BN: Jerry Rubin on People's Park

This "brief note" isn't so brief; it's a somewhat lengthy excerpt from a book I picked up at a garage sale in Fullerton a few years back: Do It! by Jerry Rubin (New York: Social Education Foundation, Simon and Schuster, 1970). From the back cover: "Do It! is to be danced to. Read aloud. Studied. Memorized. Debated. Burned. Swallowed. Eaten." Jerry Rubin went to the University of Cincinnati and then UC Berkeley, but dropped out of school to "wreak havoc" as an "Outside Agitator" in the city. He led protests and demonstrations, advocated a completely new social order and cultural system, and co-founded the Yippies with Abbie Hoffman. What follows is his account of the creation of People's Park in the late spring of 1969; you will want to compare his account with others. Here it is:

In an airport hideaway in San Francisco on September 11, 1966, a secret meeting was held to plan a new long-range operation to "pacify" Berkeley.  Present were representatives of the CIA, the FBI, University of California officials, the state's top businessmen, officials from the Defense Department, five California police chiefs and Berkeley businessmen.

The plan? Simple! Take away the sea from the fish.
The "outlaw element" thrived in all the low-cost housing that surrounded the university, the old, rambling Berkeley homes.
The University of California, which played the major role in the CIA's insidious conspiracy [to rid the city of 'liberated freeks'], planned to buy all the low-cost housing, rip it down and build in its place dormitory buildings and IBM cardboard apartment houses--too high-priced and esthetically revolting for the nonstudents.
We'd have no place to live and would have to leave Berkeley.

The university began by buying the square block of land right behind Telegraph Avenue and three blocks from campus. They tore down all the old buildings to build dorms: completely unnecessary because 30 percent of the current dorms were uninhabited.
The nonstudents were pissed off when the bulldozers arrived. We knew what the goal was: "Hippie removal." We went on our way, muttering.

Then the wonderful contradictions of capitalism fucked up the CIA's scheme. War came to the university with strikes, tear-gassing and armed occupation of the campus by the National Guard.
The state legislature freaked out. Uptight at university officials for not killing the rioters, they slashed state aid to the university. Gone was the money needed to build the dorms.
The land languished as a big mud puddle--a parking lot in the day, a mosquito breeding swamp at night.

Then one day a freek looked at the dismal bog: A VISION FLASHED INTO HIS HEAD!
He ran to see his friends. They mimeographed leaflets.
Within an hour 300 people were at the swamp. Bulldozers arrived to flatten the land. Rocks were shoveled up, green sod laid. After one day's work, a small section of the swamp had been transformed into a park.
A park!
A PARK BY THE PEOPLE!
The word went around Berkeley: come and see the new park. A notice was printed in the [Berkeley Barb]. Money was collected on the streets. The next day 600 people were shoveling up rocks and laying sod.
While Ronnie Reagan was reading movie magazines at home, and while the entire university administration was drunk, sucking each other off in the back rooms of the university, people came to create People's Park.
Like a Chinese commune, thousands scraped cement from old bricks which others then used to create winding mosaic paths.
One group built a barbecue.
Another created a playground.
Some people made music on cans and drums, guitars, flutes, harps, recorders, voices and bodies.
Others made films.
Free food every day. Rock bands played.
It was a theater for the free play of creativity, energy and community. All of the art and life force of the underground culture swelling in pure love.
Within five minutes after you'd go to the park, you'd be stoned.

free food.
free work.
free sex.
free smiles.
free sun.
free moon.
free love.
free theater.
free store.
free music.
free dope.
free living.
free park.

Every day middle-class people from the Berkeley hills left their children to play with us. People came to the park to plant their own trees.

Hippies, students, yippies, fraternity boys, sorority girls, Panthers, middle-class people, everybody grooved in their own park.

"Hey, can I plant a corn patch?"
"It's up to you. You decide."

"Hey, can I put some swings in?"
"Outasight."
There was no Master Plan. Nobody gave orders. Some people wanted to turn the huge pit in the middle of the park into a swimming pool; others wanted to have a fish pond. Everybody working on the park got together in a town meeting and debated it for a few hours, and voted to have a fish pond.

