The Digger Papers

Memo to the Reader

Realist Edition, Cover Page

The only difference between the Free and the Realist editions of The Digger Papers was the cover. The large graphic of the Hopi Indian Running Man symbol, which dominated the Free cover, was shrunk to one corner and without the sun-ray mandala. The Realist's logo, return address block, and colophon all occupied the other three corners. The most interesting difference between the two editions, though, was the Memo to the Reader which, from a historian's perspective, provides vital clues to the influences that the Diggers acknowledged.

When Time magazine decided to do a cover story on the hippies last year, a cable to their San Francisco bureau instructed researchers to "go at the description and delineation of the subculture as if you were studying the Samoans or the Trobriand Islanders."

Thus were they supposed to remain--a frozen fad for posterity.

But a few months ago, police rioted on Haight St. Next day, at a town hall meeting in the Straight Theater, the spectrum of reaction ranged from "Let's have another be-in" to "We gotta get guns!" A compromise was reached: bottles painted Love were thrown at the cops.

And yet, the question remains--What is being defended?

This issue of the Realist, therefore, has been created entirely by The Diggers, in an attempt to convey the flavor and feeling-tone of a revolutionary community.

An inadequate list of the brothers and sisters whose work is represented in this document:

Antonin Artaud, Richard, Avedon, Billy Batman, Peter Berg, Wally Berman, Richard Brautigan, Bryden, William Burroughs, Martin Carey, Neil Cassidy, Fidel Castro, Don Cochran, Peter Cohon, Gregory Corso, Dangerfield, Kirby Doyle, Bill Fritsch, Allen Ginsberg, Emmett Grogan, Dave Hazelwood, George Hermes, Linn House, Lenore Kandel, Billy Landout, Norman Mailer, Don Martin, Michael McClure, George Metesky, George Montana, Malcolm X, Natural Suzanne, Huey Newton, Pam Parker, Rose-a-Lee, David Simpson, Gary Snyder, Ron Thelin, Rip Torn, Time Inc., Lew Welch, Thomas Weir, Gerard Winstanley, and Anonymous.

The contents herein are not copyrighted. Anyone may reprint anything without permission. Additional copies are available at the rate of 5 for $l. The Diggers have been given 40,000 copies to spread their word: free.

The 10th anniversary issue of the Realist will be out in June.

Colophon

No. 81

August, 1968

35c

The Realist is published monthly except for January and July by The Realist Association, a non-profit corporation. Publication Office: 595 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10012. Editor: Paul Krassner, Box 379, Stuyvesant Sta., New York, N.Y. 10009. Subscribtion rates: $3 for 10 issues; $5 for 20 issues. Application to mail at second class postage rates is pending at New York, N.Y.

[end] 

A Curse On the Men In Washington, Pentagon

om a ka ca ta ta pa ya sa svaha

As you shoot down the Vietnamese girls and men
in their fields
Burning and chopping,
Poisoning and blighting,

So surely I hunt the white man down
in my heart.
The crew-cutted Seattle boy
The Portland boy who worked for U.P.
that was me.

I won't let him live. The "American"
I'll destroy. The "Christian"
has long been dead.

They won't pass on to my children.
I'll give them Chief Joseph, the Bison herds,
Ishi, sparrowhawk, the Fir trees,
The Buddha, their own naked bodies,
Swimming and dancing and singing
instead.

As I kill the white man,
the "American"
in me
And dance out the Ghost Dance:
To bring back America, the grass and the streams.

To trample your throat in your dreams.

This magic I work, this loving I give
That my children may flourish

And yours won't live.

hi'niswa' vita'ki'mi

[end]

Trip Without a Ticket

[Originally published by the Diggers, Winter 1966-67. Reprinted by the Communication Company SF 2nd Edition 6/28/67. Included here in The Digger Papers, August, 1968.]

Our authorized sanities are so many Nembutals. "Normal" citizens with store-dummy smiles stand apart from each other like cotton-packed capsules in a bottle. Perpetual mental out-patients. Maddeningly sterile jobs for strait-jackets, love scrubbed into an insipid "functional personal relationship" and Art as a fantasy pacifier. Everyone is kept inside while the outside is shown through windows: advertising and manicured news. And we all know this.

How many TV specials would it take to establish one Guatemalan revolution? How many weeks would an ad agency require to face-lift the image of the Viet Cong? Slowly, very slowly we are led nowhere. Consumer circuses are held in the ward daily. Critics are tolerated like exploding novelties. We will be told which burning Asians to take seriously. Slowly. Later.

But there is a real danger in suddenly waking a somnambulistic patient. And we all know this.

What if he is startled right out the window?

No one can control the single circuit-breaking moment that charges games with critical reality. If the glass is cut, if the cushioned distance of media is removed, the patients may never respond as normals again. They will become life-actors.

Theater is territory. A space for existing outside padded walls. Setting down a stage declares a universal pardon for imagination. But what happens next must mean more than sanctuary or preserve. How would real wardens react to life-actors on liberated ground? How can the intrinsic freedom of theater illuminate walls and show the weak-spots where a breakout could occur?

Guerrilla theater intends to bring audiences to liberated territory to create life-actors. It remains light and exploitative of forms for the same reasons that it intends to remain free. It seeks audiences that are created by issues. It creates a cast of freed beings. It will become an issue itself.

This is theater of an underground that wants out. Its aim is to liberate ground held by consumer wardens and establish territory without walls. Its plays are glass cutters for empire windows.

Free store/property of the possessed

The Diggers are hip to property. Everything is free, do your own thing. Human beings are the means of exchange. Food, machines, clothing, materials, shelter and props are simply there. Stuff. A perfect dispenser would be an open Automat on the street. Locks are time-consuming. Combinations are clocks. [Check this: "locks" in the 10/66 edition?]

So a store of goods or clinic or restaurant that is free becomes a social art form. Ticketless theater. Out of money and control.

"First you gotta pin down what's wrong with the West. Distrust of human nature, which means distrust of Nature. Distrust of wildness in oneself literally means distrust of Wilderness." --Gary Snyder

Diggers assume free stores to liberate human nature. First free the space, goods and services. Let theories of economics follow social facts. Once a free store is assumed, human wanting and giving, needing and taking, become wide open to improvisation.

A sign: If Someone Asks to See the Manager Tell Him He's the Manager.

Someone asked how much a book cost. How much did he think it was worth? 75 cents. The money was taken and held out for anyone. "Who wants 75 cents?" A girl who had just walked in came over and took it.

A basket labeled Free Money.

No owner, no Manager, no employees and no cash-register. A salesman in a free store is a life-actor. Anyone who will assume an answer to a question or accept a problem as a turn-on.

Question (whispered): "Who pays the rent?"

Answer (loudly): "May I help you?"

Who's ready for the implications of a free store? Welfare mothers pile bags full of clothes for a few days and come back to hang up dresses. Kids case the joint wondering how to boost.

Fire helmets, riding pants, shower curtains, surgical gowns and World War I Army boots are parts for costumes. Nightsticks, sample cases, water pipes, toy guns and weather balloons are taken for props. When materials are free, imagination becomes currency for spirit.

Where does the stuff come from? People, persons, beings. Isn't it obvious that objects are only transitory subjects of human value? An object released from one person's value may be destroyed, abandoned or made available to other people. The choice is anyone's.

The question of a free store is simply: What would you have?

Street event -- birth of haight/funeral for $ now

Pop Art mirrored the social skin. Happenings X-rayed the bones. Street events are social acid heightening consciousness of what is real on the street. To expand eyeball implications until facts are established through action.

The Mexican Day of the Dead is celebrated in cemeteries. Yellow flowers falling petal by petal on graves. In moonlight. Favorite songs of the deceased and everybody gets loaded. Children suck deaths-head candy engraved with their names in icing.

A Digger event. Flowers, mirrors, penny-whistles, girls in costumes of themselves, Hell's Angels, street people, Mime Troupe.

Angels ride up Haight with girls holding Now! signs. Flowers and penny-whistles passed out to everyone.

A chorus on both sides of the street chanting Uhh!--Ahh!--Shh be cool! Mirrors held up to reflect faces of passersby.

[10/66 edition:
Penny-whistle music, clapping, flowers thrown in the air. A bus driver held up by the action gets out to dance a quick free minute. No more passers-by, Everybody's together.]

The burial procession. Three black-shrouded messengers holding staffs topped with reflective dollar signs. A runner swinging a red lantern. Four pall bearers wearing animal heads carry a black casket filled with blowups of silver dollars. A chorus singing Get Out Of My Life Why Don't You Babe to Chopin's Death March. Members of the procession give out silver dollars and candles.

Now more reality. Someone jumps on a car with the news that two Angels were busted. Crowd, funeral cortege and friends of the Angels fill the street to march on Park Police Station. Cops confront 400 free beings: a growling poet with a lute, animal spirits in black, candle-lit girls singing Silent Night. A collection for bail fills an Angel's helmet. March back to Haight and street dancing.

Street events are rituals of release. Reclaiming of territory (sundown, traffic, public joy) through spirit. Possession. Public NewSense.

Not street-theater, the street is theater. Parades, bank robberies, fires and sonic explosions focus street attention. A crowd is an audience for an event. Release of crowd spirit can accomplish social facts. Riots are a reaction to police theater. Thrown bottles and over-turned cars are responses to a dull, heavy-fisted, mechanical and deathly show. People fill the street to express special public feelings and hold human communion. To ask "What's Happening?"

The alternative to death is a joyous funeral in company with the living.

Who paid for your trip?

Industrialization was a battle with 19th-century ecology to win breakfast at the cost of smog and insanity. Wars against ecology are suicidal. The U.S. standard of living is a bourgeois baby blanket for executives who scream in their sleep. No Pleistocene swamp could match the pestilential horror of modern urban sewage. No children of White Western Progress will escape the dues of peoples forced to haul their raw materials.

But the tools (that's all factories are) remain innocent and the ethics of greed aren't necessary. Computers render the principles of wage-labor obsolete by incorporating them. We are being freed from mechanistic consciousness. We could evacuate the factories, turn them over to androids, clean up our pollution. North Americans could give up self-righteousness to expand their being.

Our conflict is with job-wardens and consumer-keepers of a permissive looney-bin. Property, credit, interest, insurance, installments, profit are stupid concepts. Millions of have-nots and drop-outs in the U.S. are living on an overflow of technologically produced fat. They aren't fighting ecology, they're responding to it. Middle-class living rooms are funeral parlors and only undertakers will stay in them. Our fight is with those who would kill us through dumb work, insane wars, dull money morality.

Give up jobs, so computers can do them! Any important human occupation can be done free. Can it be given away?

Revolutions in Asia, Africa, South America are for humanistic industrialization. The technological resources of North America can be used throughout the world. Gratis. Not a patronizing gift, shared.

Our conflict begins with salaries and prices. The trip has been paid for at an incredible price in death, slavery, psychosis.

An event for the main business district of any U.S. city. Infiltrate the largest corporation office building with life-actors as nymphomaniacal secretaries, clumsy repairmen, berserk executives, sloppy security guards, clerks with animals in their clothes. Low key until the first coffee-break and then pour it on.

Secretaries unbutton their blouses and press shy clerks against the wall. Repairmen drop typewriters and knock over water coolers. Executives charge into private offices claiming their seniority. Guards produce booze bottles and playfully jam elevator doors. Clerks pull out goldfish, rabbits, pigeons, cats on leashes, loose dogs.

