Researching On Activism, Friendship and Fighting, I talked with several friends about their experiences. Several came and went as the interview process continued, friends appearing and disappearing. One of these conversations was with Dr Kevin Dann, a radical tour guide, and self described “Cyclist (& wannabe Troubadour)” who shared insights with me about the ups and downs of the US transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. I included him as one of the interviewees in the book. On my way back to New York from Berlin, he sent me a copy of a writing project he was engaging in on Kafka. I realized I had not sent him a copy of the friendship book, which I sent him. For a while there as the pandemic ebbed and flowed, we met every Thursday for a pint at the Lakeside Lounge, a local watering hole, now a casualty of the Gowanus blandification rezone. We’d seen each other for years at bike events, with our bike gangs throughout New York City. Eventually, he moved upstate, and I moved to Berlin. We met there once, sharing confidences, but had not really seen each other. We’re all trying to make sense of living in a country, ever descending into an Orwellian order, where facts obfuscated with propaganda, protesters are shot, and labelled terrorists.
And the streets are filled with bodies.
On Sunday, Dr Dann sent me the following dispatch. The following is his reaction and meditation on the friendship book, which he helped me shape, published with his permission:
“I kept meaning to first say how grateful I was at all that you put me in that appendix interviewee list; and I kinda think you might have already written my preferred epitaph:
Kevin Dann Cyclist (& wannabe Troubadour)
1956 –
Here below is a lightly edited version of that letter; you are so awesome, you out–Mercury me every time, and I love it.
Love,
Kevin
PS I turned up those photos while looking for one of us together – but couldn’t find one. I will keep looking. . .
Dear Ben,
Thanks so much for sending On Activism, Friendships, and Fighting. I love that threefold title—and that right-out-of-the-gate Ben brashness: the jingly alliteration softening the bitter reality of the ever-present through line of conflict—dangerous, sometimes deadly conflict.
I’ve read it with deep gratitude. I love the voices—such irresistible voices. I love the Occupy chapter—Occupy, where my daughter Jordan and I discovered the activist inside each other (I agree 100% with your assessment of Occupy’s birth and death; I was thrilled by how you let the story unfold through Bill’s eyes). I love the way you speak so honestly and admiringly of Caroline. TimesUp! – where I fell in love with you. And I love coming to that twenty-year-old photo of curly mop–you carrying Keith Cylar’s image, and then pages later seeing you again – older, short hair – with another sign, wearing that telltale Ben Shepard frown—half anger, half sorrow, impossible to separate.
Your “Introductory Notes” really sing, Ben: profound scholarship braided with your poetic gift of gab, always in service of the ethical life. I felt it a unique honor to have Expect Great Things quoted there. I have forwarded the book on to a couple of friends whom I know will take immense comfort and inspiration from it.
The whole project has your signature gifts: tenderness, street-level intelligence, and a refusal to turn friendship into either sentimental fluff or ideological discipline. You’re honoring the way friendship actually works in movements—how it carries us, breaks us, repairs us, and sometimes saves our lives. That opening premise feels more urgent than ever. The book itself feels like an act of care.
Precisely because your title names that inescapable polarity—friendship and fighting—I want to write you with an invitation to consider another polarity, a more invisible one, between us.
In your roster of interviewees, I appear as “Cyclist.” That made me smile—because yes, that’s me, and I love that part of my identity. But I also felt a strange pang reading it, because it captures only one slice of what I’ve been doing all these years. And I realize I’ve never properly told you the larger story. I want to ask you—plainly, as a friend—to consider me as an activist of a different sort.
My “cause,” if I can even call it that, has been a lonely one: to pioneer a serious, spiritually-informed, apocalyptic conversation—apocalyptic in the true sense of unveiling—about reincarnation and karma as real forces in biography, history, and the American soul. I’ve been working at this for twenty years, and I’m increasingly aware that this is one of those causes where you don’t get a movement, you don’t get a crowd, you don’t get a megaphone. You mostly get polite silence, scandalized faces, and the subtle social message: don’t bring that here.