The university deans woke up and saw what was happening. People were creating a park near the university! Motherfuck! That would attract all kinds of filth and vermin.
Ronnie was telephoned, and he zipped up his pants and rushed to a secret meeting. Two CIA agents were flown in from Washington.
What to do to stop these longhaired beasts from creating a base in the heart of the area the university was trying to destroy? The students had expropriated land valued at 1,300,000 dollars!

One morning at three A.M. Berkeley police arrived and shoved 50 people out of the park, making way for workmen who began to build a fence. By dawn a barbed-wire fence, lined with pigs, surrounded People's Park.
A noon rally at the campus resulted in thousands of people roaring down Telegraph Avenue to tear that fucking fence down.

Hydrants were opened up.
Rocks thrown at pigs.
Pigs released tear gas.
People climbed on roof tops to throw rocks, and police pulled out shotguns!
The critical escalation in the war between the cultures: For the first time police opened fire on white Amerikan dissidents, shooting with birdshot. At the end of the day, James Rector was dying in a hospital, another man was blinded and at least a hundred people were wounded.
The National Guard turned Berkeley into an occupied city.

Curfew.
Vietnam helicopters stalked the city on reconnaissance missions looking for Viet Kong (anyone on the streets) to direct pig cars to club, attack and arrest.
Helicopters bombed the campus with tear gas.
Public gatherings were outlawed. People were tortured in jail.
People's Park became the base camp for the Occupational Forces in the war against the natives.
Tents replaced our playground.
Tanks and troop carriers ripped the trees and shrubs and flower beds.
Crude Army boots destroyed the green grass.
Beer cans and cigarette butts floated on the pond.

And Old Glory proudly few above the carnage.

Petroglyphs and UFOs

The popular memory of California’s prehistory often maintains a close connection between the mysterious and the unknown. The folklore surrounding the petroglyphs of our great deserts and canyons, for example, has often been linked to the folklore surrounding UFOs and extraterrestrials. Many have seen the unidentifiable shapes and curious anthropomorphs to be prehistoric depictions of spaceships and their inhabitants. Ufologists have sought in the petroglyphs proof that humankind has been visited in the past by extraterrestrial beings, and that we continue to be so visited. Some have even desired to prove that these ancient images reveal a direct ancestral lineage between our own species and one more distant.

Why do people look to the petroglyphs for proof of extraterrestrial activity on earth? For one thing, we know next to nothing about the meaning of the petroglyphs and the societies that created them. This leaves them open to a wide variety of interpretations, and, for all we know, one interpretation is as valid as another. Whether a particular anthropomorphic image depicts a shaman or an extraterrestrial is merely a matter of opinion. There is no evidence to support one over the other.

Furthermore, in arid cultures, the open desert is often associated with the otherworldly. Jesus had journeyed into the desert to confront Satan. Early Christian hermits built their homes in the desert to battle demons. Krishna had led Narada into the desert to come upon enlightenment, the Hebrew scriptures find it the ideal place to meet God, and the Egyptian Bedouin consider it to be infested with ghosts and jinn. It is no wonder, then, that our own culture sees the desert to be the prime location for extraterrestrial activity.

But whatever the reason for the connection between petroglyphs and UFOs, my purpose here is to ask that we consider the ufological interpretation of California’s petroglyphs to be part of the life of the petroglyphs themselves. Let me explain. Amy Remensnyder has argued that, in medieval monastic society, “imaginative memory” continuously reimbued objects with meaning, often transforming object into monument. For example, a fragment of wood could first become a relic of the True Cross and then a monument to a particular monastery’s foundation. Medieval Europe had its reliquaries; California has its petroglyphs. The ufologist’s reinscription of meaning has transformed the nature of the images themselves.

Whatever meaning the petroglyphs had to the societies that created them is lost to us. The petroglyphs now possess new—and often contesting—meanings. But this doesn’t mean that the viewer is the only active agent, creating and imposing his interpretations on passive objects, nor that the whole process is a big interpretative free-for-all. Remensnyder reminds us that “in this process of reinterpretation, the physical object itself is not inert; its design determines the range of possible meanings.” Unusual anthropomorphs could have been shamans, gods, spirits, or ceremonial dancers. Or, of course, extraterrestrial beings. They are visibly distinguished from the images of more ordinary human figures, but whether these distinguishing characteristics mark them as spiritual or extraterrestrial can never be certain.

