In this thawing river of change that is the American scene we would dream revolutions moving faster even than the incessant, illimitable, expanding movement that is the American restlessness. This continent discovered by white Europe in motion westerly wandering toward the sun when in the 10th century the Vikings accidentally landed in New England, abundant, wildly flowering and called it Vinland; then set up a colony and sought fame and fortune, and almost immediately soaked native earth in internecine massacres and violent ambushes of skraelings (Indians) in order to keep the milk they had traded for animal skins. Rediscovered in motion of Europe's expansion; settled by England's growing fanaticism toward centuries of empire and ruined by commerce as Charles Olson has proven in Maximus Poems:
"...one's forced,
considering America
to a single truth: the newness
the first men knew was almost
from the start dirtied
by second comers. About seven
years
and you can carry cinders
in your hand for what
America was worth.
....We know
what Levett Smith or Conant
didn't, that no one
knew better
than to cash in on it. Out,
is the cry of a coat of wonder."
(Capt Christopher Levett
of York) p. 134-5
This triumvirate of movement, commerce and murder, this incredible westering has ruthlessly swept races, earth, and feeling before it. Then at our ocean borders movement turned upon itself, whirlpools of murder and massacres of feeling, teeming commerce of insatiable desires, assassinations rooted in feuding oligarchies and religious wars. Murder and commerce indistinguishable twins of deformed love; murder and commerce in supermarkets, our suburban homes, our universities ("towers open fire") our ghettoes, our factories, the fabric of lives now weaving its bloody woolens over the Pacific for loose credit, cheap labor, and ultimate markets of human desire. Madave tapping the drum beating the heart of yellow races into submission.
Aware now that there is an erotic web binding murderer to victim, an erection in the abysmal wound of bleeding throat, we can see the real victim of bloodthirst and money is feeling, or more precisely, man's feeling for woman and woman's feeling for man and everyone's unknowable, imminent feeling for the ecstatic body of God and self or the freedom we can not know or barely glimpse in our barbarity and slavery.
In the vortex of roving bands of teenagers in Peking, rock and roll dance halls, gangs of white and blacks in all large steel purgatories of America, artists liberation fronts, communists, democrats, brechtians, capitalists, new lefts and old rights, we must affirm that the source of creation and community is self and its cellular chants of lifelove felt but unmarketable, and unsaleable, ungiveable and untakeable. Whatever or whoever would brutalize, organize, use himself, you, or me, surrenders his one hope for being in his own body, his own fully felt experience of the effulgence of life and becoming upon which a community of men and women can depend, live, work, create and love with honor and all but natural deathlessness.
Secretly behind all illusions of order, civilization, law and tongue wipings of rhetoric the anarchic, natural, wild condition of body exists in an invisible present, in the forgotten past and in the imagined future, except that it is hidden by the ramifications of "knowledge" and "power" constrained by the conceptual culture of profit and propaganda into the image of ugliness and arrogance we call America. The moment the IS of eternity in time is personally and overwhelmingly felt it will appear in NOW in our relations of flesh and then in wood, clay, glass, steel, word, paint, that is, in building and creation. The body and being of man is all fountains of youth and heavenly apparitions.
Allen Cohen
Essay appeared in OR-OAR-ORE and Haight Ashbury Tribune.
