Heaven and Vienna and A Cold Dry Wind (from 2009)

You may have ideas of heaven, and however vague they float like wispy clouds in your mind, they probably coalesce to paint a happy destination of general good will and relaxed anxiety. Popular western notions concerning this utopia will, if tapped, include an endless expanse of puffy cloud upon which one reclines and catches up with friends and loved ones who’ve arrived earlier in the season. So it’ll be like Fort Lauderdale, Florida with your aunt, uncle and stray cousins. If your imagination never developed much past early childhood—or if you cherish as literal fact the vast painted representations adorning the world’s great galleries—you’ll visualize ducking the heavy swooping wings of angels, refraining from admonishing the cherubs about caloric intake, and participating in mandatory harp circles sans campfire.

I once read a fundamentalist Christian tract that invoked the glorious rewards of the afterlife by insisting that true believers will invest their time praising God and judging angels, which to me veers frighteningly close to sucking up to the boss and burying yourself in endless clerical work. Imagine spending the afterlife at the DMV. If you’re of the jihadist hue and are, for better or worse, martyred in a holy war, heaven awaiting you will include seventy or so…well, here’s where meanings muddy up in translation. The fashionable reading in western mainstream media has Islamic martyrs encountering virgins. Young, unmarried women, flowers intact. As I like taunting my students, unless footnotes offer specifics, a recently martyred sauntering through heaven’s pearly gates could very well stumble upon seventy spinsters pitching back in forth in a chorus line of rocking chairs vying to darn his socks and knit him a sweater. Actually, my 12th graders will occasionally get into arguments over interpretations of Muslim culture and Koranic scripture; it’s all wonderfully entertaining, as there exist different ideas of exact wording, and you can tell when the arguments gets overheated when their exchange retreats from English into a fiery Arabic. One of my brightest 11th graders, a devout Muslim, claims—quite astutely—that the Arabic or Koranic word we take as “virgin” has no exact translation. The closest he offers is “one who gives pleasure.” So if you arrive unexpectedly in Paradise, and didn’t pack a sweater, a gray-haired and hunched spinster with an impish grin twirling sewing needles might be heaven indeed.

Whatever our dreams of heaven, we rarely lay scrutiny to the implications of our assumptions. If we think heaven at all, we usually imagine ourselves somehow there, in a place, not quite believing that all will forever be well but trembling in our heart at the joyous approach of a loved one running toward us, a welcoming and familiar smile, tears in the eyes sparkling off celestial light, a hand reaching for ours, reunion at last. And your first words will be: “Why, you haven’t aged a bit.” The problem with this pastoral is time. As in a long time. As in a windy, heaving bellow of eternity. Imagine, if you will, living another hundred years upon this airy glorious landscape (I’m granting all readers a healthy and happy longevity). You’ll catch up each other with family goings-on. You’ll have to deal with omniscient loved ones long deceased who’ve been watching and waiting all these years, and all under heaven will be known. “I distinctly remember telling you before I died not to sell granny’s china. And what do you do? I’m not in the ground two days before granny’s china appears on Ebay....” Your grandfather—somehow looking exactly how you last saw him—escorts you to meet John F. Kennedy, or Genghis Khan, or Queen Elizabeth, or Rasputin, or John the Baptist, or John the barber, or Bette Davis, or Miles Davis, or point out the brownstone flat where Jesus composes string quartets under the furrow-browed eyes of Beethoven, or even meet commoners who never made the front page but can regale with tales of toga parties in ancient Greece, and are damn good listeners to boot. Meeting and greeting the luminaries could soak up a good hundred years easy. Then what? You can spend many hours ironing out thorny metaphysical problems once and for all, as answers should most likely be forthcoming; if the answers don’t dissolve the questions, then I don’t know what you’re going to do. If you’ve been martyred, your troubles are far from over. Besides the obvious, what else are you going to do with seventy virgins? Set up Scrabble tournament leagues?

Furthermore, whatever you do in life, either here or the hereafter, it’ll eventually get boring. So let’s imagine: another lifetime passes in heaven. Let’s ramp it up. A thousand years roll by. How about another thousand? By this time you’ve discussed every topic under the sun with everyone in the peaceful region. You’ve come to grips with the unpleasant reality that death does not, as assumed, exempt you from taxes. You can’t bear to hear another rendition of Handel’s “Messiah,” and, having written forty-seven incredibly intricate symphonies yourself, mastered every musical instrument, learned Dutch, French, Armenian, Persian, Greek, Latin and various Inuit dialects, and can recite lengthy passages from the Koran, Shakespeare, and Homer in your sleep, your passions are long fulfilled, your cup runneth over. Well, buck up, as a thousand years, ten thousand years, a million years await you…ten million years is a drop in the sloshing bucket of eternity. You’ve still a long, long way to go, longer than you can imagine. It is taking this thought into your gut, the squishy marrow of bone, your dark and icy soul, that you’ll understand the necessity of death. Paradoxically, you need to know the journey will end, for life pulses with meaning only when death towers over the shimmering horizon. Better, then, to cast off notions of heaven with its looming eternity, let the dead bury the dead; instead, scoop up a handful of clear mountain stream and drink, smile at a glowering stranger, pick up a guitar and play, give that homeless guy a twenty, read your Shakespeare, and if you can’t be with the one you love, honey, love the one you’re with.