What is certain, however, is that images are never dead. Although relics of past societies, the petroglyphs are also, in a sense, relics of our own. They do not and can not exist in the past, out of time, but are as part of the present as the sun and wind that continuously bombard their surfaces. The meanings our culture inscribes upon the petroglyphs constantly revivify them, reincorporating them again and again into the present.

(image courtesy of Don Gennero)

Recipe: Salmon with Huckleberry Compote

My dad’s friend is from the Yurok (Puliklah) tribe of the coastal redwoods, along the lower Klamath River. A recent visit coincided with their salmon festival, and this recipe is based on what I had. It was one of the best meals of my life.

In late summer, in the morning, go out with your family and friends and catch some salmon (make sure to thank the salmon for giving you sustenance). Prepare a bed of coals by making a shallow ditch in the earth and filling it with flaming hardwood. When the coals are smoldering and hot, cut the salmon’s gorgeous, watermelon-colored flesh into generous pieces with the skin still attached. Skewer the pieces onto long shards of redwood and season with salt and freshly cracked peppercorns. Plant the skewers in the ground around the ditch of coals, so the meat is suspended above the heat. Allow to cook for about an hour. The skin will be crisped, the outside of the meat will be caramelized with smoke, and the inside will be fragrant and moist.

My dad’s friend’s sister, who had tattooed her chin in the traditional manner as a near-political declaration of heritage (female tattoos are no longer widely practiced), had made huckleberry shortcake. I took some of her huckleberry compote and spooned it over the salmon—delicious.

Gather as many huckleberries as you can. This may be difficult, as I’ve noticed that huckleberries have grown scarcer in recent years (perhaps due to climate change?). You may supplement with wild salal berries (if they grow in your area) or store-bought blueberries. Californian blackberries are more abundant, and I don’t see why you can’t use these as well. Sweeten with sugar to taste and simmer in a small saucepan (blackberries will need more sugar than less). You may also use a squeeze of lemon juice and/or a dusting of cinnamon if you feel so moved.

Serve the salmon with the compote, outside, surrounded by redwood-covered hills. Late summer brings mosquitoes, so be aware of this as well.

Neopagan Bodies

Southern California, it turns out, is much like the stereotype. This stretch of coastline does indeed covet that lifestyle of sun, sea, sand, smoothies, fish tacos, and effortless yet immaculate fashion. Image-conscious and health-conscious, Southern California--like other coastal Mediterranean and subtropical cultures--prizes the body that is radiant, bronzed, athletic, and slender. This is particularly the case for the female body, which is almost perpetually called upon to expose itself to sunlight, ocean breeze, and the critical gaze of the onlooker. This body has become a reified thing, crystallized and reinforced (enforced, even?) by every image Southern California uses to speak to and about itself.

Therefore, I find it fascinating to note the existence in this same geography of female religious communities that purposely flaunt these images and, instead, envision a female body that is multiplicitous and diffuse, often finding in the ‘deviant’ female form a perfect expression of divinity. The goddess-centered neopagan communities of the southern coast locate the feminine divine in such culturally and chronologically diverse figures as Isis, Diana, the Virgin Mary, and Kali. They find divinity and power in bodies that are menstruating, pregnant, obese, aging. The feminine divine (particularly in Wiccan circles) can also be more diffuse, becoming what the famous San Franciscan witch Starhawk has called “the great forces of birth, growth, death, and regeneration that move through the universe. …[the Goddess] is immanent within us as well as in nature.” This boundlessness and multiplicity has meant that neopagan communities have created their own conception of the female body that mirrors this fluidity and shatters the restraints and boundaries imposed by majority culture.

