liberty in a mobcap, brandishing a pike, I thought—brandishing a popular Bail Fund motto: “Death to the Fascist Insect that Preys upon the People.”
I heard (again) my mother’s voice, quoting this time that mad mystic poet, William Blake: “For mercy has a human heart / Pity, a human face!” And I had been reading Blake myself. I had come across, just the day before, a bit of his political advice: “He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars. General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer.” So said Blake, who etched his politics into the minute particulars of his words, the minute particulars of his hallucinatory copper engravings.
General good. Remote access. I focused on the Venceremos and SDS posters on the walls. There was a huge, deeply depressing black-and-white photo of Attica, D Yard: the prisoners huddled in blankets around a small dugout fire, their heads shaved, holding hand-lettered signs: WE ARE HUMAN BEINGS. One inmate slumped, sleeping, against the shoulder of another. A few hours later they would be shot like animals in a pen, with expanding bullets outlawed by the Geneva Conventions. What Blake the engraver would have done with that scene! Next to the Attica photo was a poster of Pearl: Janis Joplin onstage at the San Francisco Fillmore. She held a flask of Southern Comfort in her raised fist, her head flung back with its electric mass of pale-sugar waves, her eyes half closed in an ecstatic squint, the phallic mike gleaming before her openmouthed wail. For one non-sequitur second I thought about blow jobs. I wondered if any of my fellow Bail Fund members practiced fellatio. I looked around at the serious inquiring faces. Probably not, I thought.
About fifteen women were sitting there in the red sun of the living room. Some were folding and collating On the Barricade, listening. Others sat straight up and took turns addressing the group, then examining their own statements, accompanied by the steady crunch-crunch of staplers. The Women’s Bail Fund was a Marxist/ Maoist “cell” and we practiced Mao’s criticism/self-criticism approach, which took a significant amount of time and uncomfortable probing. “Slow boat to China,” a smart-ass might have joked. Because I was a natural smart-ass, I tried to curb my joking. Everyone except me wore sweatshirts and jeans. I was dressed in a long skirt and a turtleneck and boots—I was due at a dinner party after the meeting.
The imposing woman guiding the discussion, Corinna Firestone, wore jeans and a down-to-her-knees sweatshirt with SLUMLORD stenciled across its Columbia University logo in dripping-blood letters. We were supposed to be an egalitarian group, but Corinna was clearly our leader, our chief, enforcer of broad ideological insight. When I’d first noticed a Women’s Bail Fund poster on a kiosk downtown at the New School, where I’d been hired to teach a beginning poetry workshop, it was Corinna Firestone’s name that was listed as “contact.” When I called the listed number, she seemed happy to hear from me. They’d been looking for someone new to work with them on a special project, she said. And that project turned out to be bail mule: taking the trip across the bridge to Rikers Island with a cache of dollar bills and coins, carrying the freedom money. And I’d been proud to do it for a while—until I realized that no one else was inclined to take a turn at it.
Abruptly Corinna crunched a Dr Pepper can flat with her hand (wham-clack! ) to close the money discussion—and looked directly at me.
“Holly,” she said. “We’d like to be hip to what’s going on with you.”
I felt the attention of the room, heads turning toward me. I nearly reached for my notebook. Like a shudder of wind through wheat.
“What’s going on,” I said, “is that I’d like to request that someone else try handling the bailouts of women at Rikers from now on.”
Corinna stared at me and smiled. She had black hair that was big and bold and frizzy like Janis Joplin’s, but without the erotic voltage, without the wicked shimmer—and her broad-toothed smile was oddly grim. She seemed solidly intact, but too solidly. I could sense that she was secretly off-kilter—as if she were a house of cards or pick-up sticks, as if, tapped lightly in a hidden place, she would collapse all over the floor.
She cleared her throat. “Patty told us that you’d called to rap to her about this. Just like that—you’re sayi
ng that you’re no longer committed to the women Inside?”
“I am still committed to the women Inside. It’s just that I’m doing other things out there.”
I looked at the faces, all turned toward me now.
“I’ve been hired as an AfterCare worker and I’m…teaching.” I decided to go for broke. “I’m teaching a poetry workshop at the Women’s House. It’s really interesting.”