At noon 1000 freed beings singing and dancing appear outside to persuade employees to take off for the day. Banners roll down from office windows announcing liberation. Shills in business suits run out of the building, strip and dive in the fountain. Elevators are loaded with incense and a pie fight breaks out in the cafeteria. Theater is fact/action

Give up jobs. Be with people. Defend against property.

[end]

 

A Speech: Dialectics of Liberation

I think we've seen this year a magnification of all our own anxieties and paranoia and terror under attack of conflicting image ideas on our bodies, and the use of language patterns and their associational affects almost scare us out of our bodies, white or black, finally.

Given this kind of awareness or consciousness, or this insight into our own emotions, habit patterns, and our conditioning — the conditioning which everyone has complained of: Carmichael in his own way, complaining of the white definitions of identity imposed on the black man as a form of conditioning the consciousness of the blacks; the whites suffering their own forms of conditioning, equally horrible — we find ourselves all in the same boat, in that sense.

This year I've been impressed by Gregory Bateson, talking about the scientifical apocalyptic aspect of the anxiety syndrome that we're suffering from. He said: Given the present rate of infusion of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the mammalian-human aspect of the planet had a half-life of 10-30 years because in that time the carbon dioxide layer over the atmosphere (which apparently is opaque) admits heat but doesn't let it bounce out; so, given the present build-up of this gas over the surface, a temperature rise of 5 degrees is possible.

Irreversibly after 30 years — the 10 to 30 years therefore the half life — the polar ice caps melt and the continents become inundated with 400 feet of water, this being only one of the many threats to the human-mammal.

If there's 400 feet of water over the continents, that'll leave more room for the porpoises who have nervous systems, brains, and a language that is as complex as ours. So ultimately the universe doesn't need our exorable yowling for the continuance of its own life.

So okay, but there's no purpose or reason for us to get off the earth, if we can make a go of it. And as long as anybody's willing to make a go of it . . . and this is "To be or not to be?" which is as deep a question as ever, you know, do you want "to be" or not? I don't know, sometimes I don't want to; I don't give a shit, I'm going to die anyway. Which everybody feels occasionally, from Shakespeare on down to the lowest chimney sweep in Blake.

So, assuming that we're willing to suffer more and continue our existence on the planet, on to more pragmatic things, aside from the methaphysical void — getting out of the void, back into the illusion.

One aspect of the illusion, then, one of the sensory possibilities, one thing we can see is a basic mood which most people have stumbled on at one point or another: the aesthetic experience, the religious experience, the peak experience, the mystical experience, the art experience, identity experience, unitive experience — an experience of One, of all of us being one — not only ourselves with varying color of skin and mysterious ego-origin or whatever we are, also one with flowers, also the very trees and plants.

So we have a unitive experience, and my conception of, or my feeling toward this fact that we are all one is that there are just many eyes staring out. There are no hierarchies, there are no categories, there are only many eyes staring out. Which is like a very mysterious situation, constantly to be facing these many eyes, and it leads me to imagine that this is where paranoia comes from originally.

So paranoia is probably good because it's the recognition that everybody is part of a giant conspiracy; and possibly the paranoid has recognized it, but thinks that he's the only one that has recognized it, and he doesn't take signals from others that they also have recognized it. So that once it's recognized mutually, it begets absolute delight, as recognition builds up for me — we're not the whites, we're not the heroes, we're that same glimpse that everyone has — and a glimpse which can be the center of consciousness and also the center out of which political activity begins.

Now, political activity linking up with social-construction activity — there's the old tribal statement from China that Pound constantly quotes from, I guess, Confucius: "To straighten out the nation, straighten the provinces; to straighten the province, straighten the city; to straighten the city, straighten households; straighten your household, straighten your family, straighten yourself."

If there is a large group of younger people and older people working in older traditions, who have come to some basic ground of consciousness where they do all feel one, where they have glimpsed that, then we may have possibly the beginning of a friendly communism, or communion, or community, or friendly extension of self outward; if they have glimpsed that and if they are willing to trust that.

But that trust has to be such a calm thing, and such an assured thing. But the weird thing is that—tearfully so, almost—many younger kids have that trust. It's the one thing that they have arrived at, I think, which makes a possible, beautiful moment, then, for history — or maybe, you know, the last moment of recognition before the giant comedy ends with an explosion.

So, have we, or have they, that much care for ourselves and for each other that we're willing to accept each other then, to work without fear, without paranoia, and enjoy ourselves finally? Begin to play again, get out of the system, not answer the machine back, not escalate the machine, but actually join together and set a completely other pattern going, wipe out the old — simply wipe it out?

Because it's conditioning, and conditioning can be deconditioned. How, is a miracle. It happens naturally sometimes; somebody wakes up on top of Fern Hill, or hears Blake, or however you first got laid, or whatever the catalyst is: it opens up the realization. Or, it is now as so often, the precipitating chemical — pot, grass or LSD.

So I would say that the privacy thing — private? — that we don't know enough gossip, which is the actual history. From the mere public image you cannot generally figure anything out.

J. Edgar Hoover wondering about little girls walking home from schools and being attacked by the stranger outside the schoolhouse? He used to put big pictures of that, signed by J. Edgar Hoover, showing little girls walking past trees in America, telling them they should not go out on the street during the day time, alone — creating this anxiety all over — preparing the children for Vietnam, actually, by that kind of traumatic attack on their trust, that phantasy — that's his phantasy.

Then what's his sex life, who was not married? He masturbates? No, probably not. Makes it with men? Who knows — his second in command, maybe? Maybe he likes girls but he can't make it? He's not married, and it's against the rules, in the FBI, for men who like to make it with women, to make it with women; I think one FBI man got bounced for that recently, for making it with a woman he wasn't married to. And Hoover ain't married, that means he'd have to be chaste, probably, and if he's chaste — you know, you got to think about that.

What does he think about when he's naked, standing in front of a mirror? That's something the citizen doesn't generally get to imagine. Probably in phantasy also citizens do imagine that, but that isn't public, that imagination.

So then finally we come to tactics of psycho-political action. The private must be made public. The public hallucination — which all along was a hallucination — history as it was known, the front symbolisms, the speeches that I make or Stokely Carmichael or J. Edgar Hoover makes or Mao tse-Tung makes, those speeches which are made to manipulate people's consciousnesses, obviously don't represent the full spectrum of our awareness and consciousnesses.

None of us public speakers who are the very form of a conference, since it puts us up front as priest-hero-politician brains — in front of you as Gods — and that immediately freezes us and our consciousness, and our identity-role . . . and so we find ourselves sitting talking, and of course like in order to maintain that identity-role we've got to stay right here, frozen in this relationship instead of whatever other phantasy we might have, like an orgy, or whatever else we would like to do.

So that everybody is forced into their different roles: spectators, the conference participants, and the preachers. And that automatically altered reality, altered any interpretation of reality, or conditioned any interpretation of reality, or outer apparency. Well that's obvious, everybody's known it and complained of it, all this problem of loudspeakers and the conference and the format it should take.

Ian Sommerville, a friend of Burroughs and an electronics expert, said that he tried to think of the model, an electronic model, for a totally democratic conference and oddly enough it wound up resembling the UN — in the sense of the desks, and everybody earphone connected, everybody being able to speak and be translated, and everybody talking at once. So we have an overpopulation problem, obviously, that we've got to deal with.

I'm going to get on now to praxis — practical plans. Social action and plans have been cased in autonomy, it's a correct term — in the sense of correct in its power and literal as to some of the new activists' techniques. And the original style seemed to rise up out of the streets: "Standing on a street corner waiting for no one is power" — along with the phrase: "Make San Francisco an electric Tibet."

The methods used, then, have been somewhat similar — as you could guess at from Burroughs' paradigm: Don't escalate the hostility, don't escalate the anger, control your mind, watch what you're doing, be aware — totally.

It isn't love that's being sought here, it's not love that's being offered — it's awareness of what your own feelings are, and the movements of your own mind, including the movements towards hysteria, including the movements toward the acceptance of words that don't have any reference — acceptance because of affective reverberations of the tone of voice (how they're pronounced) — and also acceptance because of the fear of opposing what seems to be inevitable, what you're told is inevitable, either by Black Power or by Mao or by Johnson or by Burroughs or by anybody — or yourself or your brother.

Autonomy is Power! I mean you've got to make up your own mind!

Just because everybody else is screaming the same thing, it doesn't mean that you have to join in or be lost in the universe. You're still there, in your belly — unless you get out there in a phantasy, out of your body, and you cling to that phantasy as being the only answer — as the man attacking you, the policeman or the capitalist who's attacking you is attacking a phantasy of you, his phantasy, his image.

Because if you're there neutral, not intending him any particular harm, actually, but trying to straighten him out and get him out of his bag, and he projects on you a monster phantasy, say, like where you're going to like rape his mind or destroy his entire universe in some way that'll leave him without a universe, or without feeling good in the place where he is — in other words, if he feels threatened, and if you threaten him, by God he's going to feel threatened and he's going to take the appropriate action that any madman in a nuthouse will take when he feels threatened.

He'll strike back at you. So if you get into fights with people in the madhouse, you're probably there as a patient, I would guess — or a doctor. You're in a madhouse, the world is a madhouse and everybody's nuts, so what do you do in a madhouse when somebody says that you're a spy? You internalize it and assume that it's so? Or you reject his charge and hit him?

You realize that he's making a movie of you, he's projecting an image on you, and if you accept his image you get trapped in his game and pretty soon, bam! The two of you are up in this paranoid universe battling it out — for the language!

Who's going to control the language? You know, who's going to control the microphone? As if anybody who controls the microphone controls the language: all they can do is control the sounds that come over the microphone, and they can condition you—but once yoll're deconditioned then you know that you're just hearing sounds, and that those sounds are just sounds.

And are they pretty sounds? Do they make you feel good? Do they lead to any constructive action? Or are they sounds that give off bad vibrations? And are they going to lead you to feel bad? And make other people feel bad? And escalate the booby trap till "the whole fucking shithouse goes up in chunks."

That's one view. There might be the other view that violence is absolutely necessary as a means of therapy; a different form of therapy than the one I've been proposing. That may be so, I'm not a psychiatrist. That seems to be the psychiatric interpretation. Dr. Cooper said, "Don't give Che Guevara LSD, he might stop fighting." So I said, "Well, how do you know he won't fight more efficiently?" Of course, that was my con man's answer, actually.

If one were to continue fighting after LSD it would probably mean that the situation would require that. I suppose. All things being equal, which is the safe place where we can be here together, not the unsafe place where some of us have to be destroyed so that the others can be here. But if we're going to have one place, if we're going to be here on this place then we have to make place for people in bodies, for everybody that's got a body.

Otherwise, you're going to have these bodies scared of being destroyed: as has been projected by the white race, you know, the threat of destruction of the yellow life form or the black life form. So they're reacting obviously to the hypnotic threat of the whites, and the reaction is completely a mirror image of the white presentation. Mirror image, except that actually there's old tribal wisdom still operating, with the blacks in America, that hasn't been presented either/or acounted for.

But what's necessary is active imagination, active Black Power, Digger Autonomy — active manifestation of the understanding, manifestation, active things, not sitting around on your ass: active poetry, active use of language, the first Boddhisatva's vow: "Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to enlighten them all."

Because the whole universe can't make it, nor will happiness be complete until we all enter Heaven. Othcrwise there's always going to be the Hells to be aware of that we have created for others to be in. So does somebody want to go to Heaven and leave the others in Hell too? Big deal! Big deal! Jesus! Big deal! Well I guess maybe that might lead to . . . like, you know, the porpoises. They'll go to heaven and leave us out.