Thus, the neopagan body, like the Goddess, is diffuse. Aniitra Ravenmoon of the Temple of Isis in L.A., for example, asserts that she can become dozens of goddesses in the span of a day, depending on her emotional, spiritual, and physical needs at any given time. Cathleen, also of the Temple of Isis, writes:

Well, we’re threading through togetHER, Moving in
and out and ‘round,
Weaving with COSMIC EARTH.
We’re growing all togetHER, Sowing underground,
Seeds about to give BIRTH.
Who are we WILD WORLD-WOMEN weaving
blood-red c(h)ords,
Cosmic Co-Creating FEMININE DIVINE.

The poem creates a linguistic and imagistic space where worshippers, in their spiraling movements, can actually create the body of the Goddess by weaving their own bodies together with fertile seeds, soil, and what seems to be the red blood vessels of living flesh. Here, the feminine divine, although diffuse, is not in the least abstracted—rather, it is actively ‘co-created,’ manifested, and embodied by the assembled bodies of the faithful.

The neopagan body, therefore, by expanding its boundaries and drawing inspiration from a variety of cultures and periods, seems to transcend the limitations imposed by majority culture and even time itself. For example, despite what many sociologists have identified as a stigmatization of the obese body in contemporary society, neopagan communities instead often locate in the obese female form a perfect expression of the feminine divine: they celebrate largeness as largesse, as abundance and fecundity. Such a body can, perhaps, be thought to be in a perpetual state of pregnancy.

Closely tied to this is sexuality, wherein neopagans celebrate voluptuousness as transcendently sensual and supremely powerful. Witness the popularity of ‘bellydancing’ in neopagan communities as well as the ubiquity of the prehistoric ‘fertility’ figurines.
Voluptuousness becomes, almost, a reclamation of a woman-centered sexuality: here, notions of the erotic radiate from within—and are not imposed upon—the embodied self. Feminine power arises bodily, through fertility, voluptuousness, and sheer monumentality.

For example, at a women’s retreat in the Santa Monica mountains, a priestess portraying (rather, embodying) Diana during a ritual drew her ‘goddess essence’ from her physical size. One participant in the ritual remarked: “Other images of Diana are all sexualized from a male point of view, kind of a scantily clad Playboy bunny in the woods. . . . [But] this was a female who radiated power with her body and costume. Her unselfconsciousness about her body was powerful and the way she walked was almost majestic. I’ll never forget it. This was the Diana I want to relate to.” You may notice that, according to the observer, the priestess/Diana drew her divinity from her “unselfconsciousness about her body”—the embodied feminine divine was powerful precisely because it defied the critical gaze that elsewhere permeates majority culture.

Elizabeth Reis has argued that accusations and self-affirmations of witch-hood (from the 17th c. to the present day) rest on a “fear of women’s power.” Contemporary witches largely define themselves against popular conceptions of acceptable femininity, proudly flouting expectations and transgressing boundaries, even with their own bodies. This is where a “fear” (or, perhaps, awe) of women’s power rests: self-affirmed witches often testify that rituals can shock them, surprise them, and catapult them into realms of female power they can only dimly comprehend, let alone control. By using their own bodies as tools of this power, they, I suppose, embody their own empowerment as a way to make it manifest.

Sociologist Tanice Foltz has argued that women come to Goddess spirituality “to heal their identities as female ‘others’ in patriarchal society.” Glory Vernon, for example, holds her Long Beach “Introduction to the Art of Spell Crafting” workshops for “those who wish to take a more positive approach to empowering their lives.” The Circle of Aradia, a Dianic community in L.A., pledges to “heal and empower women in their personal lives.” This empowerment goes hand in hand with the divinization of the female body. The female body is wrested from the realm of commodification--torn from the magazine page, the billboard, and the movie screen--and carried into the realm of the sacred. Neopagan women, through ‘magick’ and alternative conceptions of the body, ultimately acquire power precisely because they transgress, ignore, and destroy boundaries and expectations through the multiplicitous embodied self.

Migratory Beekeepers

In the second half of the 19th c. and the first few decades of the 20th, hundreds of Basque sheepherders roamed the Sierra Nevada. Trading their native Pyrenees for California’s monumental mountain range, they spent their days in solitude, tending to their flocks, fending off coyotes, and following the seasons’ fluctuating greenery. Much of the great mountains of the West received their first human footprints from these wide-ranging wanderers.

