Like What Wall Street Looks to Me Appearing Here that I am Far Away from You and With

I’m not really sure what’s happening in America. I read about it on my computer, links on Facebook posted by my friends, brief comments and calls to action through the internet. There are people occupying Wall Street, and I feel strange about it. Although I'm proud of them — I like the images of strangers sleeping side by side, together in the street and covered in each other’s cardboard signs and placards, borrowing the sleeping bags of friends they’ve only known hours — I live in Thailand, or at least for now I do, and I feel incredibly far away. Like their fight isn’t my fight, though I hope some good will come of it. Like somehow, terribly, I’m not a part of things in the country that I’m from. And in a place where I can’t speak to people, this means that I’m alone.

I don’t want to be alone.

           

Maybe I’ve been gone too long. No, it’s only been a month. Maybe, then, I left before I left, the spirit leaving long before my body did. Maybe it was years ago. How much time has passed since I actually really cared?

When I was young, I used to make believe I was a youthful revolutionary, dress up dark in filthy patchwork clothes and scream in punk bands on the weekends, loud as I could. At the age of sixteen I went to an EarhFirst! rendezvous in Crandon, WI. There, cops chased us onto an Indian reservation. Half terrified, half proud, I called my dad to tell him I'd be in jail. Also, an occupation of a park in Minneapolis. In the middle of the night I hauled cement which we mixed and placed in holes so protesters could physically attach themselves to metal bars cemented in the ground, their wrists chained within the earth they were trying to protect. “Dragon Traps” I think we called them, or something to that effect. The worst, though, and this I still feel sick about, was the way I used to pride myself on a riot I was in and partially started, like being beaten up by cops meant my life was meaningful and more important than the lives of people who hadn't been in riots. At the time, I really felt it, passionate and full of rage, raw love in a world of mediocrity. Sometimes I wish I still did.


Somewhere, though, maybe in my middle twenties, the spirit kind of faded, puttered out and changed. Focusing instead on pretty girls and poetry, and ultimately on school, I cut my dreadlocks off, put my favorite pair of pants away. Instead of Chomsky, I started reading Beckett. I gave up screaming in a punk band, got good at writing poems, and learned to cook. I’m not sure why this happened, or what it was that I got tired of, what it says about me as a human being, but lately, especially when I read about the people in New York and in other cities across the country expressing solidarity, I’ve been feeling a whole lot like I need to say I’m sorry.

The problem is: to whom do I apologize? The second problem: what do I do to stop this feeling altogether, kill it quickly where it hurts, right here, right now in Thailand.

The first person I need to say I’m sorry to is a friend of mine from Iowa, a poet named Adam, whose work, both in and away from poetry, is about as good as work can get. He’s been in the city, at the occupation taking care of protesters, making sure they're warm. I feel bad because he’s done so much. I haven’t. And I don't want to let him down. The other day, in Bangkok, after not hearing from him for very many months, I turned on my computer, an email, and started reading this:

#occupywallstreet

#happywiththewaythingsaregoing

#writingandactivismmerging

#inwaysthatareexciting

#andnew

spending time

in the occupation

in new york

recently

was wonderful

i joined the comfort working group

which helped people get blankets

and tarps

and warm dry sweaters

it's been raining a lot

i worked with

great people

it reminds me

of how you like the country

and your punk past

and how much of an asset

you are

and will be

in the revolution

you're always invited

to come stay with me

wherever

we are

Unlike Adam, I am incredibly uncertain how to be political anymore and continue writing poetry, a problem which Oppen, perhaps the most important and influential poet in my life, solved by abandoning poetry altogether. I am not, at least by most standards, and most certainly not anymore, an overtly political personality. Obviously Adam is, my friend in prison, Ian, was, and of course there’s the mass of bodies huddled in New York. But me, I faked it so I could listen to punk rock and not be called a poser. And now I don’t even listen to punk rock. I live in Thailand where the government my friends are attempting to affect gives me money to be a poet. I’m not even writing poetry. America is far away.

Last year, I was living with my girlfriend in Montana when the men, women, and children of Wisconsin tried to take their state back, my state. My parents were down in Madison. My friends from Minneapolis, from Chicago, from Iowa, they were all in Madison as well. They, and however many thousand others, seventy or more if I remember right, god. Every morning, I’d get on my computer as though it made me closer somehow, more back at home than not home. I’d listen to the news on NPR and shake with excitement in my living room, I was that proud. "Jane!" I'd say, "You'll never guess how many are there right now!" When people in Missoula talked about the protests, I’d make sure they knew where I was from. Those were my people, my friends and family filling up the streets.

Ultimately, I think, I want my life to be a part of the lives of the people and the places I belong to, the men and women standing there together in Wisconsin and in New York, whose beliefs are my beliefs, or at least I hope they are. I can’t be certain, which is a problem. I only think I have beliefs, I know I used to, but these days, given the complexity of trying to make sense of everything, it isn't quite that easy. Again, I can’t be certain. It isn’t clear how much of me authentically responds, and I mean actually authentically responds, to the sentiments expressed on Wall Street. I can say I’m with them, click on links and "like" things, I can put up a lonely blog post, but at the end of the day, I’m here. I write poetry which only occupies the page.

Part of this is that I don’t totally understand the situation. I know there are the less rich people upset with the more rich people, the 1% referred to on the signs raised high against the New York City skyline. That, I get. Our country's in a lot of trouble and it looks like a select few made a big fat killing helping it to be that way. Furthermore, I’ll never be a rich person, so, for me, the extremely rich are easy targets. Plus, it doesn’t seem much like they really give a shit about me either, or about most people for that matter, or about the planet on which the rest of us depend for absolutely everything. But this, the extent that I “get it” and to which I share and hold beliefs, not only am I severely limited in my knowledge of the situation, my faith in what I think and feel is rooted almost totally in abstract, shaky ground, an unclear ethic turning over in the gut that feels a lot like hunger. 


My hope is that maybe hunger is enough. If it really is a kind of hunger, a need for nourishment at the level of the spirit which isn’t full without it, a craving for something bigger and more meaningful than what I am alone, than that is my one demand. I mean this in the biggest, most beautiful sense, passion and companionship, a desire to be numerous, fodder in the form of love. I get it and I demand it because its happening, right here, right now, the process of the feeling rising up and slowly taking over, my nascent solidarity. Maybe, if Adam's right, this, the process of beginning to feel, is what all the fuss is actually about, a demand by people for people to finally be people, a process going on en mass and then, hopefully, in each of us, a way to feel alive in the face of forces, too numerous to name, that tell us we're apart. Lately, the further and further I feel from the people and the places that I care about, the more I read about New York, look back upon Wisconsin, the louder and louder it seems to get, the hunger, screaming from my stomach, no longer abstract. The more I listen, the more it’s there, growing, political and more than politics, the more and more I’m home.