On the other hand the overactive search for Heaven and all that energy gone into it is also a fuck-up. It gets in the way of awareness of what's actually going on in the actual . . . sort of like calm in the middle of all the violence and murder that's actually taking place, that undertone of calm that's always there. As for Prince Bolkonsky under Napoleon's boot, on the battleffeld as he lay there dying, in War and Peace, looking up past General's horses' asses at Heaven, indifferent to the whole fucking Franco-Russian war, looking in the sky . . . amazing, like if you went out on the streets with a switchblade and started the revolution, but then got shot down and you had 20 minutes to realize where you were, and you dying! And the whole struggle faded out into a totally other vision.

So from that level of consciousness that's where manifest action can take place. Then finally we come to the fact that it's possible for gangs of young people together to live communally, form their own organizations and begin to address themselves to the anxiety-ridden outer world.

Where would you begin? Well, in San Francisco it began to some extent with, say, the media people; which meant a tacit conspiracy of everybody to take them all to bed, to turn them all on, to turn them into friends. I mean, what's the point of having enemies when you can have friends? To de-control them, de-hypnotize them. Deconditioning them — sexual deconditioning, music deconditioning, dance-hall-media-happening-deconditioning, LSD deconditioning, orgy deconditioning.

When you have a lot of people working together with the same insight, that insight reinforces back and forth and is reflected back and forth and grows deeper. Whereas one lone nut saying "I am the Lamb" and "I am the Lion" can be clapped in jail, but one cat coming up among 5,000 people dressed in caps and bells saying "I am the Lamb" and "I am the Lion" and they all jump, and there are a lot of people shouting "I am the Lamb" and "I am the Lion" and acting on it because they're not afraid to be the Lamb or the Lion because they know that everybody knows it already.

So you can begin operating in the external world on that basis, that you are not alone. Because the insight is real. Because that is the reality of the entire universe, that's the ground of nature, that's what Being itself is, and if you ain't in Being where are you? Out in your head in a phantasy of not being in Being but, you know, having lost out and having to fight your way back into the material universe to gain possession of it.

So, you already are the material universe. You want a better relation with it. That means better relations, then with "the Squares"; means then the bringing over of all consciousness, all human consciousness into just one place where all consciousness can be one and be, feel, safe there, being one with the other ones. Where it won't be shut out and be the one lone consciousness while everybody over there in the other dimensions is having a big ball together.

It means, then, inter-personal Boddhisatva conduct, infiltrating outward on every occasion continously, through all strange forms of being, all strangers, all other persons; treating a person as person and not as role, not as uniform, not as cop, not as capitalist, not as communist, not as Maoist, not as Allen Ginsberg, not as "self" — recognition of that One which extends outward from the bar and grill to the university across the street, outward to everybody in America, obviously.

So then one would have to start making it — or we got to start making it — or you got to start making it — on that one level where you do address others to their eyes, directly, without fear, and with the realization that thtey [sic] are there. Well, now, a lot of people are going to bust up and hit you on the nose — though I think it depends on the amount of anxiety you project whether or not they have a negative reaction.

You know, I think that's the big key: the amount of anxiety, fear, trembling, nervousness that I put out, I know determines people's reactions to me, whether it's trust, friendliness despite appearance.

So then, what if all the people who had that insight were able to begin combining forces, totally neutralizing all negative affect, totally letting it drop into the void, hence transforming all that energy into conversion of consciousness to friendly nature — you'd then have autonomous communities rising as they do in San Francisco which involve kids living together and inviting other people in to join them for an evening or longer — it means the amassing of people together as in giant human Be-ins: not so much to demonstrate their force to others but to demonstrate their tranquility and quietness and presence to others, and to themselves; to reinforce the awareness, to exchange Upaya, skillful means, trade secrets of communication-forming proposals — proposition not opposition — proposals for a new society based on new consciousness, and then putting them into operation on a small scale, mutually, into operation as an example, rather than waiting for pie in the sky, rather than waiting for pie in the future, rather than waiting for Utopia to come through revolution.

Practicing on the basis of what's known already, so we have the development of free stores in San Francisco, free food in the parks, the Diggers' extensions of energy, the anonymity of most of the Digger people, the Communication Companies or the Free City news services which miemograph [sic] and print the daily news for the people so they get it fast, etc.

Where there's going to be a rally, where there's going to be music, where there's going to be free food, where you can get sleep, where you can get jobs, where you can go out into the country free so you can straighten your head out or freak out among true friends — so you can decontrol yourself of the city conditioning, calm yourself for a while and return to tribal-mammal origins in the original ecology for which we are fit, which is not the noisy, metallic city, as Leary has pointed out very radically and wisely: "Put all the metal underground, back where it belongs." If there's going to be bridges and buildings and machinery, then don't let that displace the living, organic material which is our natural friendly life form.

Obviously the surface of the planet has got to be replanted back to some sort of living delight, instead of dead vibrations. Get to work. You are the Free City planners.

So there is an autonomous idea of what Utopia is, ecologically, as something to work for, and concretely possible toward that sense. Goodman's suggestion: applying immediate social welfare ideals and principles — pay people to live in the country — like people on New York welfare. Give them the same money, and say: "You don't have to live in New York, you can live out of New York." That'll depopulate New York, remove the pressure on New York, straighten many heads out, calm everybody down to some extent. Have a healthier life — the "underprivileged," they'll get in the groove of being way out in the country and walking with clouds and stars, and talking with trees. And also save all the giant bureaucracy costs of the city.

But the only thing that will allow each of us to create his or her Utopia is praxis — and the pooling of our resources to free each of us to pursue our individual activities and strengthen the autonomous boundaries of our free cities of the now.

[end]

Final City, Tap City:
Crack at the Bottom of It

They grow wherever there is water. From the sea they mostly look white. Thin concrete skin over bay-shore, lakeside, riverbank. Big barnacles on a sea rock?

Dome of foul air, full of radio squeaks, TV signals, Radar. Shriek of Jet. Flap flap helicopter. Foulness flowing into all the very waters that made them come to be. "Hard, flat, incurable sore, Baltimore." James Agee.

Inside, the din is unbelievable.

Millions of terrified beings scurry through senseless mazes of tunnels and lanes and doors and corridors. The senses are insulted. Nose abused. Eyes revolted. Ears unable to shut it out. Lungs blanketed with lethal dust. Tired feet.

Everybody rushing about on some little errand somebody forced him to do. At pain of death. "Faces insane with purpose." William Burroughs.

Designed to protect everything inside from everything outside (country, they used to call it). Gradually there was no "outside."

Lots of danger, in.

I

Cities keep getting bigger and bigger and faster. People, inside them, get more crazed. Lots of them just can't do it anymore.

See them scrubbing that single marble step at the madhouse. Twenty years and the step is noticeably lower, very smooth. Or the Veteran, they call him, setting records at Livermore Hospital for the most wallets ever made in "Leather Therapy." He makes one, and only one, kind of wallet. Can't get him to go to lunch some days.

He isn't any crazier than any boss. The main difference is, he took it all on himself, chose a small part of the world where he could work, without hurting anybody, and made that part of the world clean. He's beautiful, at most an inch away from making it, and miserable, and lost.

I had a father-in-law, once, a gentle, good, Jewish man who worked his whole life in City. A newspaper man for Hearst, in Chicago. He once spent 3 days in a phone booth, in a race riot. "Nobody wanted to phone, so I was safe there. And I could phone my stories in." He couldn't always dart out to piss, even.

He went with us once on a vacation to the Wisconsin lakes. He was afraid to take a walk in the evenings: "The deer will put your eyes out with their horns." I tried to explain my admiration for him, that every corner in Chicago is far more dangerous, every day.

Unaware of his life of heroism, he trembled in the forest. But he went out into it, finally. And one fine evening he was lucky enough to surprise 3 deer only 20 feet away. They stared at one another for a moment, and when the deer stately left, he wept at their beauty.

City boy makes good. Age 56.

II

"Temperature Inversion" in London 1962 killed 5,000 folks in 3 days. (Warm air is on top, like a cap, and all the poisons get trapped in there, inside.)

"Mostly old folks with lung trouble anyway or bad hearts," they said. Figuring it out, later, they found that inversion for 5 days, instead of 3, would kill all of London, man and boy. Ten million London folks done in by the stink they send to heaven.

Or water. Most cities so vulnerable $50 of TNT in the right place on the aqueduct and no taps drip. Tap City. Millions, crazed, killing for a cup of water. Huge profits from a bathtub.

III

That was no-water. Consider too much of the stuff.

Every summer some part of Chicago get 3 inches of rain in 24 hours. No elevators, no lights, no way to get home.

"Wiped out!" they say. "$5,000 for the game room, not even counting the pool table. Never happened before."

Every summer of the world. Disaster of the 3-inch rain.

IV

There's a danger too grave even to be named if we stand on ground we do not know. Most of us stand in City. Few know what that City is.

City is not even ground, but thin concrete on top of ground. Plus human beings, bustling.

The Planet, as shown by the anecdote of the deer, is something else. The Planet simply waits there, gentle and undemanding, until we get out of the way. Leave a city 25 years and grass, trees, berry vines, will crack the sidewalks.

All those hyped-up errands! All those speedy days!

V

It's even worse to stand in meat and skin we do not know. City destroys our sense of meat and skin, because City insults every sense we have. Every organ of sense. Every organ.

Once I was walking with Phil Whalen at 6th and Mission and he had to excuse himself. I waited on the corner while he went into a bar. When he came back he said, "I hate to piss in skidrow bars, the floors are always wet and I have holes in my shoes."

VI

There is such a thing as City, and we have to show what that is. We have to know what ground we're walking on, or we'll all be suckers and fools. After 25 years with the Company, a calendar, a hearty handshake, and permission to get through the gate to talk to your friends.

I always admired Arthur Koestler, and always was enraged by him. I knew him to be smart, well read, and almost pathologically honest. Also, he cared a lot about the things I wanted to know. None of this changed the fact that I knew Koestler was wrong. "Wrong" is a very good word. Very few educated people still know how to use it.

Just 2 weeks ago I found Koestler giving himself away to my sense of his wrongness. He says, in Yogi and the Commisar, that we are a "vulnerable animal, living on a hostile planet."

Clearly this man has never looked at his own two hands. Has never known the miracle of his human eyes. Does not know that he is the only animal that can out-climb a mountain (as the north-west Indians do, chinning themselves on quarter-inch ledges in the rock, till they drive the goat to where the goat must fall). Can do that, and also swim. Can run with the halter in his hand until the horse drops dead. Can curl up into a ball, as the fox does, let the snow cover him, for warmth, and make it through a blizzard on Mt. Shasta. As John Muir did.

Koestler doesn't know the skin he stands in, the meat he is, and he doesn't know the ground he's standing on. What, possibly, can he tell us about anything else?

All we get are reports from various errand boys (at pain of death) and very accurate descriptions of organized insanity.

Koestler knows he's wrong, he's always cringing about it. He is the scapegoat, here, not because he's the worst, but because he's among the best of those who make articulate the European Mind we must (at pain of death) reject.

Camus and Sartre make the same errors, but have no humbleness.

VII

City is so human. Is it possible that this becomes our Tragic Flaw? (Seeing City as Mindless evolution, irreversible, Man's way of changing, not biological?)

Are we doomed to die by City? City for us like Pterodactyl flew his huge, Dinosaur, carcass with his little finger? Pinky finally 6 feet long and a web of skin for wing, but everything else was wrong and he cashed in. Victim of super-specialization.

