Guitarmy by Stacy Lanyon
Back in NYC talking about Hong Kong.
Murderers row.
Flowers of Evil.
New books and joys.
“How are
things?”
“Savage” I
tended to reply much of this decade,
mimicking an
old college friend who used to say the
same thing
when we lived
in the Haight Ashbury in the early 1990’s.
Since then
things have only become more and less like this.
It’s been
decades of it.
On Christmas
eve, the teenager and I found
ourselves watching the Fantastic planet/ le
planet sauvage,
a 1973 film
she saw in art class, tracing the trials
and
travails of the Oms, tiny human figures,
and their giant blue-skinned nemeses,
the Draags, of
the planet Ygam. For as long as anyone
can remember,
the Oms have lived in servitude.
Power dynamics
shift after a young Draag educates an Om.
Rebellion
ensues, breaking Draag control.
With Utopian
vs Dytopian outcomes at stake,
the two groups duel over their collective
futures.
Sounds
familiar.
In some ways
the Draags and Oms are still at it.
We wanna
wear those outfits said the teenager,
referring to her punk band the Cannibal Girls
and the
cool blue
coats the Draags wear.
In between a
trip to Mom’s in Princeton
where my
godfather and I discuss
Jean Genet and drank too many bottles
of champagne and a trip up to the Hudson
where we
explore Olana, the former
home to Frederic Edwin Church,
luminary of the Hudson River School of
landscape painting,
I wondered about the decade gone by.
My brothers
and I chatted about music and parents.
John talked
about Dad and his love for Fairytale of New York,
the old Pogues
homage to New York
that I played for Dad over and over in the days before he left.
Mom and I
talked about her favorite book, Little Women.
She first read
it when she was nine years old,
shortly after
the second war.
“I loved the
girls play-acting together,” gushed Mom,
reveling in
the solidarity she saw in them, a fellow feeling
that seemed to elude her in her life.
“I always
thought I’d be like Joe,
but it turned
out my life was more like Meg’s,”
Mom
conceded, looking back at her life,
more like the
sister who married the impoverished Latin
tutor than the
novelist.
She didn’t
feel like she had the glamour of Amy.
But at least
she avoided the fate of Beth,
who died of
scarlet fever.
I recall mom
reading this book to us
some forty
years ago.
"Has anyone written anything about the family
dynamic with
you and your brothers?"
wondered Dion
on Christmas,
my own
Brother's Karamazov,
"perhaps
the whole of that constellation is just a sort
of chemical
molecule.
Is there
a constellation of the lion and the sun..."
Dion, the
little one and I walk through the Princeton Museum,
Contemplating
images of illness and health.
You wanna see
my favorite painting here, I ask,
Walking
everyone to the Home of the
Heron,
George Inness'
homage
to a “correspondence” between this life
and that, a material world and a
spiritual realm,
where the
Heron sits in the woods, light shining on it
from
somewhere else.
Walking, I
wonder about what happened
over the last
year, much less, the last decade.
Was it a time
for progress or regress?
You never know
what is moving below the surface.
Over these
last few years,
I saw bodies
in the streets like I’ve never seen,
screaming
against the night.
Women’s marches
and anti-fascist brigades.
It might very
well be s time when democracy crumbled
as the
executive branch stacked the courts the congress
failed to check its power.
I’m
never one for premature autopsies.
And
we’re still fighting.
But the last
decade from Obama to Trump, from offense
to defense
gave me pause.
Observers of
the Andrew Johnson era reconstruction may
well have felt the same way after their
transformational leader
Lincoln
was taken out, replaced with someone not unlike
our current leader.
We
didn’t learn the lessons then.
We’re living
with the backlash now.
Looking back
on the year, much less the decade,
I think of the actions and luminaries.
The heroes who
came.
And those who
disappeared.
We lost Andrew
Velez, the greatest organizer I know.
A man who
attended thirty years of Monday ACT UP
meetings,
later.
None of us are
the same without him.
And there
was Aurilla,
killed on her bike,
Whose riding
was like poetry in motion.
tracing
"the hidden roads that go from poem to poem."
and Kitty, both
children of Occupy, gone way too early.
Each life
reminds me, activism is an ongoing narrative.
It is not a
paradise lost.
Between poems
and people,
Criminals and
heroes,
Create
something, they remind me.
Create
something better of this world.
I was not part
of as much as some.
Lisa
and LAK and VOCAL probably showed up more.
Rev Billy and
Savitri and the Choir were there.
Public spaces
rising and falling.
I never made
it standing Rock
But I didmake
it to the first Day of Occupy down
in Bowling
Greene and as many actions as I could
get to between unions meetings and classes,
bringing up
teenagers, taking care of an aging mom,
being a dad
and a husband and a student of rebel friendships.
Mostly they inspired. But sometimes they broke
my heart.
Friendship
breakups are the saddest thing of all,
I think she is
right.
The decade
began with public space battles over
the community
gardens and critical mass.
2010
- we spent the
summer working to Save the Gardens.
2011 - we
organized
2011 - we
organized the
and then Occupy popped
up.
up. We loved
it. Mourned it and celebrated it.
2012 -
witnessed Mayday actions reminding us
that all of our grievances are connected.
Occupy Sandy
built on the networks that were.
2013 -
the next summer, my favorite group,
Times Up crumbled.
Occupy the
Pipeline fought fracking.
A Public Space
Party grew out of the old.
Black Lives
Matter was born out of Occupy.
2014 - much of
the decade involved
a fight
for a livable planet,
with a
People’s Climate March,
Flooding Wall
Street.