For me, heaven is a small, fleeting affair. Heaven occurred on a cold night in Vienna, Austria, around Christmas Eve. Carrie and I had wandered out of the stony gray, weathered and soaring Romanesque St. Stephan’s Cathedral, the cornerstone of which was laid in 1137. The old cobbled streets were teeming with tourists and shoppers and families and friends bundled in heavy coats, wrapped in thick wool scarves, gloved hands tucked in pockets, puffing icy breath and leaning into the cold. Sparkling lights were strewn festively between buildings. Performers played the violin in mittens. Vendors stood behind steaming grills of sausage, chestnuts and salty thick wedges of fried potatoes. We’d spent the day walking, having rented an apartment a few blocks from the Danube for the two weeks over Christmas break, a week after that in Salzburg. We awake, fix breakfast, sip coffee and check the park beyond the windows of our forth story flat for snow on the rooftops and grass and hoods of parked cars. Then we’d wander the glorious, refined and clean Vienna.

This particular evening found us at one of the Christmas markets that seasonally bloom in Germany and Austria. Temporary dark small buildings, like shacks, similar to the hamlets set up for Renaissance fairs, where you can buy crafts for presents, glass ornaments, dried meats and cheeses, gigantic pretzels, more pork sausages…I bought a dapper hat for my nappy head. Christmas lights glowed and glittered in the trees, songs wafted between buildings. Heaven, for me, came in a ceramic mug. One of our dear friends here in Aleppo, Andrea, is from Germany and works for the ICARDA research center at Tel Hadiya, twenty minutes outside of the city toward Damascus, “the farm” as it’s called. She told us about gluvien, the hot spiced wine that appears during the holiday season. So here we were. We shuffle up to the stall, order a gluvien, the vendor warms blue ceramic mugs then dispenses the elixir from a steel canister, steam billows as the dark liquid fills the holy vessel, we throw down euros and take our mugs in both hands to where a high table stands empty. The coral reef spires of distant cathedrals silently watch over the city, the celebration of Christmas tingles in the frosty air, proud horse-drawn carriages amble down the avenues as of old amidst the cars and buses, the folks around you smile and laugh, Vienna sings with the memories of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and we huddle close and feel the warmth of the gluvien soak through our gloves into our hands, and then drink. Hot wine against the chill, the spice of winter life. That’s my idea of heaven, let’s hear yours….

One of the famous market streets in Vienna is on a narrow island between two busy streets, Naschemarkt. Long booths and vendor stands line the strip, and shuffling down the center you are assailed with aromas of strong cheeses, fresh vegetables, meats, gluvien, breads, chocolates, sweetly soaked barrels of wine, salty fish, roasting nuts, spices, kebabs, samosas, sauerkraut, fruits. Passing by a shack—probably half the size of an average bedroom—we saw four people huddled and standing around a small round table out front, their faces sheltered and hidden under an awning. On the table was a large platter of sliced meats and cheeses, like a sample tray. Through a small window a proprietor was standing in shadow. A small door stood on one side. It was rather spooky, and daunting, as though a portal to another sinister dimension. Brave, Carrie and I opened and entered. Warmth breathed on our chilled bones. On our right stood a narrow counter six feet long, and inside was what amounted to a foyer, large enough to hold five people standing close. Six people huddled in the small space, and we made two more. Behind the counter, a father and two twenty-something sons, all looked healthy and strong like woodsmen. Behind them, before them, all around them, were meats and cheeses, dried, smoked, cured, the works. Aromas were heavy, spicy, damp, sour, sweet, oily, salty, dark, severe, and delicious. A few standing patrons shared a platter of meats and cheeses. One of the sons spotted us, offered a wide happy smile, and asked if we’d like to share a plate. He’d slice off a sampling of faire. We agreed. Then he spoke the most beautiful words one can hear on an early afternoon coming out of the winter into a warm room: “How about a couple glasses of wine?” A minute later Austrian wine drifted into our hands. The woodsman sliced and shaved and soon a platter arrived on the counter to linger over. We turned, but there was nowhere to go, a packed house. “That’s fine,” he said, “just stay there, no problem. Enjoy!”….