Is it so with us? "The trouble with organization is it's just like perfection, the more you have the more you want." Gertrude Stein.

VIII

No use wading through Sociological swamps how breakdown of family-church-community-morals — "We lost our roots" — causes fidgety kids in the suburb, builds huge head-shrink industry, drives all to dope. Those folks spent all their time trying to figure out why it got this way. They never found out, therefore, where it had got to. Let alone getting to things to do about it.

Obviously, it's all but over. Even if you don't, as I haven't yet, bring in the Big Bomb.

And what this realization has done is to create a huge number of people who are Immigrants in their own native land. This may be almost the first time it's happened. Always, before, there was somewhere to go. Even Moses could march his folks away.

But this is the full circle. Uruburus has taken his tail in his mouth. Man has always moved westerly, now is piling up on the Pacific Cliffs, and Japan is flooding back on us. It is all One. At last.

IX

It's hard to say what to do about it, because it may be too late, and what small things are being done about it are just now starting. Or say it: It may be all over already, and it isn't even started yet.

The "Total Assault on the Culture" by Ed Sanders, and by Diggers, and all who identify with the Hip, will certainly produce a whelm of beautiful souls, it already has. Whether it will save the species is a very grave, and doubtful, question.

Immigrants on their own native soil have already established a style which has much to commend it. We have kicked the habits of Success, Ambition, Cleanliness/Godliness, Duty, Purpose, Loyalty, Citizenship, and in some rare and truly beautiful instances, as with Allen Ginsberg, the loss of European sense of "Self."

Like all Immigrants, we band together to save energy. Jews, coming to New York, banded together in sixes and nines and bought a Brownstone house, for cash. They ate together at a common table. Freed of rent and eating well and easy (you can feed 12 or more people for the same price as 3), they could turn their pushcarts into million-dollar estates.

Today their children get high together. Work little, eat well, ball like crazy, and use all their energy to perfect their own beings, and to help the perfection of others.

It may be an ugly word in America, but this is a religious revolution, just like the first one, and less hung up. Like, everybody fucks.

The worst Persian voluptuary could not have dreamed our most ordinary day.

X

Gluttony, greed, lack of compassion, has caused America to become the most despised nation on Earth. The sad thing is, my Polish Lady tells me, we were throughout her youth, and still are, or could be, the hope of all.

We face great holocausts, terrible catastrophies, all American cities burned from within, and without.

However, our beautiful Planet will germinate -- underneath this thin skin of City, Green will come on to crack our sidewalks! Stinking air will blow away at last! The bays flow clean!

And there will be signs. We will know when to slip away and let these murderous fools rip themselves to pieces.

In the meantime, stay healthy. There are hundreds of miles to walk, and lots of work to be done. Keep your mind. We will need it. Stake out a retreat. Learn berries and nuts and fruit and small animals and all the plants. Learn water.

For there must be good men and women in the mountains, on the beaches, in all the neglected and beautiful places, so that one day we come back to ghostly cities and try to set them right.

There must not be a plan. We have always been defeated by our Plan.

In all that rubble, think of the beautiful trinkets we can wave about our heads as we dance!

As we do right now. As we do right now.

[end]

The Birth of Digger Batman

O sky glorious, O sky divine — People — dominions — nations — Heavens — door — O walking deliverance — O Passage — People — O People — Machines — Animals — Trees — Towers & Bridges — O Seed — O colors — Faces — All Moving Things — Life, hello . . . I want to tell you of the birth of Digger.

Morning, about 9:30, July 5th, 1967 -- clear and sunny upon the city, the sky echoing with happiness, the streets still and clean and just to walk on them is to be silent in the bright rising from the night after a big 4th of July electric music and free feed celebration out in the park where Emmett and the cooks from the Fillmore had made barbecue for about 4,000 people.

I am up early and out into the street from Peter Cohon's on Pine Street where the Communication Company lived -- out and standing in the good day with the smiles all over me, just letting the warmth and the light honey about on me, my clothes glowing and the fine feeling seeping to the skin and a touch tasting to my innards, and O the head is just wanting to face with smiles in all directions. I had driven Susan Parker to the airport a couple days before and still had her car so I swings over a few blocks to Geary thinking to have coffee and a morning smoke with the Jahrmarkts, Billy and Joan and the kids.

Up two flights, rap rap on the door and Bill answers to my hello half-dressed and happy. "The baby's coming," is what I remember of him having said. And there is Joan sitting in the sun of those bright windows looking out over downtown and the bay, sitting on the bed, the mattress inevitably close to the floor, and the three kids -- Jade, Hassan and Caledonia -- kind of hushed and happy because they know the baby is coming and have been waiting too.

So Joany's been in labor since the night before and now sits very calm with a $3 tin watch in her hand timing the contractions -- about every 7 minutes and getting closer together. So me and Billy just standing there kind of stunned and sunny not thinking too much about what to do. "You got any arrangements made?" I says, and "no" is his reply.

It kind of goes like that, having a cigarette and a cup of coffee in the warmth of the morning in the corner room with just one fact we're standing in -- the baby's coming and we are smiling and blinking lumenant with speech in soft sounds. Nobody is thinking too much about hospitals though we figure lightly first about getting Joan into one of those places, but none too serious.

I sound on Joan if she thinks she got time for me to go phone around and see what I can do, get help I guess is what I meant, and she says there's plenty of time so I cut out and drive over to Margo St. James place on Nob Hill and start phoning.

I get ahold of Kaiser Hospital and after about seven switchings back and forth I get ahold of some voice that says No, there is no chance of getting into their facilities without two hundred and fifty dollars in front even if the baby is on the way right now, and that the only thing that They, this voice, can suggest is to take The Expectant to County Hospital, which said set of instructions vis-a-vis that exhausted brick pile of agony so offends my ear I come near to throwing the phone across the room.

So I phone Bill Fritsch to let somebody else know what's happening (who tells Emmett who sends an ambulance which nobody quite knows what to do with except send it away). So I clean out Margo's refrigerator of all its food and drive back over to the Communication Company where is lovely Sam and Cassandra and Claude and Helene who I break it down to.

Right away Claude is on the horn talking here and there. I get Cassandra and head back to Billy's, drop off Cassandra and split down to the store to get some smokes and am just rounding the corner on Geary when Claude pulls up to tell me he is on his way to Bolinas to get John Doss, a friend and Head of Pediatrics at Kaiser.

Upstairs is Cassandra cleaning the kitchen, making coffee and a bit to eat for the kids. It is late morning now and we relax -- everything seems to be going along unmolested by even the quiet logic of time -- Cassandra softly busy in the kitchen, Billy sitting with Joan in the sunny corner room, the kids hushed and talking among themselves in their room, and I with the stillness of no thinking in my head gazing out the window under the Bat flag at the greenish dome of city hall.

Rap rap on the door and I go to open it to Richard Brautigan who comes in under a soft tan hat, checks out the action, spots Cassandra in the kitchen, decides everthing is cool, walks once again through the rooms, tall, slightly stooping like a gentle spider standing up (We are all spiders, or ants, or something, I remember wondering, watching Richard putting his hands in his pockets and taking them out) decides to split. "Be back in a while -- need anything?" "No, nothing." out the door he goes.

It's early afternoon now. Quite suddenly Joan gets up, walks into the kitchen and squats down flat-footed on the floor with her back leaning to the wall, contractions coming quicker, Billy kneeling with her, Cassandra calm, me getting nervous -- smoking cigarettes.

Knock on the door and in comes Claude and Helene with John Doss, way over 6 foot, a tower of a man with those huge gentle hands that by mere holding can take the panic from a hurt child. All of a sudden it seems we got the best. Right away he's with Joan, coat off, talking real easy, squat'd down, laughing with the simplicity of things. Claude asks me if I want to smoke some gold and lays a joint on me -- I take it and put it on Billy.

People begin arriving -- Billy Fritsch and Lenore, Bill much calmer than the day before in the park loaded on acid and telling Richie Marley real anxious, "There's a warp in the continuum!" Emmett arrives. Diggers start coming.

By now the kitchen is a place of prayer -- Joan in labor on the big patch quilt now in the middle of the kitchen floor and around her kneeling and sitting silent people -- silent and back within listening to what silence says at self to birth.

John Doss moves in from the crowded front room every now and again and kneels his huge person down to speak quietly to Joan as he feels with those giant hands across her belly for the baby within. Billy squats Arab-silent flat-footed beside Joan, his hair long about his shoulders, staring into the thick air that holds the deep flux of his unspeaking Arab Prayer.

Now the city has darkened for night, and Geary Street outside the window crawls alive with the homeward bound. Across the street the huge sign of an auto-agency BOAZ, in Hebrew "the lion hearted" -- in black and white and red letters sends ancient benedictions into the rooms, and the green dome of city hall is alit as if it were a mosque removed one world and glowing not with bulbs nor candle but rather ringed with another light.

Now from out the night John and Sara and Peter and Sam and Gandolf and Natural Suzanne and more Diggers arrive like a troupe or miming chorus bearing brown paper sacks filled with sandwiches -- huge Poor Boys from some ecstasy delicatessen -- the picture: Joan about to give birth on the kitchen floor, one dim shaded desk lamp by her feet, and a dozen people encircling her eating sandwiches and smoking weed, faces all in shadow of the only lamp.

The contractions have begun to quicken and Joany is saying over and over again softly, "Come on little Baby . . . come on" -- a little song over and over again directed inside as if by this time the intelligence of the as yet enwombed Baby was beginning to be focused on its birthing passage by the soft speech of Joany's song -- "Come on Baby . . . come on little Baby . . . come on."

The labor was becoming long, more than 24 hours now and the concentration of Joany's song had drawn the muscle lines tensed above her eyes pointing to a spot between them, slightly above them, and directly within.

John Doss had a slightly worried look as his hands felt over her belly. He seemed to be trying to gauge the position. Reaching within he felt for the baby's head which seemed to be turned in a wrong direction. The contractions were now great visible waves that moved down across Joan's belly and with each one her tightened face appeared to have the full focused power of everything behind it pouring down through her body toward the slow and heavy workings and waves of force that carried the baby in its passage.

"I need an instrument," he said mentioning some sort of birthing clamp. "I have to turn the baby's head." He turned to someone there and told them to go across the street to the hospital and get an instrument and an intern.

Meanwhile John begins instructing Billy in how he, Billy, is going to receive his baby. Beneath the belly skin you can see the baby making its movements. Around Joan about a dozen Diggers and Digger ladies looking like all the accumulated faces of the Universe, the Divines of Ever pouring from each eye.

Like no time there is bang on the door and two white coated hospital guys come in stiff and important with shiney metal in their hands, take one look at the scene and decide it won't do for them to have anything to do with it. John Doss goes to meet them and they start backing off real quick. John grabs one of the guys by the lapels and starts to jerk the doctor's jacket off and gets it down to around the guy's elbows.

"Take off that coat and get to work in here, for Christ sake. Be a doctor for once in your life!" he says to the guy.

"Take it easy John, take it easy," the other guy tries to soothe. "This can't be done here . . . it's not sterile. She must be moved to the hospital."

About this time I start to ride up. "She isn't going anywhere," I says leaning across Joan at the guy. "Cool it," Bill says from the floor. They split threatening an ambulance and, for all we know, the Heat, so everybody settles down again with "Come on baby" going very strong.

So John is back down with Billy showing him how to receive the baby, when it starts to come out and so quick and easy it seems a miracle but Billy has the baby's head in his hands and it looks like throughout the whole scene of deliverance the baby had turned its own head and decided to come on out and with a thick liquid whoosh is right in Billy's hands. I am on my knees by Joany's head and I lean down with little more than a whisper, "It's a boy."

