Does populist outrage at the state of the U.S. economy as arranged by its corporate masters make people more likely, or less so, to take evasive action to avert the looming threat of species suicide?

I have felt so greatly heartened by Occupy Wall Street above all because of its theatrical potential as an uncontainable (and contagious) demonstration of mass defection from the tidy socioeconomic rituals of war-making, earth-wrecking, inequality-addicted capitalism. It’s an upwelling, a spill–potentially a flood that allows us to glimpse the potential for sweeping away existing channels.  Beyond any tactical considerations, I think that’s why all talk of “demands” leaves me feeling apprehensive. “I’m losing my cynicism,” a friend writes from the West Coast in response to my blog. “But, how does all of this translate to legislative action?” As someone who believes that structures go a long way toward determining consciousness, I have to be in favor of legislative solutions. As someone who knows that “revolution,” when it’s not a violent and traumatic reality, can be an awfully cheap metaphor, I have to resist getting swept away. But as someone who’s lived through the 60’s, the 80’s, and the Bush II era, I can’t help but dread that any effort to translate the big, healthy NO! that is Occupy Wall Street into something with immediate practical effect (particularly if the critique focuses solely on domestic as opposed to foreign policy and international concerns) will only help persuade us to continue making peace with what is intolerable.

“Gee, that’s interesting–maybe Lorca was a vegan!” was the unexpected comment from an attentive listener along Liberty Street on the north side of Zuccotti Park on Monday afternoon. I had just finished reading “New York (Office and Denunciation)” by Federico García Lorca, in the translation by Pablo Medina and Mark Statman of Poeta en Nueva York (Grove Press, 2008). (“Every day in New York they slaughter/four million ducks,/five million pigs,/two thousand doves for the pleasure of the dying…..”) The man who made this comment (and stayed to hear at least one other poem read in its entirety) said that he has been coming to spend a couple of hours each day with Occupy Wall Street, taking photographs that he hopes to make into a book “to inspire people.” He told me about the OWS poetry anthology, which he said was available in the form of a scrapbook located inside the park, somewhere within the OWS library. “Some of it’s really good. The first poem is by somebody called Stewart–no last name. I only read part of it, it goes on for pages and pages. He says, ‘Walt Whitman told me to do this, and I didn’t do it…Whitman told me to do that, and I didn’t do it. But then, little by little….'”

I had taken up a position on Liberty Street because the competition for standing room (and ear time) among the late afternoon Monday crowd along Broadway seemed too Darwinian. I read “Ode to Walt Whitman” and finished with the poem “Death” from the section “Introduction to Death,” some of whose lines form the epigraph to a poem of my own: “And I, on the eaves,/what seraph of flame I seek and am!” I had one other extended conversation, with a wiry man about 70 years of age whose response to seeing BECA– USE THEY’RE TRYING TO DRIVE OUR PLANET OFF A CLIFF on my sign was to stop and inquire, apparently seriously, “How long do you think our planet will last?” before launching into a speculative discourse about the cosmological processes that might eventuate in its demise millions or billions of years hence. At first I thought he was trying to make a point about the self-centeredness of equating human life with “the planet,” but I think he was only making conversation. He said he sometimes volunteers at WBAI.

It’s relatively quiet on the north side of the park. The most significant aural counterpoint to my reading was not the chanting, haranguing, and disputation common on the Broadway side, but extended conversation between two young Orthodox lulav-wielding Jewish men and a secular-looking guy standing to my left who responded affirmatively to the question that becomes ubiquitous in New York during the Sukkot holiday: “Are you Jewish?” (Or, someone asked me recently, to my considerable amusement, “Are you Jewish today?”)

Days after a particular session at Zuccotti Park, I find images recurring as if from a dream–the young man wearing some sort of Viking helmet who stares hypnotically into my eyes as I look up from my book.