On the Indirectness of Direct Action
Afriend, Jaime Cortez, tells me I should consider the difference between hope and faith. Hope, he says, can be based on the evidence, on the track record of what might be possible—and in this book I’ve been trying to shift what the track record might be. But faith endures even when there’s no way to imagine winning in the foreseeable future; faith is more mystical. Jaime sees the American left as pretty devoid of faith and connects faith to what it takes to change things in the long term, beyond what you might live to see or benefit from. I argue that what was once the left is now so full of anomalies—of indigenous intellectuals and Catholic pacifists and the like—that maybe we have faith, some of us.
Activism isn’t reliable. It isn’t fast. It isn’t direct either, most of the time, even though the term direct action is used for that confrontation in the streets, those encounters involving lawbreaking and civil disobedience. It may be because activists move like armies through the streets that people imagine effects as direct as armies, but an army assaults the physical world and takes physical possession of it; activists reclaim the streets and occasionally seize a Bastille or topple a Berlin Wall, but the terrain of their action is usually immaterial, the realm of the symbolic, political discourse, collective imagination. They enter the conversation forcefully, but it remains a conversation. Every act is an act of faith, because you don’t know what will happen. You just hope and employ whatever wisdom and experience seems most likely to get you there.
I believe all this because I’ve lived it, and I’ve lived it because I’m a writer. For twenty years I have sat alone at a desk tinkering with sentences and then sending them out, and for most of my literary life the difference between throwing something in the trash and publishing it was imperceptible, but in the past several years the work has started coming back to me, or the readers have. Musicians and dancers face their audience and visual artists can spy on them, but reading is mostly as private as writing. Writing is lonely, it’s an intimate talk with the dead, with the unborn, with the absent, with strangers, with the readers who may never come to be and who even if they read you will do so weeks, years, decades later. An essay, a book, is one statement in a long conversation you could call culture or history; you are answering something or questioning something that may have fallen silent long ago, and the response to your words may come long after you’re gone and never reach your ears, if anyone hears you in the first place.
After all, this is how it’s been for so many books that count, books that didn’t shake the world when they first appeared but blossomed later. This is a model for how indirect effect can be, how delayed, how invisible; no one is more hopeful than a writer, no one is a bigger gambler. Thoreau’s 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience” finally found its readers in the twentieth century when it was put into practice as part of the movements that changed the world (Thoreau’s voice was little heard in his time, but it echoed across the continent in the 1960s and has not left us since. Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Walter Benjamin, and Arthur Rimbaud, like Thoreau, achieved their greatest impact long after their deaths, long after weeds had grown over the graves of most of the bestsellers of their lifetimes.)
You write your books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them, or they might rot. In California, some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate after fire, and sometimes the burned landscape blooms most lavishly. In her book Faith, Sharon Salzberg recounts how she put together a collection of teachings by the Buddhist monk U Pandita and consigned the project to the “minor-good-deed category.” Long afterward, she found out that while Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese democracy movement’s leader, was isolated under house arrest by that country’s dictators, the book and its instructions in meditation “became her main source of spiritual support during those intensely difficult years.” Thought becomes action becomes the order of things, but no straight road takes you there.
Nobody can know the full consequences of their actions, and history is full of small acts that changed the world in surprising ways. I was one of thousands of activists at the Nevada Test Site in the late 1980s, an important, forgotten history still unfolding out there where the United States and Great Britain have exploded more than a thousand nuclear bombs with disastrous effects on the environment and human health (and where the Bush administration would like to resume testing, thereby tearing up the last shreds of the unratified Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty). Some of the largest acts of civil disobedience in American history were committed when we would walk into the place to be arrested as trespassers, thousands in a day. There too, as in peace marches, just walking became a form of political speech, one whose directness was a delight after all the usual avenues of politicking: sitting in front of computers, going to meetings, making phone calls, dealing with money. Among the throng arrested were Quakers, Buddhists, Shoshone, Mormons, pagans, anarchists, veterans, and physicists. We would barely make the news in the United States. But we were visible on the other side of the world.
Our acts inspired the Kazakh poet Olzhas Suleimenov on February 27, 1989, to read a manifesto instead of poetry on live Kazakh TV, a manifesto demanding a shutdown of the Soviet test site in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, and to call a meeting. Five thousand Kazakhs gathered at the writers’ union the next day and formed a movement that shut down the nuclear test site. They named themselves the Nevada-Semipalatinsk Antinuclear Movement, and they acted in concert with us. Us by that time included the Western Shoshone who had come to endorse our actions and point out that we and the United States government were on their land; the Kazakhs identified with these indigenous people.