With some cotton string John Doss ties off the umbilical cord and cuts it with a pocket knife and the baby is born, out, free, alive and beautiful crying in his father's hands so fast that it was not a process of birth at last but life occurring.

John Doss begins cleaning up Joany and places the afterbirth in a basin.

"Eat!" he says to the circle of joyously lighted faces holding out the basin. "Everybody eat!" and starts carrying the basin around from one to one and each dips a hand to the stuff of birth and blood and tastes and never, from no dope I have ever taken, have I got so instantly high. Somebody marks the time, 10:41, and asks Billy the baby's name.

"Digger!" Billy answers back with a voice loud with single word as its own rising song.

The bloodied ends of the umbilical tying string Billy takes and wraps up in a poem I had made that afternoon to lay on the kitchen floor:

Velvet kneeling meat --
Crazyblood in his prayers

is all I remember.

[end]

All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
. . . . . . . .(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
. . . . . . . (it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

[end]

Rushes

The boy said the killer looked a lot like himself.

naked in violent death, they were sprawled in the nude, 10 feet apart, face down on the dirty concrete floor, their heads bashed in, their blood splashed . . . mixed with wine bottles, the old newspapers, the moth-eaten sweaters, broken light bulb, the dog food.

Then the cops came.

and so, on the surface of daily life, consciousness forms beings and bodies that one can see gathering and colliding in the atmosphere, to distinguish their personalities. and these bodies from hideous cabals where every eventuality comes into the world to argue against what is beyond appeal. i am not andre breton and i did not go to baltimore but this is what i saw on the banks of the hudson. the residents of the area were overcome with an insatiable curiosity, wondering whether the hippies were at it again over in tompkins square park.

The morgue attendents brought the first body bag out of 169 Ave. A. And the neighbors knew what happened. A body bag has a sobering effect on people. Two body bags have twice that elfect.

a stout elderly black woman said, "When I works, I works hard. When I thinks, I goes to sleep."

Even the police didn't know.

There is a computer in the attorney general's offlce which is said to be able to predict when and where riots are going to break out . . .

Death to intelligence! Hurrah for death!

How to make a fire bomb: Fill a glass bottle about one-fifth to one-fourth full with sulphuric acid. Fill the remainder with gasoline, kerosene, or a combination of both. Add water to potassium chlorate and sugar mix, and soak rags in the mix. Wrap the rags around the bottle, tie in place, and allow to dry. When thrown the bottle will break, the acid will ignite the chlorate sugar saturated rags, which in turn will ignite the fuel. Caution!!! Improvised explosives are much more dangerous to handle than conventional explosives. Such mixtures as above can be ignited or detonated by a single spark, excessive heat, or merely by friction generated by stirring or mixing ingredients together. Danger in handling these items cannot be overemphasized.

In New York in 1966 there was not one record of a Puerto Rican suicide, but in the Tombs prison 15 young Puerto Rican men supposedly committed suicide in their cells.

We don't talk very much of Marxism anymore. Our goal is a Free Society, a genuine democracy in which all the people are integrated through their own constant, active participation in the continuing struggle required for a man to feel free and be free.

To achieve the basis of that kind of society, man must first defeat his exploiter. To do so, in view of the reality that the exploiter is always richer, stronger, bigger, each man must particularize the struggle into his personal commitment; if he can, he can defeat any exploiter whose motivation is greed and possession.

That is why the Vietnamese cannot be defeated by the armed technological might of the United States. Each Vietnamese fights for his revolution. His own and all of theirs together. He fights for himself, for his country, and for his vision of a just world. That combination is undefeatable. We, too, in the Americas, are gaining such a combination.

The detectives investigating the double killing were beginning to fashion a portrait of the dead couple in all the sordid surroundings and the slovenly way of life in which they had existed. Reporters asked Inspector McLaughlin if the murder victims were hippies. "Well," he responded, "they were found in the environment of it, and in the area of it . . . and they were young people . . . Yes, you could classify them as being in that category."

the issue is no longer the status of an american minority, but the status of america.

. . . I'm not for wanton violence . . . I'm for truth, no matter who tells it, I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against . . . I'm a human being first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole . . .

The recidivist problem . . . the rebirth of the hopelessly homicidal mind.

They are the fringe whites . . . outcasts . . . worse than being a Negro or Puerto Rican. Assistant Chief Inspector Joseph McLaughlin, boss of Manhattan South detectives, is tempted to send all these freaks to Hell.

after you get inside, all your fear more or less is gone. and you concentrate on the safe, and you can look at it and . . . of course you always know what kind of safe it is before you make your entrance and everything. You go in, you got your tools and everything, and you can estimate what's in the safe.

if it's a place that has delivery trucks you can figure 500 dollars per truck for every truck they got and they'll have that much in the safe. i mean that's the average for any kind of business whether it be beer trucks or a dry cleaning place.

but still in all, that jewel might be the one. it just might be the guy that's beating the income tax, or it might be the guy that's booking all the big football payoff or layoff or something.

and there's no charge in the world like when you see that smoke . . . and when you're punching it and you hear that pin hit the back of the safe: clinggg! you know you're home free. or if you're peeling it you see that smoke come out . . .

whenever you pop that door and see the smoke you know that you've cracked the rivets and it's all yours. and when you see that safe door open, man, it's sweet times and the hell with death!

when it is no longer bought with money, commodities lie open to criticism and modification . . . the cops' job is to ensure that a commodity maintains the magical property of having to be paid for instead of becoming a mute, passive, insensible, submissive thing.

A child was found beaten today and they report that the President has gone mad.

. . . Each hour here in the Holy Land enables me to have greater spiritual insights into what is happening in America between black and white. The black American never can be blamed for his racial animosities -- he is only reacting to 400 years of the conscious racism of the American whites.

But as racism leads America up the suicide path, I do believe, from the experiences that I have had with them, that the whites of the younger generation, in the cities and universities, wlll see the handwriting on the wall and many of then will turn to the spiritual path of truth -- the only way left to America to ward off the disaster that racism inevitably must lead to.

He was 5 feet 11 and his body weighed no more than 140 pounds when police found him sprawled on that basement concrete floor in goddamn death. The girl's clothes were in a neat little pile . . . they were not the clothes the daughter of a wealthy Greenwich, Conn. company president would wear around the Baronial 30-room mansion she was raised in.

no brassiere was found at the murder scene.

The girl didn't want any more culture, any more classes . . . she simply wanted to paint. Her mother wanted her to be a dancer when she was young.

how do men make history, starting from the pre-established conditions to persuade them not to take a hand in it? ? ? Watts! Drop-outs! Black Panthers! Niggers! and the revolutionist and communal gangs of every area.

Are you aware that some Protestant theologians, in their writings are using the phrase "post-Christian era" --- and they mean now? Pagan energy.

Affluence is by no means natural or human; it is simply an abundance of goods.

even if the murderer hadn't betrayed any strange behavior, the green carboard sticker on his apartment door was enough to make the cops ask questions. it bore the insignia of one of the country's most militant forces -- the Black Panther and the legend "Black Power."

. . . Oh, Sir, get a doll a roofing. You can play jacks and girls do that with a softball and do tricks with it. I take all events into consideration. No, no and it is no! It is confused and it says no. A boy has never wept nor bashed a thousand kin for nothing. Did you hear me? . . .

[end]

Take a Cop to Dinner Cop a Dinner to Take a Cop Dinner Cop a Take

Mr. Answer Man what is a weapon worse ten times worse, than the Hydrogen Bomb?

Why a cunt which is ten times larger than the largest cock extant, mickey.

Degoutante, said mickey kissing the cops to hedge the bet.

Take a cop to dinner:

Racketeers take cops to dinner with payoffs.

Pimps take cops to dinner with free tricks.

Dealers take cops to dinner with free highs.

Business takes cops to dinner with graft.

Unions and Corporations take cops to dinner with post-retirement jobs.

Schools and Professional Clubs take cops to dinner with free tickets to athletic events and social affairs.

The Catholic Church takes cops to dinner by exempting them from religious duties.

The Justice Department takes cops to dinner with laws giving them the right to do almost anything.

The Defense Department takes cops to dinner by releasing them from all military obligations.

Establishment newspapers take cops to dinner by propagating the image of the friendly, uncorrupt, neighborhood policeman.

Places of entertainment take cops to dinner with free drinks, and admission to shows.

Merchants take cops to dinner with discounts and gifts.

Neighborhood Committees and Social Organizations take cops to dinner with free discussions offering discriminating insights into hipsterism, black militancy, and drug culture.

Cops take cops to dinner by granting them immunity to prosecution for misdemeanors and anything else they can get away with.

Cops take themselves to dinner by inciting riots.

And so, if you own anything or you don't take a cop to dinner this week and feed his power to judge, prosecute and brutalize the streets of your city.

Note: Gourmet George Metesky would remind everyone not to make the mistake of Arnold Schuster, who served the right course at the wrong time.

[end]

The Post-Competitive, Comparative Game of a Free City[:]

[An annotated version.]

[Note: on an August 2017 visit to the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library to view a group of papers which Emmett left with Harvey Kornspan in 1968 and which Harvey sold to a book dealer in 2014 who in turn sold them to the NYPL, the text below was [annotated] as it appeared in the draft version that is located with the Grogan Papers. As well, the formatting of paragraphs etc is according to the draft version. [Brackets] indicate text in the draft #1 at NYPL. [RING] indicates occasional differences with the version in Ringolevio. {Braces} indicate text in the Realist/Digger Papers version. /Slash/ indicates end of line in either version. Also note: H3 headings in the web format are ALL CAPS in the NYPL draft version #1. [[Double brackets]] indicate a comment by editor.—ed.]

---

Our state of awareness demands that we uplift our efforts from competitive game playing in the underground to the comparative roles of {free families} [FREE FAMILIES] in {free cities} [FREE CITIES]. {¶} We must pool our resources and interact our energies to provide the freedom for our individual activities.

In each city of the world there is a loose competitive underground composed of groups whose aims overlap, conflict, and generally enervate the desired goal of autonomy. By now we all have guns, know how to use them, know our enemy, and are ready to defend{. }[...]We know that we ain't gonna take no more shit. So it's about time we carried ourselves a little heavier and got down to the business of creating free cities within the urban environments of the western world.

{Free Cities} [FREE CITIES] are composed of Free Families (e.g., in San Francisco: Diggers, Black Panthers, Provos, [substitute "Red Guards" in Ringolevio], Mission Rebels and various revolutionist gangs and communes[.]) who establish and maintain services that provide a base of freedom for autonomous groups to carry out their programs without having to hassle for food, printing facilities, transportation, mechanics, money, housing, working space, clothes, machinery, trucks, etc.

At this point in our revolution it is demanded that the [F]{f}amilies, communes, black organizations and gangs of every city in {A}[a]merica co[-]ordinate and develop[e] Free Cities where everything that is necessary can be obtained for free by those involved in the various activities of the individual clans.

[NOTE: the next sentence stood by itself as a single paragraph. however, there are three different versions as noted below.]

[version on the web:]

Every brother [RING "brother and sister"] should have what he [RING "they"] need to do whatever needs to be done.}

[version in the Berg Collection (item II.2.5):]

EVERY BROTHER SHOULD HAVE WHAT HE NEEDS TO DO HIS THING.

[version in Ringolevio:]

Every brother and sister should have what they need to do whatever needs to be done.

[version in Realist/Digger Papers version:]

Every brother should have what he needs to do his thing.