Which is why I’m writing you now.
Because Ben—you don’t shrink back from serious conversation. You don’t flee complexity.
You don’t turn away when things get morally difficult, emotionally raw, or socially dangerous.
That’s part of why your friendship matters to me.
So here is what I’m trying to bring before you. In October, I presented my Emerson/Thoreau reincarnation research at the Harvard Divinity School Transcendentalism gathering—Concord, the whole mythic setup, a small intimate circle, the kind of room where you’d think genuine intellectual risk could happen. I was one of the invitees, there to help Charlie Stang with his bold project of kickstarting Transcendentalism as a spiritual/social movement in the early 21st century (a premise that made me belly-laugh too, I admit).
I spoke about what I’ve found regarding Thoreau’s prior incarnation—and how that karmic fact reshapes the Emerson–Thoreau relationship, not sentimentally, but structurally: it changes the whole spiritual geometry of their friendship.
Not one soul could speak a word in reply, Ben. Not disagreement. Not curiosity. Not even the courtesy of “tell me more.” Just the look-away. The social anesthesia. The gentle refusal.
Then again at the Div School itself in December—at the “Rudolf Steiner at 100” gathering—I gave a talk naming Steiner’s prior incarnations and the Bodhisattva stream, trying to speak soberly and carefully, grounded in the actual karmic research.
Again: recoil, silence—this time from both the academics and the anthroposophists. I came home from Cambridge shaken.
Because at a certain point the question isn’t “Do people agree?” The question becomes: what kind of culture are we living in, if even institutions devoted to spirit and truth can’t tolerate reincarnation being discussed as a matter of serious historical inquiry?
I have just written a book about Trump’s prior (evil) incarnations—not as a parlor trick, not as a metaphysical flex, and not as some “interesting” reincarnation curiosity. I wrote it because I’m trying to come to grips with the naked brutality he has stirred up in the American soul, and the way it has entered the streets, entered families, entered friendships, entered the air we breathe.
I’m trying to understand the karma of this moment, and I don’t know how to share that work—how to even begin to let it breathe in the world—when so many people instinctively step back right at the threshold.
This is the battleground I’m standing on now: not left vs. right, not even activism vs. reaction, but the deeper epistemological fight over what kinds of truth we are allowed to name.
Yesterday I cried at lunch when I heard what went down again in Minneapolis—a city I love, a city that gave me friendships and intellectual life when I did a semester of my postdoc there almost thirty years ago. I heard the news and I just broke. It felt like the same wound reopening in the national body.
And I thought of you. When you wrote that you were leaving Berlin, I pictured you flying straight to Minneapolis—because that’s the Ben Shepard I know: immense heart, immense head, immense hands. The kind of person who would show up. The kind of person who would try to help hold the line where things are burning.
But here is what I want to say, as gently as I can: what’s unfolding in Minneapolis, and everywhere, is not only political. It is karmic, a cipher for something unresolved in the American soul—something older than our current vocabulary can hold. And if we cannot widen the conversation to include that dimension, we will keep fighting symptoms while the deeper cause keeps reproducing itself.
So I’m writing to ask you, Ben—not for agreement, not for endorsement, not for you to “convert” to anything—but simply to meet me here, with your full intelligence and your full courage, to read what I’ve written in the spirit of friendship.
To treat reincarnation and karma not as fringe ornament, but as one possible language for making sense of why history repeats, why brutality returns, why some forces feel almost “possessed,” and why our social conflicts often feel like they’re carrying something ancient and unfinished.
That’s what I’m doing. And I’m asking you, as a friend, not to leave me alone in it. Can you work through that problem with me, Ben?
With love, gratitude, and a shiver of gooseflesh at the prospect of what lies around the next bend,
Kevin”
Attached to the email, a document with a quote:
“Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. But the Genius which according to the old belief stands at the door by which we enter, and gives us the lethe to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday. Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience” (1844)..”
I’ll meet you there Kevin.
Thank you Dr Dann.
