Zuccotti Park was a hive of activity today, under a foggy sky with occasional drizzle. Mayor Bloomberg has announced that, starting at 7 a.m. tomorrow, occupiers will have to vacate the site so that it can be “cleaned,” and will be allowed to return only under conditions that would seriously restrict if not effectively quell the community that has been developing there over the past weeks. In response, occupiers mounted a massive cleanup effort under the slogan “Today we clean up the park, tomorrow we clean up Wall Street.” I saw occupiers with mops and brooms, huge heaps of bagged possessions and trash, and young men clearing a pathway through the crowds with cries of, “Move aside, please–dead mattress walking!” The call has gone out for supporters to help resist any attempt to move people out of the park.

Around the periphery of these activities, self-expression continued more or less as usual. I stood facing Broadway and read the poetry of Osip Mandelstam, which I had thought of repeatedly yesterday while reading Bei Dao, who I feel sure must have been influenced by his Russian predecessor. There was a time during my 30’s when I read Mandelstam quite a bit, and as I read today I recognized the familiar feeling from back then that there is something essentially impenetrable in his work; but this means that, even more than with other poetry, one must immerse oneself in its language, almost like a mud paste that one smears over one’s torso, continuing to apply more as the last coat dries. There are passages that seem to yank me by the roots of my hair, leaving me galvanized with the conviction that the poet is speaking directly to the times we live in now–from “The Twilight of Freedom”: “As with a plow, dividing up the ocean,/we will remember even in the Lethean cold/that the earth has cost us ten heavens.”

I was rewarded today in my strange activity (“extreme performance art for wimps,” I’ve taken to describing it) by visits from a few serious listeners, several of whom said they were not really familiar with Mandelstam’s work but cared for poetry enough to stop and pay attention for a few minutes. And then there was the middle-aged woman who looked and listened attentively, then asked, “Are you Russian? Why do you read Russian poetry?” She told me her name was Natalia, that she knows and loves the work of Mandelstam (while not necessarily considering him the absolutely best Russian poet), and that she feels deeply for the occupation and hopes for its success, but also, as a Russian, she feels apprehension about what is going to happen next. She was very excited to learn that I was reading from a bilingual collection (Selected Poems by Osip Mandelstam, translated by David McDuff and published in 1975 by the Noonday Press); I wrote the publication information out for her so that she could recommend the volume to her son, who is more comfortable in English than in his mother’s native tongue.

I had several less than edifying encounters. One was with a member of the news media who asked me a couple of canned questions about my reactions to the mayor’s call for the park to be cleaned; he clearly had no interest in anything beyond a sound bite. Another was with a woman who turned out to be the proprietor of the sign that I mentioned being troubled by in a previous post, the one that reads, “RONALD REAGAN SUCKED BALLS.” (On that occasion, I saw it from a considerable distance and over-hastily concluded that a man was holding it–my apologies to that gender.) She was getting quite a lot of attention for it; one young man said admiringly, “That sign has made its way around the world!” It seemed that she enjoyed nothing better than to excite the disapprobation of some Reagan-worshipping passerby (“You’re an asshole!” snarled one elderly pedestrian), at which she would gleefully shout, “Republican alert, Republican alert–watch out, there’s a Republican.” (And what about the Wall Street-connected Democrats? I wondered. Don’t we need to watch out for them as well?) Finally I turned to her and asked if she had considered the fact that her sign could be read as having homophobic overtones. Yes, she replied, that thought had occurred to her as one possible interpretation, but she had decided she could live with it. I took my poetry reading elsewhere.

Before I left for the day, I took a turn around the entire periphery of the park, noting all of the businesses and carnivalesque activities that feed off its energy–the food trucks, the on-the-spot spray painted T-shirt sales, the woman handing out business cards for a web site with the slogan “donate your services to a neighbor in need,” the mendicants (one man stood on a box, naked to the waist, with a sign at his feet: “Girls, if you think I’m cute, give me a kiss”; he was sort of cute and also congenitally disabled, with hands seeming to blossom from the sides of his shoulders; at his feet was a container for his earnings, a pile of dollar bills), the occupiers doing whatever it takes to get attention for their signs (a very comely young man, also naked to the waist and below it wearing nothing but a pair of very revealing briefs while holding a sign with a detailed economic message). This is what democracy looks like. I am very worried about the mayor’s plans to shut it down tomorrow.