[Thus the draft version in NYPL conforms to the Realist/Digger Papers version. What I have on the Digger web, however, doesn't conform to either. It slightly conforms to the Ringolevio version but there are significant differences in gender usage between those versions too.]

[THUS I need to figure this out. Where did I get the version of this sentence that I transcribed into the web page.]

Free City:

An outline {. . .} [     ] a beginning /
Each service should be performed by a tight /
gang of brothers and sisters whose commitment should enable /
them to handle an overload of work with ability /
and enthusiasm. 'Tripsters' soon get bored, hopefully /
before they cause an economic strain.

[Note: looking at the draft version in NYPL I would format the above text after the first line (An outline..) as a single paragraph with text flow within indented margins. Thus, the jagged line wraps would be fixed.]

Free City Switchboard { / }[ - ]Information Center

should co[-]ordinate all services, activities, and aid and {direct} assistance where it is most needed. Also provide a reference point for legal aid, housing, machinery, etc.; act as a mailing address for {discolated} [dislocated] groups or individuals and guide random energies where they are most needed. {(The} [(nb. the] work load usually prevents or should prevent the handling of messages from parents to their runaway children {. . .} [...]that should be left up to the churches of the community.)

Free Food Storage and Distribution Center

should hit every available source of free food {—} [(as] produce markets, farmers' markets, meat packing plants, farms, dairies, sheep and cattle ranches, agricultural colleges, and giant institutions (for the un[-]eaten vats of food) {—} and fill up their trucks with the surplus by beg{ging}, borrowing, stealing, forming liaisons and communications with delivery drivers for the left-overs from their routes . . . [...]best method is to work in two shifts: morning group picks up the foodstuffs and the afternoon shift delivers it to the list of Free Families and the poor peoples of the ghettos. everyday. hard work. {¶} This gang should help people pool their welfare food stamps and get their old ladies or a group to open a free restaurant for people on the move and those who live on the streets. Giant scores should be stored in a garage-type warehouse equipped with freezers and its whereabouts known only to the Free Food Gang. This group should also set up and provide help for canning, preserving, bread baking, and feasts and anything and everything else that has to do with food.

Free City Garage and Mechanics[:]

to repair and maintain all vehicles used in the various services. the responsibility for the necessary tools and parts needed in their work is entirely theirs and usually available by maintaining friendly relations with junkyards, giant automotive schools, and generally scrounging around those areas where auto equipment is easily obtained. The garage should be large enough and free of tripsters who only create more work for the earnest mechanics.

Free City Bank and Treasu{ry}[rey:]

this group should be responsible for raising money, making free money, paying rents, for gasoline, and any other necessary expenses of the Free City Families. They should also organize and create small rackets (cookie sales, etc.) for the poor kids of the ghettoes and aid in the repair and maintenance of the machinery required in the performance of the various services.

Free City Legal Assistance[:]

high-style, hard-nosed, top-class lawyers who are willing to defend the rights of the Free City and its services . . . [...]no honky, liberal, {bleeding heart, guilt-ridden} [bleeding heart-guilt ridden] advocates of justice, but first-class case-winners . . . [...]turn on the best lawyers who can set up air[-]tight receivership[s] for free money and property, and beat down the police harassment and brutality of your areas.

Free City Housing and Work Space[:]

rent or work deals with the urban gov't to take over spaces that have been abandoned for use as carpentry shops, garages, theaters, etc.{,} rent whole houses, but don't let them turn into crash pads. Set up hotels for new arrivals or transients by working out deals with small hotel owners for free rooms in exchange for light housework, porter duties, etc. Big warehouses can be worked on by environmental artists and turned into giant free dance-fiesta-feast palaces. {¶} A strong trio of serious business-oriented cats should develop this liberation of space within the cities and be able to work with the lawyers to make deals and outmaneuver urban bureaucracies and slum landlords . . . [...]one of the main targets for space are the churches who are the holders of most real estate and they should be approached with a no-bullshit hard line.

Free City Stores and Workshops[:]

nothing in these stores should be throwaway items . . . space should be available for chicks [[sic]] to sew dresses, make pants to order, recut garments to fit, etc. The management should all be life-actors capable of turning bullshitters into mud. Important that these places are first class environments with no trace of salvation army/st. vinnie de paul charity rot. Everything groov[e]y. Everything with style . . . [...]must be first class. {It's all free because it's yours!} [IT'S ALL FREE BECAUSE IT'S YOURS!] previous sentence ALL CAPS no italic.]

Free Medical Thing[:]

should be established in all poverty areas and run by private physicians and free from any bureaucratic support. The Free City Bank should try to cover the expenses, and pharmaceutical houses should be hit for medical supplies, etc. Important that the doctors are brothers and do not ask to be salaried or are not out to make careers for themselves (witness Dr. David Smith of the Hippie Free Clinic in San Francisco who is far from a brother . . . [...]very far).

Free City Hospital[:]

should be a house converted into bed space and preferably with a garden and used for convalescence and people whose minds have been blown or who have just been released from a state institution and who need the comfort and solace of {their} [their own] [RING "their own"] people rather than the cold alienated walls of an urban institution.

Free City Environmental and Design Gang[:]

gangs of artists from universities and art institutes should be turned on and helped in attacking the dank squalor of the slums and most of the Free City Family dwellings . . . [...]paint landscapes on the sides of tenements . . . [...]fiberglass stairwells . . . make crazy. Tight groups of good painters, sculptors, designers who comfortably construct environments for the community. Materials and equipment can be hustled from university projects and manufacturers, etc.

Free City Schools[:]

schools designed and run by different groups according to the consciousness of their Free Families (e.g., Black Man's Free School, Anarchist's Creative Arts School, etc.). The schools should utilize the space liberated for them by the Free City Space Gang.

Free City News and Communication Company[:]

providers of a daily newspaper, monthly magazine, free {G}[g]estetner and printing of [delete "of" in Ringolevio] notices for other groups and any special bulletins and propaganda for the various families of the Free City. The machinery should be kept in top condition and supplied by any of the various services. Paper can be scavenged at large mills and cut down to proper working size.

Free City Events . . . [...]Festival Planning Committees

usually involves several Families interacting to sponsor tours for the kids {. . .}[,] Balls, Happenings, Theatre, Dance, and spontaneous experiments in joy . . . [...(EG. ]Park Events usually are best set up by hiring a 20-foot flat[-]bed truck for the rock band to use as a stage and to transport their equipment; people should be advised by leaflets to bring food to exchange with their neighbors; banners, props, balloons, kites etc.{,} should be handled by a committee; an electrician should be around to run the generator and make sure that the P.A. systems work{;}[, etc.] hard work made easy by giving responsible people the tough jobs{.}[)]

Co-operative Farms and Campsites[:]

the farms should be run by experienced hands and the Free Land settled on by cottage industrial people who will send their wares into the Free City. {T}[t]he farms must produce vital food for the families . . . [...]some free land that is no good for farming should be used as campsites and/or cabin areas for [add "Free" in Ringolevio] citizens who are in need of country leisure, as well as kids who could use a summer in the woods.

Scavenger Corp{s} and Transport Gang[:]

is responsible for garbage collection and the picking up and delivery of items to the various services, as well as liberating anything they think useful for one project or another. They are to be responsible for the truck fleet and especially aware of the economic strain if trucks are mis-used by tripsters.

Free City Tinkers and Gunsmiths, Etc.

will repair and keep things going in the houses . . . [...]experienced repair men of all sorts, electricians, and carpenters. They should maintain a warehouse [ware house] or working space for their outfit.

Free City Radio, TV and Computer Stations[:]

demand Free time on radio and TV [tv] stations; demand a Free City frequency to set up your own stations; rent computers to call the punches for the revolution or use them in any constructive way possible.

[RING this is the end of "Post-Competitive ..." in Ringolevio]

Free City Music[:]

Free Music
Where is the place that your music comes from
do you know
What determines the rest between phrases
The Interval that grows from the cluster
of sounds around it
Hanging behind the beat
Clipping the front of it
That's the gift
The thing that blows through a body that responds to spirit and a
mind that doesn't lock itself
It's that thing
We're all made of, forget about, and then try to grab again
That thing that's all there and all free

[ & * & * & ]

The fretless infinite string banjo has invented new means of music which it must buy from itself to sing

$ * $ * $

fat man owns the carnival and all the booths play business. he double hypes the want glands, lets you buy in and then displays what's available to the crowd. all of a sudden you got something to lose. he spreads the news and pays for it by telling kids they're ugly blemished smelly unimaginative and dull . . . [....]then sells them cures{,}[.] says to you, "here kid, change the name, change the games, do anything you want, but don't give it away." that game's called vested interest and it can apply to anything.
fat man runs a crumby joint, but it's the only joint right? [¶]
He'll be there until we free the goodies {¶}
Art forms and life forms interact
look at fat mans Life
look at fat mans Time
look at fat mans forms
The record industry, dance-hall promotion rackets and the artist-star-celebrity-hero roles they support and promote are fat man forms and are cramping the number
the dance-light show package hasn't changed since its form crystallized and it became business. it reached the end of its evolution. kids don't dance they watch, because the bands are pro now and you don't play with a pro. when you pay to go to a dance the medium is business . . . [...]the problem is to free the form and the carnival.

Some Ideas for Liberating the Ferris Wheel:

A) Contracts could demand free cuts on all albums

a name group might take one side of an album and divide the other into sets of two tracks each {of} which they would give away. give a brother a piggy-back over the business-shit [business shit] to the ears of our people. two truths don't compete

B) A certain number of records be released in plain white folders.

saving all art and printing costs and leaving free space for local artists to use. Ready mades would cost more.

C) Scrap liner notes and "photos-of-the-band"

print charts of the tunes, diagrams of cheap amps and pick-ups so local wizards can plug in more kids, good poems, clothes patterns{,} recipes.

D) Add 1% to all royalties to be used for free forms

equipment for free rehearsal rooms
sound systems for free concerts
musical communes for non-working cats.

E) Send other bands on your publicity junkets

after all its not just your sound is it[.] its the sound you're all part of. make that clear to people. free fat man's star trip by giving away your [yr] names. how many times can you go to Des Moines?

[end]

Address List

Unless otherwise indicated, the following groups may be contacted c/o:

The Diggers
P.O. Box 31321
Diamond Hts. Sta.
San Francisco, Cal. 94131

Free City Bank

—provides necessary funds for rents and the maintenance of Free City services and families; to help, send free money (tax-deductible checks, money orders should be made payable to Glide Foundation/Free City Bank).

Free City Planning & Conference Committee

—write for information on future conferences, or to inform the committee of available or donated free land, houses, farms, etc., or to send free money donations to stage events and celebrations.

Free City News and Communication Company

—telephone news items/bulletins to 415-664-7058; mail your free news (travel notes, recipes, addresses of places to stay & be fed anywhere on the planet, free services you know about or perform, information of special free events, etc.); also will print propaganda for you and your brothers — beautiful poems — important articles (tax-deductible donations for ink/paper made payable to Glide Foundation/Free City News).

Free City Garage & Vehicle Repair Shop

—bring your broken machine to 1809 Oak St. or call Richie for appointment and information evenings at 664-7058; to donate tools, parts, mechanical experience, cars, etc., call Richie at above number or write Free City Garage c/o The Diggers.

Free Food Distribution Center

—write if you have food we can pick up or need free food information for your family, or send free money for free food and rent of storehouse (tax-deductible donations made payable to Glide Foundation/Free Food).