What has become of the traditional café? I remember a café in downtown Sacramento when I was in college, can’t remember the name, 20th between H and I streets, my Sacto friends? A small faded red brick building with an alley alongside. Late afternoon, rain lightly splattering the sidewalk and dancing off the huge trees, but inside faint, diffused light poured through the front glass and illuminated the quiet space, light that seemed to have soaked through a dusty curtain in the sky. The tables and chairs were thin and rickety. I remember the guy behind the counter, elderly with shaggy wild gray beard, sitting on a stool, head bowed scanning a newspaper. From behind him came lilting strings from a classical station on his small radio. Coffee was strong, real mugs and saucers, plain, simple lines along the ceiling and modest black and white photographs on the walls. It was a clean, quiet café, and glancing up now and again from your book to see the rain haze the afternoon into blue evening, the room preserved a kind of sanctuary for the soul. Weatherstones, that was the name. My favorite café, and I’ve never found another like it. Walk into cafes now, and everyone sports a laptop, bulwarks standing ready to rebuff unwanted social encounters like guards before a citadel. Or, laptops as drawbridges perpetually drawn up, over which fire deadly sharp glares if you happen to approach and cross into the owner’s protected realm. Leave your cramped, dark, isolated apartment to isolate yourself and glower at petty emails. A book can start conversations. I had a friend who told me how he met a woman he dated for awhile. He was in the Pig & Whistle Irish pub off Geary and Masonic in San Francisco. He had a pint of Guinness, and the woman watching him was intrigued by the sight of this guy laughing out loud reading passages from Joyce’s Ulysses. Can you imagine siding up to someone and saying “So, what email are you reading?” A philosophy professor once told us about being a student in France, sitting with his friends at the feet of Sartre and Camus as they held forth in cafes of Paris. And now? Cafes have become antisocial. Where once they were places to enjoin conversations and share ideas, cafes have become shiny, soulless boutiques. And why do the young people behind the counter think their blaring repetitive house electronica creates an appropriate mood? I hereby declare that only jazz or classical shall be at quiet volumes allowed in cafes. And don’t get me started on sweet flavored seasonal crappacinos and the like. Lord have mercy, folks, grow up. All good things must end, ‘tis true. But good cafes are few, and it’s hard to witness their vanishing.

We found one in Vienna. There are restaurants, there are cafes, and often mixing the two invites disaster. Not so at Café Westend. High ceilings fading an elegant, soft turquoise, inlaid wood of vines and branches. Dull white curtains hung in the window. We took a booth in the center and ordered goulash and bratwurst and a couple of tall dark beers. At one table a large laughing family shared a late lunch. Over my shoulder in a booth sat a young man with shaved head in a leather brown jacket, accompanied by two young women in short skirts and heels who seemed bored, sitting gracefully rigid, proud of their cleavage. The young man was talking quietly, but emphatically, hands on the table, in an earnest soliloquy, glancing up at the women occasionally as though fishing for admiration of his accomplishments. The women shot glances at one another, delicate quick smiles, mildly entertained at the young man’s self-absorbed charm. I couldn’t figure out their deal. Were they prostitutes from Eastern Europe getting the scoop on their employer’s competitive healthcare plan? Fans overhead swung slowly, gallantly. The light had the hue of pale golden sand, and the presence of a good waiter: rarely glimpsed but essentially present. The waiters here are all old men in dark suits and ties. Near the windows at a corner table, two young people were chatting, leaning toward one another in the easy thrall of early love. Comfortable and trusting, they’d inch closer to whisper, and then exchange kisses. The kisses were not wet and passionate, but seemed to serve as punctuation marks in their conversation. Next booth over was an old man’s head hunching out of a dark plaid jacket, wisps of gray hair spraying in a riot from his oval, blemished skull. A pipe veered into view every few minutes as he turned to scan the right side of his newspaper, while snowy blue smoke rose in splashes around his sagging face. Somewhere, music, a waltz begins. A woman at a table alone looks through the window and lingers on the day. She pulls her hair back and binds it with a rubber band, her blond strands dangling loosely on a Sunday in Vienna. ….