Southern California, it turns out, has its own heritage of what one might also call wandering pastoralists. In the 1920s and 30s, the fragrant coastal hills were home to a vast number of migratory beekeepers. In Ventura and L.A. counties in the mid-1890s, beekeepers discovered a way to deal with erratic rainfall and lengthy dry spells: they would mobilize their hives and follow the flowers wherever and whenever they bloomed.

Although migratory beekeeping was not new or unique to Southern California, it was here that it attained great significance. Southern California’s climate facilitated a wonderfully long flowering season, with blossoms cropping up in different areas as the season progressed. Because some plants only secrete nectar for a brief length of time (and nectar yield can vary sharply from year to year), and some are indigenous to very small areas, beekeepers would haul their colonies onto special horse-drawn wagons, trains, or automobiles and follow the wild sages and buckwheats for dozens or even hundreds of miles.

By the 1930s, California had become the leading honey-producing state in the union, with an estimated 2,000 migratory beekeepers, most of whom resided on the southern coast and took advantage of that region’s native pungent flora. Although fields of cultivated plants such as alfalfa, lima beans, orange, and pear did provide the colonies with nectar (indeed, fruit growers were dependent on beekeepers for pollination), these were only plan B, in case the sage crop failed. For the most important and the most prized plants were the indigenous black, white, and purple sages. Black sage was the chief producer of honey, and, in fact, had been dubbed Salvia mellifera, or honey-bearing sage. But many other indigenous plants proved valuable, for nectar as well as pollen: buckwheat, acacia, willow, cottonwood, black walnut, oak, and the many flowering ephemerals that bubbled up after spring rains.

Few other industries could boast such an intimate dependency on and vulnerability to Southern California’s climatic whims, frequent wildfires, and hardy yet finicky native flora. These migratory beekeepers, like Northern California’s wild salmon fishermen, had placed their livelihoods in the hands of forces completely beyond their control. Certainly, they had to learn to surrender to California’s natural fluctuations, but they also had to become keenly perceptive, learning to sense favorable climatic conditions and discern where and when the next and most nectar-laden field of blossoms would arise.

In 1932, Clifford M. Zierer characterized the migratory beekeepers as “amateur naturalists [who] enjoy outdoor life….The successful migrator is always a keen observer; he must be resourceful and frugal; he must possess unlimited hopefulness. For the migrator fortune lies always just beyond.”

The Incorruptible Sister Irenita

In 1931, Sister Irenita, a young nun of St. John’s parish in Fresno, died from appendicitis. One person remembers her last words: “I don’t want to die.” For some years thereafter, Sister Irenita could still be spotted by nuns and students in St. John’s Catholic School and the nearby cathedral, lingering around the rectory and flicking lights on and off in empty classrooms. She did so until a special mass was said for her soul.

Apparently, in 1936, her coffin was unearthed and opened by vandals. Upon investigation, the story goes, the Monsignor discovered something very strange: he found that the corpse was uncorrupted--the body was free of all decay even though she had been dead for years. Sister Irenita’s story was recently published in a Halloween edition of the Fresno Bee; journalist Tom Bisson included her story with other “spooky tales” of “those phantoms who hoot and gibber and drag the clanking chains of mystery down the stairs of our collective unconscious.” This is how the tale of Sister Irenita is remembered by local residents: as a creepy ghost story, an uncanny brush with the horrific.

But let me just say this: had this story been told 700 years earlier, Sister Irenita might have been called a saint. Medieval narratives of sanctity--hagiographies, the lives of the saints--abound with tales of incorruptible bodies, that is, saintly corpses that prove resistant to decay. Goscelin of St. Bertin’s eleventh-century Vita S. Wihtburge (The Life of St. Wihtburh), for example, tells us that upon the opening of Wihtburh’s tomb, everyone was amazed by the radiance of her undecayed body: “her face glowed for the Lord with rosy cheeks, animated with the breath of life; her breasts are firm and upright in their incorruption, her unwedded limbs blossom with the loveliness of paradise.”

