(side note: at some point I finished Tantra: The Path of Ecstasy, by Georg Feuerstein; I do not feel like writing about it now. my Reading Log is not going as well as I’d hoped.)
this weekend I went to San Francisco. the first time I went to San Francisco, I was still a naive 17 year old who wanted to see City Lights and the Haight Ashbury, to feel what it must have been like to be an American bohemian living radically against the grain of bourgeois society. back then, there was still some sense of possibility, that I could be a beatnik or a hippie, burning burning burning, throwing myself headlong into the fullness of experience, devoted to making art and Sticking It to the Man.
this time I went to San Francisco with my very stable live-in girlfriend and our dog.
there’s nowhere in the city nowadays to eke out a living on the cheap. or, well, I’m sure there is, but so much of it’s been gentrified in the last 20 years by Homo Techbroius that it’s practically impossible to live there and have a good time without making at least six figures. (whether you’d even be “having a good time” in the way I mean at that point is a separate but related question I won’t get into right now.) this seems to be true of so many places in the US, if not the world over. it’s said so often nowadays that it’s a cliche to even dwell on it, but there really doesn’t seem to be any counterculture to speak of.
on the drive home, I paid three dollars to get past the Patreon paywall for Ghost Stories for the End of the World, a podcast I’d heard about a few times but always felt sort of averse to because I hate when people say we’re at the end of the world. but we listened to an episode about Patty Hearst on the way up the coast, and then an episode about the Wonderland murders on the way down, and I figured it’s probably better to throw this dude a few dollars and get some solid deep politics content to listen to for a month than it is to give The Adam Friedland Show more money. so for the last stretch of the drive I put on the first of two episodes about the Zodiac Killer. these episodes feature everyone’s favorite American mercenary-cum-podcaster Brace Belden.
in the first part of the episode, Belden makes the same point about San Francisco that I just did, about everyone being priced out. he also makes the point about how the present state of San Francisco, as the bleeding edge of technocratic neoliberalism, can trace its genealogy back through the very counterculture I once romanticized, and to some extent still do. he says (paraphrasing here) “it’s not like the Beats are directly responsible for the installation of walls on Market Street that reflect piss back at the person pissing on the wall, but there’s a pretty clear through line.” meaning that, despite the radicalism and the utopian ideals once espoused by hippies yippies and Black militants, the ultimate heritage of the 60s Bay Area is seen in the rise of Silicon Valley, the selling out of people like Jerry Rubin, and all the deranged market financialization that came along with it, which has culminated in San Francisco zipcodes being a status symbol among the 21st century’s nouveau riche who don’t want to live with riffraff.
I saw quite a few copies of Palo Alto, the latest publication from Malcolm Harris detailing this through line, for sale at City Lights. I didn’t buy it, because I’m trying to focus more on fiction and poetry right now, so instead I dropped $55 on Black No More by George Schuyler, The Western Lands by William S. Burroughs, and the 50th anniversary edition of Revolutionary Letters by Diane di Prima, which I read and finished over the weekend.
reading the first set of poems in Revolutionary Letters was genuinely bracing. here were artifacts of a time when people really, genuinely felt that it was possible we were on the verge of creating a better world freed from the hang ups, stupidities and greed of Western civilization. not that creating that world would be easy, far from it. many of the poems are almost shockingly “artless” but all the more effective for it: instructions for what supplies to have on hand in case of emergency, advice on how to deal with a State apparatus designed to crush people’s spirit, reminders that the only thing we can rely on is each other. but the lucidity with which these “letters” outline practical action is predicated on a sincere belief in the power of resistance both political and spiritual, something that’s not often found nowadays. alls that’s to say I felt a fire in me I long worried was extinguished rekindled.
as the poems progress from the late 60s through the 2010s, there’s never any sense that di Prima wavers in her conviction, but there’s a subterranean feeling of tragedy as she’s forced to contend the first Gulf War, 9/11, Obama’s presidency. one particularly direct and devastating letter (#102) reads:
soon the only ones
who'll know how to find us
will be Google
& those small
surveillance drones
despite the sense of regret and loss that permeates the later poems, some of the most invigorating also come late in the collection: #100, subtitled “REALITY IS NO OBSTACLE,” asks us to “come to no end that is not/a Beginning”; #105 urges that “we need to look/Not at what’s wrong/but what is possible“
in a conversation with my dear friend Angie, whom I visited this weekend, she said that a lot of life is about making a decision and acting on it, rather than miring oneself in doubt and hesitation. at another point, I said that a lot of the time when we believe something isn’t possible given decisions we’ve made, that’s a trick we play on ourselves, usually rooted in fear.
later that night, angie asked if I’m happy with my life. I told her I’m trying to accept being pretty stable with an actually healthy relationship, something I’m not used to because part of me craves volatility and discomfort and friction. but seeking that kind of external conflict is a way to avoid facing the intense emotional turmoil I already carry with me, and the last six months or so have been a process of working towards squarely facing myself. I told her that if what I really want to do is make art then I need some measure of stability, because art only arises when the artist is afforded opportunity to reflect and concentrate without base level concerns getting too much in the way. she asked me if that’s true about art, and I said it was, pretty emphatically at the time.
but I’m not so sure Diane di Prima would agree.