Darkness had fallen when our driver picked us up at the small airport in Gazientap just across the Turkish border for our drive to what is home. Our driver is Turkish, but lives in Aleppo and spoke Arabic as well, so for a fee we were driven to and from the airport and had his assistance getting through the border crossings, a bureaucratic nightmare worthy of Kafka. The roads were dark. From the back seat we watch the oncoming cars and listened to Turkish music on the radio. I kept noticing the oncoming cars turning on their brights as they approached. Nearly every car! I couldn’t understand it, and immediately felt disdain for the drivers. Was that how Syrians drove, finding different ways to annoy? Already their weaving in and out of traffic and trying to squeeze between our Volvo and a large truck earned my middle finger a few times, although the offenders probably interpreted it as wishing Syria the best in next year’s World Cup. But how completely asinine was it to shoot your brights at us! Immediately I deemed them culturally inferior. We knew the right way to drive. We’d gone another five or so miles when I realized that our driver had his brights on, and of course the other cars were warning him, to which he paid no attention. It was a good lesson learned: how quickly we assume our view is the correct one, that how we see things is exactly how they are, in other words, reality. But in truth, we first and foremost have perspectives; we see and interpret events through a lens crafted by and for our own culture. So one could hear me sneer and complain about the trash I witness daily on Aleppo’s streets, comparing life here with clean California. But though litter piles in gutters here, people don’t, human litter, the tragedy of the homeless men, women and children in the world’s richest empire. What’s worse, more appalling to my sight? I’m reminded too of how far away Iraq seemed when living in the States. I think I’ll not be accused of hyperbole when estimating that when the United States invaded Iraq (for the first time) in 1991, only a tiny percentage of my fellow citizens, myself included, could point to Iraq on a map. There's something sinister about that. How far away does 1991 seem today, and ironic that now I’m in a country that borders that troubled land. Both Syria and Iraq share the same vast desert. And never could I have imagined walking with my wife to school, and as we begin parting toward our respective classrooms have Carrie say over her shoulder, “Oh and remember, I’m going to the Euphrates River today, class field trip….” The Euphrates! And for five days in March, a holiday, the Prophet's birthday, we'll visit Beirut and hike the Bekka Valley in Lebanon. But here we are, and though we’ve only been here a little over five months, we are becoming aware that there are other perspectives to unfolding events, and of history. People here are very much aware of the double standards that seem to apply: Iraq refusing to abide by U.N resolutions and getting bombed by the west; Israel refusing to abide by U.N. resolutions (specifically 242) and getting bombers from the west, as well as financial aid and political support. The people living here are Arab, as the people of Iraq are Arab. So the people I see daily here in Syria could very well resemble the people in the villages, towns and cities of Iraq. By 1996 an estimated half a million Iraqi children died as the result of U.S. supported and imposed sanctions, but I was still so far away, and the sanctions failed to get the sexy press coverage; it became old news there. Not here. The suffering was shown and reported, and resentment simmered. On the weekends, if I’m not hunched over papers to grade or readings to prep, I sometimes take a walk, a pure walk, without any planned destination in mind, just some neighborhood in Aleppo.

I wander around and watch people living their lives, going about their business. I see teenage girls sitting side-by-side on a bench laughing. I see men opening up their shutters of their shops. I see families in dilapidated playgrounds, children running for the slide as children everywhere do. I see young men in shiny shirts and slicked black hair spitting nut shells into the gutter. I see a rambling bus spewing dark exhaust, and in the windows bounce students going to school. I see old men and young men ambling into a mosque for prayer. Today on my walk something extraordinary happened. On a dark mountain far in the distance I saw the silhouette of man, his face glimmering in and out of shadow. I was once friends with him and supported him with money and other items, but now I didn’t like him, and wanted him off the mountain. So I wandered into a neighborhood and found families coming out of their houses. I dropped sanctions on them, and immediately they fell to the ground. Others tried to help them, but I had made the necessary medicines disappear, because the man on the mountain could perhaps find a way to use the medicines for other evil purposes. Some women were crying and pleading with me to stop what I was doing, but I explained I wanted that man to get off the mountain. It seemed obvious, but maybe they didn’t understand English. I then found other families and distributed depleted uranium shells at their feet. Cancer rates soared, and young people were dying at higher rates all over the region. Again I explained I wanted that man off the mountain. My walk found me approaching the little liquor store in the Armenian quarter where we buy our booze. A tall handsome young man, George, works there, and we greet each other warmly (shows how often we visit). Inside, too, was the boy, probably eight years old, who smiles and waves happily when he sees us, enjoys helping us out with our heavy sacks of wine and beer, and refuses to let me carry one of the bags (he’s thin, but somehow quite strong). I purchase a few bottles, then order a Tomahawk cruise missile into the neighborhood, because I suspect someone lives there that is helping the man on the mountain. Pieces of George and the little boy—who is not smiling anymore—scatter in the blast. I explain the same thing to the people who’ve gathered, that I’m trying to get that man off the mountain. I point to the summit, but the man has retreated into his shadowy palace. I see the four laughing teenage girls in a bus coming back from a wedding. A cluster bomb splinters the windows and slices the girls and drops them on the hot asphalt. I apologize to the gathered crowd (who are now murmuring revenge), and explain that I didn’t intend to hurt them, but it’s the man on the mountain I was after, and anyway, why didn’t the bus see the guarded checkpoint I installed? If you invaded my country and put up a guarded checkpoint, I told them, I’d happily oblige and stop. I walk up one street to destroy a water treatment plant. That way, women and children cannot drink clean water, and disease will spread. But I want that man off that mountain, I don’t care at what cost. For one thing, that man used weapons of mass destruction on his own people, and I want him gone (he used the same weapons on his own people when he was my friend, but that was different). In the evening I am walking home when a white pigeon like a winged angel swoops down and perches on my shoulder. I feed her sunflower seeds from my flak-jacket pocket, and mention the weapons of mass destruction the man on the mountain possesses, or I believe possesses, or tell people he possesses whether I believe it or not, that worry me. What if he uses them against me? The pigeon ponders this, and then asks if I am Christian. I say, well, yes, I suppose so, if she insists on labels. I wait for her point, but she doesn’t respond, perhaps because I’m fresh out of seeds. We walk awhile in silence. The pigeon then tells me to turn around. I do, and see a valley littered with countless tiny slips of paper. I cringe at the trash. The pigeon tells me on each piece of paper, written in Arabic, are the names of each of the 500,000 children who died because of my sanctions. She asks me if that’s the weapons of mass destruction I was referring to. I turn around to reply, but she has flown away, leaving me alone. A cold dry wind rises from the darkening valley. In the shadowy distance people are fighting, and more explosions, more death. It’s amazing how far I could see. Then I realize I’m on top of the mountain, and the man is gone.