When the papacy began to crystallize an official canonization process in the twelfth century, incorruptibility was seen to be one of the strongest recommendations for the deceased’s legitimacy as a saint. Incorruptible bodies, to medieval peoples, signified purity, sanctity, loftiness. A body that was radiant though in death reflected a soul that was rejoicing among the blessed in paradise. Indeed, an undecayed body could even represent the union of flesh and spirit the saint had achieved while alive.

St. John’s parish did not, of course, begin to whisper about the possibilities of beatification and ultimate canonization. There are no altarpieces, festivals, or medallions commemorating Fresno’s local saint--only an entry in the mysterious annals of ghost lore. Why? First, one may realize that, around the 16th c., the Catholic Church lost its obsession with discovering and creating new saints. Furthermore, the New Code of Canon Law (1983) abandoned most of the complex and subtle criteria--including incorruptibility--for determining sainthood. But this does not explain why Sister Irenita has, failing saintliness, in fact become ghostly. To explore this, I might leave behind ecclesiastical law and look instead to intersecting folklores.

Mexico has a lively and deeply entrenched tradition of “folk saints,” those luminaries (such as deceased curanderos) who are followed, revered, and summoned for healings but are not formally recognized by the Catholic hierarchy. This practice has often caused strife between local believers and the Church, for the Church feels that its monopoly on sainthood--almost a thousand years strong--is threatened by folk saints. And indeed it is: as cultus develops around such folk saints as Nino Fidencio, Fidencistas threaten schism. The Church has responded by frantically discussing the possibility of canonization in order to regain control.

With the wave of Mexican immigration in the first half of the twentieth century, California’s Catholic parishes decided to take an active role in the Americanization of the new immigrants. Although their flocks were largely hispanic, California’s Catholic hierarchy, at the time, was predominantly Irish-American. Irish-American Catholicism in the late nineteenth century, traumatized by the potato famine and rebuked by ecclesiastical reform, de-emphasized the presence and power of the saints. It also found less value in the bodily aspects of sainthood--medieval traditions of saintly healings and paradisiacal bodies (still present in Mexican folk Catholicism) gave way to a strictly liturgical experience of the divine. Perhaps the story of Sister Irenita and her incorrupt body as ghost story, then, became another means of acculturation for Mexican immigrants. The story would, of course, enforce the Church’s grip on the manufacturing of saints by infernalizing Sister Irenita’s miraculous body. But it would also ensure an acculturation to Irish-American forms of folk Catholicism, in which saints were far less quotidian and were, instead, more likely to be disembodied, abstract, and antique.

BN: Dr. Bronner's Mystic Prose

“Passions that quicken your senses, fulfill; quench the thirst of lonesome years! Yet the sun has shadows, learn to control your will; to enjoy life long happiness, not tears! Wait! Rise to the stars above and thrill! Arouse the very flames of life! Sweetheart, kiss me: Hold still, hold still! Listen to God’s reward for strife! Rosebuds, slowly woken, break budding open! delicate, sweet, so on soft fingertips; shivering up your spine, red pulsing blood; in lightning speed through your pure body’s lips! Caressing deep, searching, way out of sight; oh beautiful spirit of God’s eternal Spring! Heat of passion in a warm moonlit night! Ecstasy to be buried in heaven, within! Relaxed then to long, dreamless sleep; body and soul join close in life’s most brilliant bliss! Revealing clarity-beauty-harmony-peace, sailing on far away sun-laden ships! Yet-what-cunning-feminine touch can draw new desire to pulsing lips! When-soft-hands wander-casually-such, deftly down near lingering tips! Who else but God gave man Love that can spark mere dust to life, the Moral ABC uniting All-One, brave, all life.”

By Emanuel H. Bronner (1908-1997), from the label of Dr. Bronner's Hemp Almond Magic Soap. Compare to the writings of such Spanish mystics as Teresa of Avila or John of the Cross.

Bronner was a soapmaker, visionary, and former mental patient whose all-natural soaps have become ubiquitous in natural foods stores across the country. Apparently, in Bronner's adopted homeland of California, spiritual seekers in the late 1960s would remove the labels of his wholesome soaps and frame them. One such seeker testified: "Your label is my bible."