Someone repeated “Poetry?” with parrotlike bewilderment, and then there was complete quiet.
Corinna snorted. “Your interests,” she noted scornfully, “are not the point. They are.”
“I know,” I said. “I know that. The women: they are the point. And there are Our Priorities.”
I looked out the windows for a long minute until Corinna coughed loudly and rolled her eyes, impatient. I smiled wanly at her and shrugged: I couldn’t help myself. I kept falling into reveries lately. I wrote down each daydream, each random floating interruption, in my notebook, hoping the collection would make profound poetic sense as I reviewed it in some distant literary future.
“Holly!” Corinna murmured reprovingly. She recited the Bail Fund Priorities for me, gesturing for the others to join in: “Pregnant women, political prisoners, sick women, women whose children are about to become wards of the state and sent to foster homes.”
She nodded accusingly at me. “We gave you the names.”
“Sorry,” I said, sitting up, waking up. “But Our Priorities take in just about every woman at the House of D.” I considered Akilah Malik, a famous “political” prisoner, but I said nothing about her presence in my poetry class. I considered Billie Dee Boyd as well, but I didn’t mention her either.
“Good grief!” I cried, aware of the rising pitch of Minnesota in my voice. “It takes so little money, you know? We could bail out the whole place with one day of Columbia library fines. Twenty-five dollars for shoplifting Kotex. Forty dollars for jostling.”
Vicky Renslauer spoke up. She was a scholarly young woman who was forever reading Mao or books about him. She had recently tried to interest me in a volume about China’s barefoot doctors called Away with All Pests. I’d promised to read it at some point, along with Mao’s poems, although Mao’s literary gifts had not so far engaged me. Once Vicky had cornered me after a Bail Fund meeting and read me these lines from a poem by Ho Chi Minh: “Calamity has tempered and hardened me / And turned my mind to steel.”
“How could a human mind be turned to metal?” I wondered aloud. “A person’s resolve might be steely,” I suggested to Vicky, “or their stance straight and steel-like, but a mind? Turned to steel?”
Vicky had narrowed her eyes at me. She asked me if I was sure that I was a poet.
“You keep missing the point of advanced metaphor,” she said.
Yet Vicky possessed a very sunny temperament and had forgiven me not long after that exchange. Now she was looking at me with a kind of distracted fondness.
“Then it doesn’t sound like it would be that difficult to keep on truckin’, Holly! Right on! We can keep covering the small bails. We can get down with the struggle from day to day! We’ve got the bread, man, and we’re setting our sisters free!”
She grinned at me. She turned her head and her thick glasses snagged sunlight. They glowed violent pink, then grew transparent again as she nodded at me. She radiated the breathless distracted energy of a tourist arriving at a destination—a tourist from somewhere not very interesting or far away, I thought irritably, though her mind was always in China.
“I’ve done it for six months. I think it’s time for someone else to take over,” I said. “You could go, Vicky—or you, Corinna. Or you, Martine.”
Corinna offered criticism/self-criticism on my behalf. She said that because I was from California, I represented no “risk”—unlike other Bail Fund members. She knew for a fact that she and others were on the FBI list and would be immediately arrested if they ever set foot on the Island.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “They’re not all that efficient out there. Really.”
I hesitated. “Though undoubtedly you’re right at the top of the FBI list.”
Corinna scowled at me. Was I being sarcastic? I refused to meet her scowl. I looked around me, trying to fathom the response of other members. Everyone else was, it seemed—like Corinna—high on an FBI list, or too busy or committed to other projects. Still, I was surprised by the amount of resistance to my mild suggestion that the job of bail carrier be shared. The time for me to move on had come: Why was no one else willing to take over?