Rainbow Colored Shanties: A Season of Protest: San Francisco State, 1991

On May 3, 2016, four students from San Francisco State University, at a noon rally on Malcolm X Plaza near the Caesar Chavez Student Center, announced a hunger strike to protest planned budget cuts to the College of Ethnic Studies. The College’s budget for the current year was $5 million, although one student “demanded” an $8 million allotment, but then offered, “Let’s say we don’t get the $8 million. Having the community support us is an act of revolution.”

The bright ambiguity of that conditional claim should not diminish the sincerity of the student’s commitment, but one could be forgiven for pairing hunger strikes in one’s mind with protesting deleterious prison conditions, human rights abuses, or British rule, rather than adding two Africana Studies professors, creating a Pacific Islander studies program, and hopefully requiring all students to take an ethnic studies class to graduate. Limiting nutritional intake to chicken broth and coconut water, the four students, all minoring in Race and Resistance Studies, christened themselves Third World Liberation Front 2016, commemorating the sit-in strikes and campus shutdown of 1968 by the Black Student Union/Third World Liberation Front which inaugurated the country’s first college program devoted to Ethnic Studies. 

On May 11th, the strike was called off, negotiations spanning from early morning to late afternoon resulting in an agreement reached between the hungry students, faculty, and administration to implement some of the ten “demands” pared down from twenty-six, and an additional $482,806 found, or reallocated, to keep the College of Ethnic Studies afloat, if not thriving. No word on how the $482,806 suddenly appeared. The four protesters will return to a much quieter campus than their predecessors of 1968 endured, whose strike lasted 115 days, and included broken windows, trashing of the Gator newspaper office and roughing up an editor, and threatening to shut down the university…which in turn was met with tear gas, police on horseback charging protesters, and university President S.I. Hayakawa donning tam’o shanter ripping the cords out from the strikers’ PA system. 

A photograph of the strikers shows the four students sitting on lawn chairs under blankets, clutching coconut water, a strike leader reading a statement into a bullhorn and wearing a Palestinian kaffiyeh over his head tucked under a San Francisco Giants cap, while all around supporters gather, raising the iconic closed-fist the Black Panther Party made historical in those less than halcyon days. 

I remember raising that closed fist. In 1991 students marched from the San Francisco State campus one afternoon to protest the US invasion of Iraq, blocking traffic en route to an Army recruiting center in the West Portal neighborhood to shut it down. The recruitment staff had wisely evacuated before we’d arrived, though this didn’t deter speeches from a bullhorn to the gathered audience primarily of those who’d marched. I held that raised closed-fist until my armed wearied and the gesture was drained of power, too embarrassed to lower my arm and dampen my commitment in the eyes of others.

College campuses, easily enough, engender rebellion. The most remarkable memory I have of passionate intensity at San Francisco State in 1991 during the first of two whirlwind Gulf Wars, of marches and speeches and demands and sit-ins, remains how similar it all seemed to the protests of 1968, as chronicled by Joan Didion in her collection of essays, “The White Album.” Didion had missed the campus upheavals at Berkeley and Columbia of the same year, and wanted to survey a “campus in disorder.” Campus shutdown proceedings at San Francisco State then were spurred by the suspension of an instructor who also served as Minister of Education for the Black Panther Party. Black militants and striking white radicals—radically enfranchised as urban guerrillas “on an investment of virtually nothing”—wandered through Administration buildings and strategized with sympathetic deans. Demands were published. Press conferences held. Hand votes taken and retaken. But to Didion, “the place never seemed serious.” Indeed, it more closely resembled “a musical comedy about college life.”