Wanted

—Free City needs Bay Area doctors who are willing to donate some time each week to make house calls and treat the sick in San Francisco; interested MDs should write to Free City Medical Thing c/o The Diggers.

Black Man's Free Store

—call store and truck will pick up whatever (clothes, furniture, appliances — no throwaway or useless crap) you have for free: 1099 McAllister (at Webster) 922-9841.

Provos & Free Store

—2286 San Pablo Ave., Berkeley; 848-7758.

Black Man's Bookstore

The More: 1413 Fillmore St., 931-3332

Western Addition Library

—specializes in Afro-History: 1550 Scott St.

Black Panther Party

—Huey Newton Defense Fund and the Black Community News Service (See inside back cover).

Free City Puppet Show

—call Lindon: 863-8162

Bail Project

—gets prisoners awaiting trial freed on their own recognizance: 552-2202

Free Medical Clinic

—431-1714

Haight-Ashbury Switchboard

—acts as a mailing address, message and information center for new arrivals and regular residents: 1830 Fell St., 415-387-3575

Rolling Stone

—free classified ads for musicians: 746 Brannan St., 552-2970

Free Tattoos

—beautiful & obscene enough to keep you out of the army: Contact R. H. c/o Elliot Mintz, KPFK, Los Angeles; 213-877-5583 or 984-2420

Radical Booking Agency

—finds bookings for radical performers, groups: c/o Drama Review, 32 Washington Place N.Y. 10003; or contact R. G. Davis c/o Mime Troupe, 924 Howard St., San Francisco; GA 1-1984.

Real Great Society

—and University of the Streets —New York City lower east side gangs formed these two agencies: Chino Garcia, 212-254-0239

WBAI-FM

—after midnight community radio provides air-time for no-bullshit individuals & groups who are into something: Bob Fass, 30 E. 39 St., N.Y., 212-OX 7-2288

[end] 

Garbage Or Nothing

I. The recent death of capitalism has everybody fucked around & confused.

Private enterprise laissez faire legally murderous piracy GONE already buried to be replaced by what?

If it doesn't have a name, how can you talk about it?

And what about the garbage?

WHO'S GOING TO COLLECT THE GARBAGE?

Now there's something you can talk about . .

II. America 1968 so incredibly wealthy that the local spiritual crisis is what're we going to do about the garbage.

the economic crisis how to distribute the garbage,

the political crisis who's going to collect the garbage & why should anyone want the job,

while in the oblivious streets attention has suddenly exploded into flesh bodies & the various ways of rubbing them together.

The Evolutionary Credit & Loan Association has terminated our contract, stamped it PAID IN FULL, & the planet is ours at last.

Sudden flashes that maybe those five thousand years of time payments

—all those payments ON THE DOT—

all those

food wars & social cipher contracts were gestures of empty anxiety.

Now that it's ours & we can take a casual look around, well there's so much GARBAGE.

4 bilion people camped in the planetary wilderness & somehow WE FORGOT ABOUT THE GARBAGE.

Our wilderness is turning sour.

IT STINKS!

No place in the cosmology of planetary physics for garbage.

What?

What an astounding oversight!

What were our ancestors THINKING about?

III. America a nation in 1968 so incredibly wealthy that all morality isbased on the problems of EXCESS:

fantasy executives & governmental spies running wild-eyed down the corridors of control:

"There's too fucking much of it!"

"It's completely out of control!"

"Power leak! Power leak!"

The cells of power grow wild: undisciplined freedom cancer.

Sudden flashes that the future of bureaucracy spy systems lies in garbage control.

People are USING it, picking it up FREE on the streets, living on it, they no longer respond to the seduction of the state, there's no way to get a HOLD on them.

Pomposity suicided & rigidity machines put to work at a furious clip: all this garbage must be catalogued & filed, garbage destruction teams trained, parking lots on the tillable land, thousands of well-programed garbage experts march to work each day to GET IT DOWN ON PAPER, enormous factories hastily tooled for garbage conversion.

"By God, we'll make napalm out of it."

Youngsters who don't understand it's all been paid for already

are given guns!

given napalm!

& shipped to parts of the planet where there MAY be people who MIGHT be hip to OUR garbage & MIGHT WANT SOME OF IT FOR THEMSELVES.

The situation complicates itself incredibly.

Computer engineers make it worse: the machines don't UNDERSTAND power, sex, & control: the machines program useable garbage & forbidden fantasies of FREE.

The Secretary of Garbage Control considers dropping acid & getting it over with.

Systems of control grow schizophrenic . . . they writhe & contort in involute paranoia.

SYSTEMICIDE MAKES HEADLINES.

IV. America a nation so incredibly wealthy in 1968 that all morality is based on EXCESS:

true American career counselors now ask only one question.

"Do you want to produce garbage or do you want to collect garbage?"

Industrialist or politician?

Fishfarm or junkyard?

The young people want no part of it, of course, what with garbage their natural matrix & medium.

Produce it?

Collect it?

They want to fuck in it!

The career counselors build marvelous constructions of seduction & mystery, they trans-substantiate symbol money

into sex
into power
into death insurance
into pleasure.

But it's just THINGS, it's garbage, it's overflow & the young people know it.

They throw the career counselor out the window.

Who's going to collect the garbage?

who knows?

who cares?

Let's use it to act out our fantasies, use it for unimaginable gratifications.

V. We were sitting around the other night talking about garbage, making screaming intuitive leaps thru each others arguments, when Wm. Fritsch suddenly woke up & shouted, "What I gotta do is learn to do nothing."

And of course that's it

& it's not surprising that the solution came from a man who sometimes arrives at the compulsion to visit all his friends & empty the garbage for them.

VI. Garbage crises cannot be SOLVED:

they must be ALLOWED TO DISAPPEAR.

The alternative to the garbage collection production box

is to do just exactly nothing . . . no more & no less.

Sudden flashes of the invisible network w/ the individual spine planted squarely on it,

organic units in the planetary ecology,

DOING NOTHING.

Ecological systems have no garbage in them, contain nothing that is alien to them.

VII. Invisible networks of nameless human connectives (names shed as metaphysical garbage) can help each other to do nothing.

That part of the psyche organism to which name is attached, that part which DOES things in praise of the name,

that part withers in the flesh caress of the anonymous community.

The galactic actor does nothing in the NAME of anything:

he receives his direction from the silent spinal telegraph,

his spine is planted square on the invisible network,

HE DOES NOTHING,

his movements are not outside the process.

VIII. It's paid for, all of it.

A cellophane bag represents 5000 years of machine history, inventors suicided by their inventions, aeons of garbage dedication, paid for in cancer wombs, in fallen cocks, in the crazy waste of our fathers.

Generations dead of lacklove sold for 29 cents.

Your birth certificate is your final credit card.

Stack the garbage in piles & people will live in among it, communities of free parallel spines planted square on the invisible network.

They will do nothing to effect the celebratory transformation of garbage into spinal food.

Their movements are not outside the process.

IX. The invisible networks grow thru the absent university of nothingness, disguised as dopesellers.

as sneakthieves
as naked dripping 17 year old Americans girls.

Doctors of garbage philosophy.

Doing nothing in PUBLIC teaching nothing demonstrating nothing living paradigms of nothing!

The absent university is powered by social magic.

It has flesh classrooms.

It is the university of the spine.

Tuition is paid in units of psychic bondage.

Its graduates are FREE.

[end]

Selections From The Free City News

Prisoners of San Francisco Unite with Prisoners of San Quentin

who are the prisoners?
who are the people?
uniting for free

we are all prisoners and none of us will be free until we are all free. prisons are systems of human control predicated on the ethics of ownership. the treatment of inmates at san quentin is only one of the more recently well defined crimes in a long history of crimes committed by the most sophisticated prison yet devised in the name of the deeply rooted ethic of ownership. managed through the medium of money, inspired by the myth of gold, the ethic of ownership is the value that makes us all prisoners. the wall that keeps us all in the prison of ownership is money. break out of prisons/burn money/unite for free

san francisco 1. free identity. the ownership ethic of identity in terms of possession is a prison wall built by money. burn money & find your free identity. you are beautiful. 2. free food. food comes from mother earth. people & machines harvest & distribute food. the ethic of ownership is the prison that controlled the harvesting & distribution of food. break out of prison/burn money. free people harvest & distribute food because that's what they want to do. 3. free families. the ethic of ownership defines family responsibilities and the education of children. break out of prisonl/burn money/evolve free families. 4. free architecture. business is the architecture of the ownership ethic. profit, salaries, rent, taxes have been the architects of america. break out of prison, burn money, evolve free families. 5. free myths. the myth of gold, while mystically intesesting, is unsatisfying because it requires the ethic of identity in material possession to sustain its power. break out of prison, burn money, you are the myth. 6. free life. institutional ownership identity ethics sustain our fear of death. break out of prison, burn money, free acts inspire free life. 7. free government. the ownership identity ethic of institutional government requires police, of obvious disguise, at every level of the prison. break out of prison, burn money, vote for me. 8. free land. the planet earth is not owned by anyone. the prison of schizophrenia is the psychology of ownership. break out of prison, burn money. mother earth is to be cared for and loved as the source of our strength. 9. free god. institutional business church identity serves the god of the ethics of ownership. god is our image of liberation. break out of prison, burn money, liberation inspires god. 10. free city. san francisco is a city on plain earth governed by the ethic of ownership. liberate san francisco . . . international exposition celebrating the liberation of san francisco beginning on the summer solstice and ending when there are no more prisons in the world. break out of prison/burn money/unite for free

san quentin 1. opportunity for all alleged parole violators to have a hearing in a court of law, with normal constitutional guarantees. 2. abolition of increased penalties for first time offenders. 3. more favorable consideration for first offenders when their minimum time is completed. 4. replacement of all ex-law enforcement officers on the adult authority by such persons as professors and psychologists. 5. removal of all child sex offenders to mental health hospitals. 6. reconsideration by the adult authority of all cases heard since october 1967, when the longer time-scale took effect. 7. better food and living conditions. 8. complete revision of the pay scale for convict labor. 9. a doctor available within the prison around the clock. 10. requiring of written approval of requests granted by parole officers.

DAYTIME PARANOIA BECOMES A JOKE AT NIGHT

Some false-bottom fear holds downtown day in a hopeless comicstrip. Waiting for a payoff from parking meters? Flames to erupt from desks full of guilty gum-wrappers? Boring late-to-work lies—just one float flight slip skip could lose a living nobody's making and then where? Discontinued.

BusFace to LunchFace. Sidewalk strangers even at apathetic 4 o'clock only touch in recoil. StreetFace to HomeFace. Hear who really happened on the 7 o'clock news.

Abstract China and somebody else's riot.

Black Muslim minister in Cleveland predicted a solar eclipse in June as Allah's sign of impending war with China. Cleveland's terrified mayor tried to cover—National Guard troops if there was no eclipse, a promise that troops would remain in Cleveland Armory if there was an eclipse and war.

Bombgod Nickeldime mind!

Downtown faces, can you look in the mayor's eyes? There is no pushbutton for the sun and billyclubs pump more blood than you can swallow. Are you afraid to vomit salary and turn off atomic commercials? Bombgod is a deadpan ghost shaking down old ladies for life insurance.

We need not apply to job bodycounters. Up all night being meteors finally laid . . . off. Locked out screwed . . . and screwing, thank you. Celestial spine work paid in grace.

Risk roof—to be in the night together whose bed.

Risk food—harvesting machines leave half a crop to rot, fishing boats junk half a catch—feasts wait for celebrants. Start with one spine and stars. Bombgod gets the living dead.

