Human Rights Law

Ex Nihilo: X Marks The Spot

By blueness

There's a phrase in Egypt for something that is sold in the marketplace. Here's a pot that's made out of brass and here's another made out of brass. They're the same pot. This one is old and beat up; this one's brand new. The old one sells for more money. It's said that it has baracca; it means that it's been blessed; just the amount of hands that's touched it, the amount of eyes that have looked at it, have blessed it in some way and made it magic. You can tell what's good by how worn it is.
Always I'm reminded of French Peak up here. French Peak, for those who haven't kept track of it in the last ten years, is a place that they have been wanting to log so bad for so long that they don't really even want to log it any more, they want to fight about it. There are no roads through it, no wires through it--it exists at an elevation, about an hour from Eugene here, that no other wilderness area exists at. At one argument we were having about the French Peak area, a logger stood up and said, "All these long hairs, these ecologists, and stuff like that, they never go up there. They're just talking about it like it's an abstract idea. We're loggers and we know the place. We want to get into it." He says, "You're probably not even going to go up there this year." And I said, "That's probably right. I'm probably not going to go to the Library of Congress, either, but I don't want it logged."

I want it there forever, just like I want the Great Pyramid there forever so that I can go and look at it. "My God, look at that. There's that pyramid. I've seen it all my life on a pack of Camels; it's there; it exists on the face of this earth; it belongs to me."

My short story teacher at the University of Oregon was a guy named J. B. Hall. He was a controversial character there because he wore white shoes. At that time, wearing white shoes meant that you were either a faggot or a commie, or maybe both. Anyway, he at one time pointed out to me a part in a short story called "Soldier's Home" by Hemingway in which this guy Krebs has come home from the war and he's sitting there in the morning wondering what to do with the day--whether to go watch his sister play indoor baseball or just exactly what. His mother wants him to go get a job, but he doesn't want to move. As he's sitting there, he watches the bacon fat harden on his plate. And J. B. Hall says, "See, that's what it is. There's where it happens; right there." And I saw it. I saw, "Right! That's what it's about! That's what literature is about!" And a door opened up to me and it's never been closed. I thank this man from the bottom of my heart. It's a turn-on like--it has nothing to do with intelligence. It has to do with somebody grabbing somebody and saying, "I know something that's good. I'll give it to you for nothing. You'll have it all your life."

Everybody in this room has pretty much the same idea that I have about what the light is. One time somebody was saying, "But you're so much more enlightened than I am." Paul Foster was sitting nearby and says, "The light is seven million miles away and we're all clustered up back here at 5 inches, 5 1/2 inches, 6 inches, 6 1/2 inches." Maybe somebody's a half an inch ahead of somebody, but that's about all. When it comes to really going toward the light, the people in this room are about as enlightened as it gets. I know Baba Ram Dass, I know Tim Leary, I know all the honchos of enlightenment. There isn't a one of them that knows anything that everybody in this room doesn't know.

Martin Buber says there's a path of community. It's made up by a nation of people which extends over the whole globe--it knows no boundaries, it knows no ideologies, it knows no policies. It's a nation that has always been in there, in between various conflicting forces, trying to oil the waters as best as possible. It's a nation that knows itself and keeps track of itself, and if you think about it, wherever you've gone you've known this nation and you've always been strengthened by this knowledge.

An example when we went to Mexico two or three years ago. Instead of going down to the beach where the Grateful Dead and the cocaine was, my wife insisted we go up into the hills where the Mexicans were. As we walked up the hills--we had to park our car at the bottom--I felt eyes out in the bougainvillea and saw this 70-some-year-old woman up there washing dishes. She watched me go back and forth, kept track of me, and if I had come home drunk, had lascivious inclinations towards some of those Mexican girls, got out of line in any way--she would have filled my night with strange arrows. She had that whole number of blocks covered. When we left after three weeks she gave me one nod. It was all I was to get, but it was as strong an acknowledgement of human-to-human as you can get.

Ram Dass explained it this way: he said about 400 years ago the Baal Shem-Tov, the founder of modern Jewish Chasidism, came to the king and says, "King, the wheat is all poisoned and everybody that eats it this next year is going to go crazy." King says, "That's terrible." And he says, "I thought you would say that, so I have stashed back here enough wheat for you and I to make it through the year and we won't go crazy." The King says, "Now wait a minute. If I'm the King of these people and you're the rabbi to them, ought we not eat the same food and feel the same things so that we have a better idea how to do it?" The Baal Shem-Tov says, "I thought you would say that, too. So I thought that we'd give each other the chance to put a little X on each other's foreheads so that when we see each other later on in the street, we will know that we chose to go crazy, whereas everybody else is just crazy."

Driving through West Virginia, through this raped country, staying off the freeways where they've landscaped it, through this torn, terrible country, we passed this guy whose face was so much like the country that we didn't really see him out there hitchhiking. We picked him up later on in town when he walked up to the car and says, "Can I get a ride with you guys?" Almost 60, skinny guy who had done jail time or VA time, wearing khakis, wearing a baseball hat, with a six-pack of beer.

He says: "You guys just don't know. Last year," he says, "a couple young fellers came by here." He says, "I just finished a construction job, I had a lot of money, I had a brand new suitcase," he says, "these couple young fellers, they pick me up," he says, "they took me outside a town here. Man," he says, "they beat the piss out of me." He says, "I almost got away, up the bank, but one of the suckers got me by the ankles," he says, "they drug me back down there and they just beat the piss out of me." He says, "I finally got up to the road and I waved a car down and I got into the hospital." He says, "I've been hurt worse than that a lot, by machines and by cars and horses," he says, "but this was different."

And he says, "The cops finally came in about three days and took me back out there to the place and I got out there." And he says, "I saw the grass where it was all bent down and my blood was on it and," he says, "God, they just beat the piss out of me."

And it was like the nation spoke up through this guy. He was saying, some things hurt, deep inside of you. The spirit, the spirit, is hurt in this nation. And all the people whose spirit has not been hurt can help these people.

There's nowhere people are going to go to get away any more. I ran once because the cops were after me and went to Mexico, but I came back because this is where the action is. We're the frontier here. Nobody's gonna leave this country. Everybody who's tried, from Cleaver to Leary to Abbie Hoffman to all those draft evaders, they're all going to come back here because it's our country, and it's where we want to fight this battle.  

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on December 27, 2008 (boomark / email).