All rings a plaintive bell. Having admired Didion’s essays many years before the 1991 protests, I remember thinking I’d photocopy the relevant section of the much longer title work, and tack it to the rickety campus bulletin board constructed by the Notorious 40 as someone affectionately if not dismissively named them. This lively bunch were the core progressive students you could count on to show up to your march, sit in at your protest, and undersign your demands. They would block traffic. Demonize police. Sling epithets at Authority. Hurl demands down from an imaginary Masada of leverage. I looked around and wondered at how little things changed since Didion penned her sardonic review. 

I was glad to attend college in a liberal city rich with diversity both ethnic and artistic, with vocal, thriving bands of political progressives, with culinary choices ranging from dire vegan to Rabelaisian, with time in the year to read Chomsky and Parenti. I never thumbtacked a Frida Kahlo poster on a prominent wall in my incense-tinged apartment, but swept clean my heart’s inglenook, stoking angry fires honoring beleaguered indigenous peoples. I named my cats Sandino and Che, then dutifully attended activist meetings on windy evenings. During that time I nurtured a vigorous contempt for brethren, family, and citizenry, the concern abroad turning spite at home. From my backyard growing up in Sacramento I used to longingly gaze west on the glorious, beckoning sunsets splashing across wide valley skies. I had outgrown the suburbs, and believed life was elsewhere.

Choosing to attend San Francisco State University for graduate school was unabashedly romantic and irrational. Through an eccentric Philosophy instructor at Sacramento State University I discovered the writings of Indian mystic Krishnamurti. Reading him fired my intellect. Of uncompromising integrity, he seemed to radiate wisdom from that misty Eldorado we mildly disaffected longed for: Enlightenment. As a student of Philosophy, I delighted in his writings, none more so than a large compendium of his lectures and dialogues called The Awakening of Intelligence. Two dialogues between Krishnamurti and one Jacob Needleman, recorded in Malibu, California, 1971, drew me in further. Needleman had then been a professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State and author of The New Religions, Lost Christianity, The Heart of Philosophy, among others. This guy had actually seen and spoken with this sage in the flesh and blood. Was Needleman still alive? He was, and still teaching only 99 miles away from Sacramento at the fog-enshrined campus near the shores of Lake Merced. I dreamed that after a productive, lively seminar Needleman and I would walk along a garden path in soft twilight, hands folded behind our backs, heads bent thoughtfully, while eucalyptus solemnly whispered and swayed. It never happened, although I took many seminars with him. 

The awakening of my intelligence, however, coincided with youthful steps into minor political activism on the San Francisco State campus. In early 1991 the San Francisco State campus found itself fortunate enough to experience the riveting attention that only the United States invading another developing country could garner. I wanted to help the spark catch the wind. Krishnamurti was kicked aside.

***

August 2, 1990 Iraq invades and threatens to annex Kuwait. The US and allies invade to defend (we were always reminded) the non-democratically elected monarchy of Kuwait and reestablish its royal sovereignty to keep the oil flowing into Western friendly pipelines and ports and ships docking in Gulf of Arabia waters. As the US was the stronger, its only strategy across the world’s teeming political/economic savannah remained feeding on the weaker. Injustices committed by actors in the United States, singularly embodied in the fevered imagination as Imperialism, or Capitalist Power, didn’t play out then retire like an aged pirate on a veranda in Mar-A-Lago, but instead built on one another, accumulating across centuries from Manila harbor to the Persian Gulf, feeding a monster ever stronger after each gorging. It was against this dramatic backdrop that students at San Francisco State and other campuses, their time come, prepared for the long struggle. Adjacent to the campus bulletin board, and vital to the Gulf War protest that sunny spring of 1991, were the shanties, roughly designed, brightly painted, and hastily constructed square shelters inspired by the UC Berkeley’s protesting South Africa’s Apartheid in the 1980s, and the corollary demand of UC portfolio divestment. That protest, of course, constructed its shanties to highlight the wrenching poverty of South Africa’s majority disenfranchised black population. So already the Notorious 40 were building on a borrowed symbol. Seemingly overnight plywood sheets were hauled, 2x4s shouldered, hammers and nails liberated, and an eyesore was erected on a meandering sweep of lawn between two walkways connecting the classrooms with Malcolm X plaza and yet-to-be-christened Caesar Chavez Student Center (the Student Center’s multi-leveled and honeycombed design, the story goes, was chosen purposely by the nebulous State Powers to thwart the possibility of any large central gathering of the masses, compartmentalizing and therefore isolating into diffused pockets any sparks of protest). A free speech stage was set up for anyone at any time to stand and speak at “shantytown”. The grittiest committed protesters spent the night in sleeping bags in the many of whom were studying political science or ethnic studies or both. Angela Davis was rumored to have stayed a night in solidarity. One evening I brought an apple box filled with various fruits and nut “borrowed” from the produce market on Geary where I worked. A youth with an unblemished face selected a banana and asked “Are you from Food Not Bombs?”

