What is it about the words BECA– USE THEY’RE TRYING TO DRIVE OUR PLANET OFF A CLIFF that you don’t understand, Mr. Middle-Aged Biker with an all-American accent and a jersey that reads “USSR” in Cyrillic letters ( and is further adorned with a hammer and sickle)? You tossed the question at me as I stood on Liberty Street, slightly west of Broadway, reading from William Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” to the fair-weather Sunday crowd that was slowly circling our Financial District zócalo. “Who’s they?” you insistently wanted to know, reminding me of your confrere from a day or two ago who asked if “off a cliff” was meant to suggest that the world is flat. Against my better judgment, I interrupted my reading to offer the closest thing to an interpretation that I felt I could in good conscience: “There are a lot of they’s. Who do you think ‘they’ is?” When you kept pressing me, I made a further concession: “Well, let’s say the Masters of War, for starters. Everyone who’s profiting from all the conflicts–the Wall Street weapons purveyors, for example.” “But that’s been the story since the beginning of time!” you grumbled, in the tones of one who is not about to be gulled by sentimental imagery where tough-minded arguments are needed. “Come on,” your helmeted female companion good-naturedly exhorted you,  as she tried to drag both her bicycle and you away through the pea soup throng. “You know your daughter is an environmentalist!” You didn’t look mollified. “I just want to know who we’re dealing with,” you insisted. Was it, perchance, your intention to demonstrate that if there is no identifiable “they,” the alleged driving cannot in fact be taking place? I should have lobbed you a quote from Foucault: “People know what they do, they even know why they do what they do, but what they don’t know is what what they do does.” That would have given you something really substantive to chew on.

My favorite sign of the day was the one I saw in large black letters painted on cardboard, mounted next to a sleeping site on the southern edge of the park: WE ARE THE NEW BARBARIANS, OCCUPYING OUR ROME.  (Perhaps I’ll read Cavafy one of these days.) I had a few appreciative listeners to various items of Blake’s oeuvre (from the “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” as well as the “Marriage”), but was slightly disappointed by the way in which the great familiarity of certain lines and pieces, along with the density and obscurity of the poet’s more extended mythic narratives, made it difficult to choose texts that felt exactly right. “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.” Yeah, sure. “In every voice: in every ban/The mind-forg’d manacles I hear”…whatever.  (But really, folks, isn’t that a wonderful phrase, mind-forg’d manacles? What else are we trying to divest ourselves of, if it isn’t the mind-forg’d manacles?) As with several other very famous and politically sympathetic poets, I had to resign myself to the fact that the smiles, nods, and cameras pointed my way usually had as much to do with name recognition as any response to the actual poems. One young man who did stop to listen told me he remembered having to read some Blake in school–“is he an American?’; an Occupier whom I’d seen handing out fliers a little earlier paused long enough to tell me that Blake knew Tom Paine, and one night saved his life by warning him that he was in danger and needed to flee England. (I have no independent notion of the historical accuracy of this, but for what it’s worth Wikipedia thinks there’s some truth in it.) I was briefly interviewed by a Russian man with limited English who, unlike almost everyone else in sight, had no camera but only a microphone. He said he was reporting for Russian-language radio and had come down from his home in upstate New York, near Lake George. I asked what radio station and he said Radio Free Europe.  (!!!–Who knew, when I left for Zuccotti Park, I’d end up being sucked back, as if in a time machine, to the depths of my Cold War childhood?) I had a lot of work to do at home and didn’t stay for long, but as I was getting ready to leave, I noticed a crowd at the east edge of the park. They were gathered around in a circle, maybe 75 or 100 people, repeating the remarks of a compact, gray-haired person who appeared to be reading a prepared text off a hand-held electronic device. Then I saw that an assistant was holding up a sign advertising a “Talk by Judith Butler.” I saw a lot of appreciatively wiggled fingers-in-the-air, but couldn’t catch much of the content. I did hear the ending remark, which was that the crowds here assembled were enacting the meaning of “we, the people.”  (Did I need a Judith Butler to tell me that?)

Well, everybody thinks/hopes this is their 1968, don’t they? And everybody talks about the Arab Spring extending into the New York autumn. But so far, not very many (who weren’t already “revolutionaries”–or, as the receiving line of Progressive Labor Party stalwarts I saw handing out pamphlets at Zuccotti Park yesterday proudly proclaimed, “Communists”) are taking things to the place where they clearly need to go if we’re to break the stranglehold of the 1%. I’ll know things are really moving when I hear the chant: THE PEOPLE WANT THE FALL OF THE REGIME (OF CAPITAL).

Speaking of strangleholds, I forgot to write about the Saturday rally and walk sponsored by Brooklyn for Peace to mark the 10-year anniversary of the war in Afghanistan. It began in front of the Central Library at Grand Army Plaza and included a walk to a local subway station and school, as a symbolic indication of the public services that our tax dollars could fund adequately if it weren’t for the drain of the military budget.  Speakers included City Councilmember Tish James; Public Advocate Bill DeBlasio (who was especially fierce on the malfeasance of the Democrats who have unashamedly continued to pump billions into wars, at times with even greater alacrity than the Republicans); Bobby Khan from the Coney Island Project (he’s Afghan-American, and I remember hearing him speak ten years ago at the start of the invasion); and a member of the Transit Workers’ Union.  I spoke briefly for U.S. Labor Against the War. There was a bit of guerrilla theater with a large, scary-looking puppet representing a war veteran (he ended up limp on the sidewalk); a sound system that worked (advantages of a permitted march–no people’s mic this time);  and a cop-led walking tour of the strange ocean-themed sculpture (a menage à trois of a very fit-looking male and female nude accompanied by a sea monster) in the middle of one of the large, greenery-studded traffic islands that adorn Grand Army Plaza. I’d guess there were about 100 participants, many of whom I knew from the peace demos of yesteryear. Why is this issue so little in evidence at most Occupy events?