A spirited debate ensued about how to demand one’s individual file from the FBI through the new Freedom of Information Act. There was consideration of what would happen if the “long-term” Bail Fund members showed up on Rikers Island. The discussion gradually turned to me again, and I reiterated my desire to try something else at the Women’s House. It was then finally, crankily determined that Vicky Renslauer would make the trip to the Island with the bail money the next time, the trip I’d been making every week. It was further decided (though I wasn’t named directly this time) that one of us was being “uncooperative,” “bourgeois-neurotic,” and “counterrevolutionary,” and that a lesson could be learned from these reactionary attitudes. Much criticism/self-criticism bubbled up from a deep caldron of steeped implacabilities and appeared to refresh and calm everyone. Each dipperful from the ideological vat diluted the group’s tensions: the red sunset war paint gradually faded from each troubled face, and one by one lamps were turned on and a soft dusk-gold, color of appeasement, suffused the room.
I listened with a kind of masochistic interest to my condemnation as it turned to slow exculpation and then realized suddenly that I had to leave. It had grown late. I picked up my bag and stood up, then sat down again, pulling the strap over my shoulder as Corinna turned back to me, still smiling her grim smile, and inquired where I was going. Before I could answer, she shook her head at me again:
“By the way, what the hell is AfterCare?”
“It’s a program for women who are being released. They’re called ex-offenders, which I think is pretty funny.”
No one laughed.
“Anyway. The idea is to find jobs or job training or get them back into school. That kind of thing.”
A tall nervous long-faced woman in a frayed blue-striped poncho whom I hadn’t seen at our meetings before (though I’d heard it whispered earlier in the evening that she was a member of the Weather Underground) observed that I was playing into the hands of the System and was I aware of this? How did it feel to be made a pawn of the Establishment?
“Hey, sister,” she called out to me, her expression stony and contemptuous. She squinted at me as if she were half blinded by my sellout clothes and hair. “How naïve can you get?”
I stood up. “I have to go,” I said. I felt completely reckless now. “I’m expected at a dinner party.”
There was that straight-man silence, quite a long one—then Vicky offered the inevitable: “Mao said it perfectly for us, Holly: ‘A revolution is not a dinner party.’”
I learned to teach creative writing by comprehending without a doubt that it could not be taught—the approach I acquired by default in graduate school in San Francisco. One of our writing professors, in an attempt to teach us craft, noted that the most difficult things to describe were the familiar objects of every day.
“This chair, for example,” he said, hauling an empty straight-back to the front of the classroom. “How would you go about getting it on paper?”
We stared glumly at the creaky four-legged polished wooden seat, its sweat-stained, scratched back, and its single flappable wing, which was crisscrossed with scratched graffiti, designed to serve as a rickety desktop. How indeed?
That workshop was followed by a seminar with Dimitri Hajikakis, a Greek surrealist. He liked to reminisce at length about his years in Athens and Paris before he “broke with Breton.” An earnest student with waist-length hair, dress
ed in a shaggy sheepherder’s jacket with splinters of mirror stitched into the hide, reported to Prof Haj that we had spent the previous hour attempting to capture the essence of a classroom chair.
Prof Haj smiled ruefully, hoisted his shaggy eyebrows, and gazed out the window for a loaded second, then winked at the student, who smiled lazily back, shrugged, and shook out his hair, his mirror-shards catching the light, sending tiny prisms spinning about the room.
“But what would happen to your description,” Prof Haj asked, drawing out each word, his expression impish, “if the chair suddenly sprouted wings and flew?”
The bemirrored student laughed approvingly and the class members sat back in their indescribable chairs and also laughed, a little nervously, “Right on, Prof Haj!”
Professor Haj had taken an interest in me for some reason. He invited me to his office, where he reminisced at length about European literary capitals, shaking his head and laughing to himself. Later that year, near graduation, as I was preparing for a backpacking trip to Paris and beyond, he called me into his office and offered me two formal letters of introduction he’d written on my behalf: one to the French actress who was subletting his apartment in Paris (the apartment included an atelier, which he thought I might be interested in renting) and a second letter, to the underground filmmaker Maurice Girodias. I blushed with gratitude and embarrassment as I held the letters in my hand. An atelier in Paris was a gift beyond reckoning—and though the little I knew about Girodias fixed him in a category slightly above an artsy porn-flick director, I felt a hot shiver, a little red frisson of vanity. Was I really pretty enough to be in a French film? Then it struck me that I might be asked to take off my clothes for the camera. Maybe Prof Haj thought of me as a whore?
Channeling Mark Twain Page 3