I remember, too, walking through campus in fading sunlight posting on doors, in hallways, on gray-green lampposts handmade flyers publicizing an evening talk given by a visitor from El Salvador, reporting from the front lines of the US supported oppression in his country. A quiet young man, soft spoken and courteous, he seemed grateful for the chance to share his stories even only to the organizers gathered there in an open classroom, and a few bored passersby. All those flyers, all those warm chemical smells wafting from the copy machine. The flurry of serious activity that afternoon was captured in memory: a young activist—with whom, enamored, I shared flyer posting—racing up a leaf strewn pathway, papers clutched in one hand, and with the other impatiently brushing her long windblown dark hair from her weary, pretty face.

A journalist visiting from Germany asked me one clear blue morning about the shanties, their endgame. I must have offered a vague and lively strategy of a single candle alighting a bonfire across the land, then apologized for his arriving at “a fascist state.” He smiled, but only to be polite. “If this was a fascist state,” he said, waving his arm over the shanties and across the plaza, “none of this would be here.”

One warm evening a few of us were gathered on the dark and quiet campus, shanty walls flickering in candlelight. Suddenly we were pelted with eggs and exploding M-80s. We rushed out and glimpsed two or three assailants running into the shadows between the student union and Psychology buildings, and gave chase. I heard the mocking voice of one comrade: “I’m going to catch you, you know I am!” as he closed in. A few moments later two Heroes of the Revolution strongly escorted an anxious young man, who turned out to be a pledge from a fraternity, into the candlelit shanty for interrogation. One of the heroes, a combat veteran from South Africa’s uMkhonto we Sizwe, the African National Congress’s armed wing, conferred with others within earshot of the pledge, “Let us break his wrist. It is quite painful. He will surely tell us which fraternity he is with!” Surprisingly, the young man sat. When he tried to offer unbidden testimony, an enraged comrade yelled “No, you sit there and shut your mouth!” This elicited admonitions by the gathered women for the hothead to leave, assuring their good cop to the hothead’s bad cop will elicit information. The peacemakers proceeded, then, to circle round this wary anti-protester and offer calming introductions, emerging later with name, address, phone number, fraternity affiliation. The contrite pledge also named names of other fraternity brothers organizing the shanty raid.

I remember falling in love with one of the good cops, an activist majoring glumly in film. Karla was warm and intelligent, at home in an activist milieu, but her luminous hawk eyes kept me off balance. I’d hoped for more than long conversations beneath the library windows, but it never developed past a fully-clothed snuggle one evening, only a brief touch of her skin beneath her shirt, and she eating cold leftover pasta for breakfast. 

Some months later, the State Police came to the apartment of a shanty comrade, kicked in his apartment door, and arrested him on charges of incitement to riot, disorderly conduct, illegal assembly, failure to disperse, and assault on a police officer with the intent of doing grievous bodily harm. The last charge stemmed from throwing one of the police barricades surrounding the shantytown at a patrol car. In jail, he showed his arrest sheet to one his cellmates who had approached him threateningly. The man read the sheet, then announced to the others, “Damn, homeboy! You crazy! What you go and try to kill a police officer for? Are you out of your fucking mind?” The comrade replied he was, and was left alone.

Didion surmised that perhaps novelist Evelyn Waugh possessed the eye to capture the portrait: “Waugh was good at scenes of industrious self-delusion, scenes of people absorbed in odd games.” Blocking traffic on the Bay Bridge or I-80 in Berkeley, screaming at portly police officers standing by in riot gear, marching around and around, chanting ditties and slogans, scattering from rushing police in the Mission District where protests peter out, then regrouping in pairs and threes and pretending to heed the feeble call of returning to the Federal Building and tearing it apart brick by brick, but instead calling it a night and grabbing victory beers at Toronado or Mad Dog in the Fog: what were these rowdy exertions but games of limited impact? 

***

A protest march in an economically thriving urban metropolis like San Francisco is powered by the conceit that the world is watching, that trailblazers will galvanize. Shutting down or disrupting the everyday flow of public life was required to jar the repressed masses from their slumber and then…. If our demands were ignored, the machinery—Mario Savio’s coinage during Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement—will be prevented from operating, and then….  It was never entirely clear, beyond the inspiring metaphors, what the activism would accomplish, how life would be different from the sunny freedoms California grew in abundance like wine grapes. An easy irony: the more widely offered opportunities for political freedom to speak, write, and gather is inversely proportional to how vociferous the voices arose in protest. Speak truth to power, even if your voice shakes, was a popular bumper sticker in those years, calling to mind a determined, trembling figure with pursed mouth and a winter pallor standing before a shadowed tribunal of sneering men. Notice: language tends toward zealous abstraction, “Corporate Power” (even more unhelpful, Chomsky’s “Masters of Mankind”), when nothing and no one is stopping you from saying, writing, or doing whatever you want. That the masses hear the wake-up call, and choose not to foment a revolution but reserve a three-day getaway at the beach, simply means the masses are investing in what is possible given their own struggles. They don’t need reminding to support the local: the local’s all they  really know. But I noted a further pathos in the tacit longing for that hallowed time of the great struggles, sufferings, and victories in the heady 1960s. They had their day. Ours was now. Perhaps you glimpse the sorcery: history doesn’t inspire, but charms.