2015 - Cop21
in Paris, fighting for a livable planet.
2016 -
witnessed chaos and fighting,
misinformation
and Russian interference in our election.
We
bickered and lost.
2017 -
resistance grew. Trump’s inauguration
was
overshadowed by the Women’s March
And campaigns
to save the ACA
Battling train
bombs, fascists, and fracked gas plants.
Meanwhile,
Trump’s wrecking ball destroyed
as much as it
could.
Taking out the
Paris Climate agreement,
DACA, and many
of the step forward during the Obama years.
2018 - fighting
the tax cuts and Kavanaugh,
with multiple
arrests.
2019 - saw
impeachment Rallies
and struggles to
save democracy.
Fighting the
Williams Pipeline.
Extinction
Rebellion kicking off in NYC.
Losing and
winning.
Arrest after
arrest as decade ended.
With battles
over the Supreme Court.
Speak outs every
week.
Trips to see a
whale
in New
Bedford, a witch in Salem, a city in Bucharest,
a heatwave
in New
Orleans, a rascal Washington,
DC,
Rhode Island
and Long Island, a Butterfly
protest in Prague,
off toTokyo,
Hanoi, and Cambodia,
And San
Francisco where
All of us
hoping to create something livable of
our lives and
communities of resistance.
In the chaos
of
the
present, I read as much as I could, finishing Capital
with my
friends at the Commons, Moby Dick, Nightwood
and Jean Genet
with the Activist Informed Reading Group.
A clerk at
City Lights said to read Baudelaire and
I
followed to my great joy.
The Flowers
of Evil lull and
tease.
Catherine and
Erik and I read Master and Margarita.
And Harold
Norse
charmed me on
the beach with his stories of
Auden and
Allen and Tennessee,
memoirs from the dead.
We read the
Bridge out loud, thinking
about sailors cruising along the waterfront.
And wondered
about the future, as words
soothed and
brought advice from the past.
The past was
with us, meandering
through an
ever-flowing present.
The activists
of Tiananmen who did not
survive that
June should have kids and grandkids.
Yet I was
lucky enough to live, to write, to have a life.
Ten more
books, two this year alone.
Narrating
practice with the youth who called BS.
Old stories
going so new stories can come.
Mysteries here,
Saying goodbye
to Luke
Perry.
And looking to
new adventures.
Have we moved
ahead?
No one
can say.
Progress moves
in odd directions.
Among people.
American
nutzos off the rains.
My frequent
arrest buddy Ken Schles writes:
“The
past follows me like the moon in the sky. I can’t escape
its hollow dead eyes or its beautifully cold
distant light.
The past is at
once frightful and haunting, comforting
and familiar, filled
with accomplishments, memories,
loss and
reminders of every possibility.
The past is
elusive, untouchable, deceitful.
It grows
bigger and bigger as it recedes into an
expanding
irretrievable darkness. But let me tell
you a secret: We
are conjoined escaped prisoners
from those collapsing times. To sink
back into the lifeless comfort of any
accomplishment
would a
betrayal of the present and to
possibilities for the future. The past
and future
are, perhaps,
counterintuitively, two sides of the
same knife
that intersect at a razor point in the present.
The trick, I gather, is to balance that knife
on its
deceptively thin sharp edge without drawing
too
much blood...The past and the future are
deceitful,
illusory Sirens. They whisper warnings
and dreams into our ears. But they are not
deterministic. They don’t predict our
fate.
To everyone
reading this I say: The future
is ours to
invent together. The future beckons us,
calls us, demands our participation, together.
Together I
believe we can heal this broken world.
The present is
where our possibilities start from,
and the future is where we’re going: headlong,
without brakes or seatbelts. And our guides?
They sit with
hindsight in our past.
After
listening to them long enough you know
you must turn
away and head on blindly.
Let us be neither overly optimistic nor
defeatist
as we move into a new decade. To all of
you
who share this
crowded and confusing realm
with me, let
us dream this life together.
I hope it’s a
good dream, filled with
possibilities
and hope. A place
where all good
possibilities still can live.#topnine #topnine2019”
Thank you Ken.
"....let
us dream this life together."
Thank you
activists and friends.
Can we
still be a city friends.
Can
democracy be that space where we all participate?
“We had the
right to vote as American citizens,”
noted Cokie R, before she shuffled off.
“We didn’t
have to be granted it…”
Have we used
it well?
Maybe?
Maybe not?
It’s a
complicated notion.
I’m tired of the
electoral college.
Abolish the motherfucker.
If voting
could do anything they
would make it
illegal.
But what
choice do we have?
We fight for
it.
John Lewis
fought for it.
He’s still
here.
So is my
favorite president Jimmy.
Reminding us
there are better angels of our nature.
But today may
be a time poets.
“Since
ignorance is on the increase,” Baudelaire
wrote in one
of his many drafts to the preface
of the 1857
collection Flowers of Evil.
“[It] dares
today for the third time to face the sun of stupidity”
God knows we
all are.
Especially here at play and ideas where I
wrote almost a
thousand blogs over the
last decade, tracing a story from my
dissertation
to today's disembodied,
sometimes
lyric dispatches from the front,
153 entries
this year alone,
a new record, sound and fury signifying...
“When its over
I want to say:
All my life
I was a bridge
married to amazement.
I was the
bridegroom,
Taking the
world into my arms.”
Thank you Mary
Oliver, poet born in 1935.
Thank you.
Godspeed.
Moving into
the next decade, I hope we
can all walk
with a little of that wonder.