Anyway, the Soviet test site was shut down. The catalyst was Suleimenov, and though we in Nevada were his inspiration, what gave him his platform was his poetry in a country that loves poets. There’s a wonderful parable by Jorge Luis Borges. In the last years of the thirteenth century, God tells a leopard in a cage, “You live and will die in this prison so that a man I know of may see you a certain number of times and not forget you and place your figure and symbol in a poem which has its precise place in the scheme of the universe. You suffer captivity, but you will have given a word to the poem.” The poem is the Divine Comedy; the man who sees the leopard is Dante. Perhaps Suleimenov wrote all his poems so that one day he could stand up in front of a TV camera and deliver not a poem but a manifesto. And Arundhati Roy wrote a ravishing novel, The God of Small Things, that catapulted her to international stardom, perhaps so that when she stood up to oppose dams and corporations and corruption and the destruction of the local, people would notice.
Or perhaps they opposed the ravaging of the earth so that poetry too would survive in the world. A couple of years ago, a friend wrote me to urge me to focus on the lyrical end of my writing rather than activism and I wrote back, “What is the purpose of resisting corporate globalization if not to protect the obscure, the ineffable, the unmarketable, the unmanageable, the local, the poetic, and the eccentric? So they need to be practiced, celebrated, and studied too, right now.” I could have added that these acts themselves become forms of resistance; the two are not necessarily separate practices. All those years that I went to the Nevada Test Site to oppose nuclear testing, the experience was also about camping in the desert, about the beauty of the light and the grandeur of the space, about friendship and discovery. The place gave me far more than I could ever give it. Resistance is usually portrayed as a duty, but it can be a pleasure, an education, a revelation.
The year after the birth of the Nevada-Semipalatinsk Antinuclear Movement, when some of its members were already with us at the peace camp next to the Nevada Test Site, I was the only one who attended a workshop there on Nevada and the military. The man giving it was visibly disappointed but gave it splendidly for me alone. As we sat in the rocks and dust and creosote bush of the deep desert on a sunny day, the great Nevada organizer Bob Fulkerson taught me that the atrocities of nuclear testing were not unique in that state with a fifth of all the military land in the country and invited me to travel into its remote reaches. He is still a cherished friend of mine and still the executive director of a coalition he founded a few years later, the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada (PLAN), the most potent statewide group of its kind, bringing together environmental, labor, and human rights groups.
What came of Bob’s invitation changed my life and had much to do with my book Savage Dreams, the first half of which is about the Test Site and the strands of its history wrapped around the world, and before there was the book there was an essay version of what the Test Site and Bob taught me that appeared in a magazine with circulation of about half a million. A few years ago I went back to the Test Site for another spring action, and there I met several students from Evergreen College in Washington who had decided to come down because they had been reading Savage Dreams in class. If you’re lucky, you carry a torch into that dark of Virginia Woolf’s, and if you’re really lucky you’ll sometimes see to whom you’ve passed it, as I did on that day (and if you’re polite, you’ll remember who handed it to you). I don’t know if the Evergreen kids have become great activists or died in a car crash on the way home, but I know that for them I was a leopard prompting a word or two of the poem of their own lives, as Bob was for me. Borges’s parable continues. On his deathbed, Dante is told by God what the secret purpose of his life and work was. “Dante, in wonderment, knew at last who and what he was and blessed the bitterness of his life.”
One day in Auschwitz, the writer Primo Levi recited a canto of Dante’s Inferno to a companion, and the poem about hell reached out from six hundred years before to roll back Levi’s despair and his dehumanization. It was the canto about Ulysses, and though it ends tragically, it contains the lines “You were not made to live like animals/But to pursue virtue and know the world,” which he recited and translated to the man walking with him. Levi lived, and wrote marvelous books of his own, poetry after Auschwitz in the most literal sense.
In 1940, in his last letter to a friend before his death, the incomparable, uncategorizable German-Jewish essayist and theorist Walter Benjamin wrote, “Every line we succeed in publishing today—no matter how uncertain the future to which we entrust it—is a victory wrenched from the powers of darkness.”