***

The media source most trusted on the San Francisco State campus during the Gulf War protests of the early 90s was listener-sponsored Pacifica Radio station KPFA, the Bay Area’s progressive platform. Shortly after Operation Desert Storm’s warplanes strafed Iraq, KPFA allowed an “unprecedented” suspension of their regularly scheduled programming for a live performance of a singer-songwriter delivering an original protest anthem. The mics were on location, the transmission windy and trembling in the moment. The songwriter imagined the song inspiring kindergartners in the coming years to raise their voices and sing out. That he dreamed the song wearing legs long enough to reach a distant elementary classroom of pre-political tots, or even lodge in listeners’ ears beyond that afternoon, revealed a cherished if unspoken assumption that this generation’s time for the long struggle had arrived. A quagmire glimmered on the horizon like a mirage of water on hot asphalt. You glimpsed the hope in the giddy assurance that when the body bags start lining up on the tarmac, public opinion will turn against the US aggression in the Middle East. Often only the rueful chant: “When the body bags come home…” But of course the dramatic rising body bag death count fizzled at a mere 148, and these unfortunates were, predictably, not given the hoped for mainstream media coverage. Why focus on the negative? The war last a mere seven months, hardly a slog. The protest “movement” never had a chance to hit its stride. Eventually the Gulf War shanties too were disassembled, having served their vague purpose, and because many walls had become colorfully painted murals, word had it the pieces would be stored safely somewhere on campus to preserve and archive the historical moment. As I personally did no building, I volunteered to help break it down. Sometime later, in the gray afternoon light of a forgotten strategy meeting, a Notorious 40 member with a clenched teeth smile claimed someone spied me that Saturday morning helping the Authorities take away the shanties. What, he wondered accusingly, was I doing there? 

Informants! So goes the revolution. Sniffing out the tiniest heresies brightens the dullest play in a dimly lit theater. 

But the initial months were lively on the Saturday morning streets of San Francisco during that heady time, when the city-sanctioned marchers happily thronged the blockaded routes chanting, waving bright color posters and parting for the dancing puppets vilifying Bush and Cheney, delighting in a shared spirit of progressive political unity under a sparkling blue sky, sunshine flooding this fabled land at America’s end. I walked the streets with my neighbors, free, protected on all sides. 

I left one Saturday march and felt my spirit dissolve, envisioning instead a garden to plant and weed. We had gathered at San Francisco’s affluent Marina District to protest a Support the Troops rally. Military vehicles and trailer-hauled missiles paraded by to the delight of the silent majority in attendance. Chanting turned to shouts. A suspected informant in our midst was surrounded and splattered with an egg. A former Marine turned anti-war vet climbed atop a passing Army jeep, its green canvas hood sinking and billowing under his stomping, and was giddily arrested. An entrepreneurial comrade dived into the exultant crowd cheering the lanky vet and offered an upturned hat: this brave, arrested soul would need bail money. We all pitched in, dollar bills flapping in the chilly salty mud breeze. A friend of mine, familiar with political arrests himself, dryly remarked “He’s going to need a lot more than a hatful.” A tug of war began between supporters and a diminutive but wiry Communist (“I’ve devoted my life to overthrowing Capitalism” I’d heard her exclaim), and I still remember the tight snarl on her face as she jerked the banner greedily, rocking a steel barricade lining the route. An elderly woman, uninvolved but passing by the scuffle, got bumped and fell upon the pavement. Frozen tableau: was she with us or against us, this fallen gray-haired woman? Reasonable folks helped her to her feet. 

Riot police arrived. I walked home to my small apartment on Van Ness and Green....I remember well….

Traffic is flowing through the clean streets, bumpers and windows reflecting vibrant sunlight spearing the blue. Friends are heading to Ocean Beach. Strangers slyly glance at one another, attracted, hesitant. Servers with knives dust sourdough bread crumbs from tablecloths, scoop tips. BART is on time, MUNI is late. Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue” drifts from an apartment window like a sterling silver rainbow. Shoppers flood the crosswalks. It’s somebody’s birthday, and somebody’s not sure the City by the Bay is where she wants to stay, but maybe she’ll stick it out in retail. Pigeons swarm and saunter, pick at crumbs, then spray across the skyline. Lovers give in, and give it one more chance.