The earth will supply sufficient resources to feed, clothe and house its entire population, if we only put our minds to that problem.—Buckminster Fuller.

The moon, in its first quarter is in Pisces and the Viet Cong, military arm of the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front, continued today what has become the major offensive of the war. Forty cities and towns were under attack and all of Free Vietnam was placed under martial law and 24-hour curfew. Nineteen of the Cong made it into the impregnable American Embassy again, but all were killed during a counterattack on their embassy by American paratroopers who landed on the roof in helicopters.

COCKIE DOODLE FREE TRASH REMOVAL
FOR OUR DAILY PLANET. Call 752-9919

White House sources stated that they knew in advance of the Viet Vong onslaught but that there was "no effective defense against suicide raids."

THE SEVENTH FLEET STILL COPS
IN THE HAIGHT-ASHBURY

Democrats accused Reagan of illegality in a judicial appointment. Reagan answered that the Judge was doing it free.

LENORE KANDEL IS STILL LOOKING FOR
SERIOUS MIDDLE-EASTERN MUSICIANS TO
ACCOMPANY HER BELLY DANCERS. Call YU 6-3965

Mayor Alioto plans a bigger and better San Francisco Film Festival this year.

MARDI-GRAS IN THE FILLMORE DANCING IN THE
STREETS AND PEOPLE AND FOOD FEB. 9, 10, 11

David Harris, former Stanford student body president, was arrested today by Federal Marshalls for refusing the draft.

PAULA AND HER LARGE FAMILY ARE STILL
LOOKING FOR A BIG ENOUGH HOUSE

Police Chief Blackmoor of San Jose said today that police should act quickly and on their own to quell campus riots.

<==><==><==><==><==><==><==><==>

They were immigrants who had come too far off for their lord to be traced and who, since their serfdom could not be presumed, necessarily passed for free, although born of unfree parents.

But the fact had to be transformed into a right.

It was essential that the villains, who came to settle in the towns to seek a new livelihood, should feel safe and should not have to fear being taken back by force to the manors from which they had escaped.

They must be delivered from labor services and from all the hated dues by which the servile population was burdened, such as the obligation to marry only a woman of their own class and leave to the lord part of their inheritance.

Willy-nilly, in the course of the 12th century, these claims, backed up as they often were by dangerous revolts, had to be granted.

The most obstinate conservatives, such as Guibert de Nogent, in 1115, were reduced to a wordy revenge, speaking of those "detestable communes" which the serfs had set up to escape from their lord's authority and to do away with his most lawful rights.

Freedom became the legal status of the bourgeoisie, so much so that it was no longer a personal privilege only, but a territorial one, inherent in urban soil just as serfdom was in manorial soil.

In order to obtain it, it was enough to have resided for a year and a day within the walls of the town.

Stadtluft macht frei ! — City air makes a man free!

And the city was pure gold,
like unto clear glass.
And the gates of it shall not be shut
at all by day.
for there shall be no night there.

<==><==><==><==><==><==><==><==>

THE MOON IS IN ITS THIRD QUARTER,
IN LEO, ENTERING VIRGO AT 8 AM

free city adventure for kids leaves today from the corner of belvedere & haight at 1 pm. tour radio station kmpx w/ phyllis & eva. pick the kids up again at 5 pm. toujours gai.

free news from new york . . . garbage is the meat of revolution . . . the recent two week municipal garbage strike had the entire lower east side smelling like the terminal end of a sewer . . . garbage piled at the rate of ten thousand tons a day . . . while liberals held protest demonstrations, puerto ricans, who have to live among the crap, used it to throw at policemen . . . local underground heroes instituted free garbage service, trucking the trash to lincoln center . . . that got to rocky where he lived.

have you smiled at your garbage man today?

A noisy dirty free factory is coming together through screaming irrational planning sessions at 22 Belvedere St. A loft in the mission district has been procured in which to put tools & machinery for the graceful production of free & useful goods. There will be living space for some: a certain amount of rent will have to be raised each month. Projections include potting wheels, welding tools, candlemaking, tie-dying, sewing machines, & such. What's needed to make this fantasy whole is a group of people willing to die for it. Ask for Lee.

It now costs 50 cents to take a stroll in Muir Woods. It's free to those who cross the stream & enter from the other side. Signs say 'Stay on the path' & 'Muir Woods closes at 8:30.' How do you close woods?

A free stove has been sitting at 528 Schrader St. for two weeks now and John Blackwell, whose apartment it sits in, says if no one takes the fucking thing soon he's going to sell it.

as two international free news correspondents disembarked at san francisco international airport, they were approached by an attractive lady from milwaukee. after inquiring if either of them called themselves jesus, she showed them the picture opposite [photo of girl] of her daughter, janis, usually known as trixie. she is 23 & has a dog named brod. "if you see her," the milwaukee mother said, "will you ask her to phone the police?"

PROPHECY . . . RUN YOUR VALENTINE FINGERS
THROUGH SAN FRANCISCO'S WEDNESDAY HAIR.
STROKE HER CITY HALL THIGHS ON THURSDAY.

Bishop's restaurant at 315 Divisadero needs food, supplies & help in order to fulfill a vision of free food for everyone. They now serve dinner and are forced to ask a 25c donation. They want to do it free. There is a possibility of free breakfast too, if people & food show up. Call 431-7195 and ask for Bishop.

A free greasemonkey with otherwise clean habits is looking for garage space in which to practice his trade. Ask for Richie at 22 Belvedere.

Free fabric exchange this Friday at 2 pm, 1748 Haight St. Bring what cloth has come to bore you, take away new stuff.

<==><==><==><==><==><==><==><==>

TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE.

Free food

Lion meat
Soul vegetables
Blue chip dairy goods

Everymorning delivered to
Your commune.

Fresh fish
Ripe fruit
Solid greens

Everyevening feed the brothers
And sisters in your house.

It's free because it's yours

Give your address and the number of
People in the commune to the behind the
Counter cousin at the psychedelic shop.

Must be done now.

<==><==><==><==><==><==><==><==>

"I dreamed a cop, an old cop,/a whitehaired cop bowed sad on a sofa/knowing in life he carried a gun/and when that realization mowed him down on the sofa/he wept to know Man."

[end]

Free City Bloodlight

No play can change your life unless you are in it.

A requiem for audience, a morgue for voyeurs.

Some grandiose Palace of National Honor and Culture is prepared for a final performance: searchlights, white canopy, funeral wreaths.

Solemn politicians greet overdressed notables at the door. BIack-veiled ladies hand out lit white tapers. Ushers hang oversize tickets like bibs around patrons' necks and stuff white silk handkerchieves down their throats to enforce silence.

Curtain opens on an exact duplicate of the house and a cast identical to the audience, also gagged, ticketed and holding candles.

Fidgeting in the house, fidgeting on stage. Someone rernoves a soggy handkerchief to cough. Everyone in the cast mimicks him. Now the rest of the audience imitates the cast. Volleys of coughs are exchanged for 15 minutes.

"What the hell is this?" mumbles the boldest patron.

"What the hell is this?" mumbles the cast

Volleys of mumbles for another 15 minutes.

The mayor clears his throat and stutters, "St-the-star start the show."

"Start the show," roars the cast, "or we'll kill you!"

Murmurs through the house. A fat benefactress whispers, "I thought it was a proper memorial for years of attending Shakespeare, Brecht and Noel Coward."

"I heard that," snorts a gentleman in the cast "Listen, lady, I've been watching you slobs fidget, mumble, murmur and whisper for 37 years!"

"They'd murder you at La Scala," shouts an opera buff, pitching a candle onto the stage.

Cast boos and send a wave of candles into the house.

"A happening! How wild!" It's a critic giggling in the balcony

"Fuck you," screams the mayor's mother and aims a candle at her counterpart on stage. Enraged pediatricians and stockbrokers are charging down flaming aisles to strangle their doubles.

Cast dives into the first row, snatching jewelry and bellowing, "Fraud! You call this art? Give us our money back!"

The Final Act of Police Theater

Listen tool, we got a man on every exit
Nobody wants to live forever anymore.
But suppose some citizen unaware
he's a source of carwreck meat
pastes up the windows with parking tickets
won't report missing?
Who counts his change?
Who gets an erection in the unemployment office?
Who pays the rent and THEN locks up?
Be serious.
Anyone's an exit but no one leaves.
Right! We got 'em standing in the aisles
Sit down and watch the line-up.

Improvisations

Life acts! Acts that can create the condition of life they describe!

No electrochemical limbo. Man a protozoan shockroll hits each face in the back of the neck. Visions off the mainline are natural free.

No frozen moments re-enacted for tomorrow's fantasy revolution. Life-acting is freeing eternity in now!

Put free in front of words that guard the universe. Free liberation.

"Free World" is a prisoner of propaganda. Try Free Earth, Free Planet. It is a free planet. No cosmic landlord.

Planet creatures—free beginning, free autonomy, free end.

Common wonder.

Any free creature can stammer through any moment's lip, electrocute oblivion with flesh.

Improvisations out of Industrial Age roles:

Job. Free job. Show up for a free job.

"I didn't know you worked here."

"Came in this morning to try it. You know, free job."

Money. Free money. Trade grafitti bills for cookie nickels. Counterfeiters are stodgy purists.

Career. Free career. Give away your name and adopt a free ego.

Free time!

What was time before it was bought?

Buds, sun, fruit, ice. Seasons.

Theater originated as ritual seasonal myths. Bodies moving stories, magic words. Their function was not history or enterainment but action. Action essential to the seasonal cycle. Universe movement of bloodlight.

Corn dance for summer at Santo Domingo Pueblo in New Mexico. Men, women and children dance 12 hours dawn to sunset invoking natural elements, animal spirits and plant powers of their cosmos. Each dancer helps create the world of growing life. Dancing is being.

Before time was bought it was hand-made.

Free time is nowever ritual.

Being an act of celebration. Free.

No message or moral of bought time, pretend time.

Bloodlight of present. Ascension of anyone.

Nowever stance is one person/free universe. Your style is your role.

Vernal equinox, summer solstice, autumnal equinox, winter solstice.

Social movement as rites of passage!

Free men. women and children will move a free city in San Francisco on the summer solstice, 1968.

[end]

Huey Must Be Set Free

Let us make one thing crystal clear: We do not claim the right to indiscriminate violence. We seek no bloodbath. We are not out to kill up white people. On the contrary, it is the cops who claim the right to indiscriminate violence and practice it everyday. It is the cops who have been bathing black people in blood and who seem bent on killing off black people. But black people, this day, this time, say HALT IN THE NAME OF HUMANITY! YOU SHALL MAKE NO MORE WAR ON AN UNARMED PEOPLE. YOU WILL NOT KILL ANOTHER BLACK PERSON AND WALK THE STREETS OF THE BLACK COMMUNITY TO GLOAT ABOUT IT AND SNEER AT THE DEFENSELESS RELATIVES OF YOUR VICTIMS. FROM NOW ON, WHEN YOU MURDER A BLACK PERSON IN THIS BABYLON OF BABYLONS, YOU MAY AS WELL GIVE IT UP BECAUSE WE WILL GET YOUR ASS AND GOD CAN'T HIDE YOU

We call upon the people to rally to the support of Minister of Defense, Huey P. Newton. We call upon black people and white people who want to see the dawn of a new history in this land. We call upon people who want to see and end to the ... of blood. We call upon people who want to avoid a war ... this land, who want to put an end to the war that is now ... on in this land. We call upon people to take up the ... HUEY MUST BE SET FREE.

[Montage of images from the Black Panther Party newspaper]