Wednesday, April 7, 1971 r17e THE MICHIGAN DAILY Page Five Movement: A THE MOVEMENT TOWARD A NEW AMERICA, Assembled by Mitchell Goodman, Knopf, $5.95. By DANIEL ZWERDLING "This is not a book at all," Mitchell Goodman writes. "It is people making their own history -not letting it just happen to them. It is not 'explanation' or description. It is making-an ac- tion. It is representation. A 1 e- representation. An acting . out. The energy of this book comes straight from the kinetic of the Movement: . . . an intersection of scenes, voices, statements, stories, faces, meetings, demon- strations, reflections, v i s i o n s, comprehensions, confrontations." It's an extraordinary source of energy, this book, a monumental effort by Mitchell Goodman, member of the Spoek draft con- spiracy, to snip, assemble, and paste every conceivable article from every conceivable under- ground newspaper and movement publication revealing in aiy depth the progress, dynamics, and meanings of the revolution simmering in American society since the freedom rides of 1961. People with a detached interest in history will find Mitchell's compendium a stupendous l:alei- doscope, a scrapbook of the civil rights movement, the 1965 teach- ins on the war, the Resistance and draft card sit-ins, the demon- strations, the riots, the San Fran- cisco and Columb'a strike:, the battle of People's Park; Huey Newton arrested and convicted, the spectacular growth of the Panthers from Oakland to Al- giers, the Chicano's struggle, and the Indians ba-utle to regain their plundered dignity; radical sim- merings, then ecplosicns, in tine high schools, the emergence of woman's liberation and gay power, ferment in the inilita'y, and Kent State. From the society pages of the New York Times, we even remember how a Bar- nard woman expelled for l with her boy friend shocked country when she said that three or four but many wom college lived with men: or Abbie Hoffman let loose a painted with "hippie'' on David Susskind show. People woho lived parts of G man's movement, who will themselves in the photos of r sive demonstrations-if no the barricades then just a f tion of their faces--will sense the book represents, or "re resents," as Goodman says, own life histories. It vill t them deeper. It's fofr thepm Goodman started on this Fffo late 1968, struggled with a profit printing company and was forced to publish the through Knopf-selling ou t corporation his efforts ai dismantle, but a necessary porary sell-out to assure book will reach th- right ence. Goodman intends the as a tool to serve the Move matter o iving not as a chionicle. Some may I the read the "comprehensions" first, not to gain a sense of perspective and en in analysis, some sense of what has hew happened to each of us since 1961 duck as we have passed through per- ' the sonal and collective crises, others may start where they are now- ood- "with that material (models, al- see ternatives) that will reinforce mas- them in their Movement work, or t on suggest what they might be do- frac- ing in the Movement. If you how Want to begin with a specific -rep- model of what to do and how o their do it, it's there," writes Good- touch man: strategy on rent strikes that, (Ann Arbor's!), living off the rt in land, or fighting an urban guer- non- rilla war. later Too much has happened in the book past 10 years too soon for any- o the body to really absorb and codify m to it in some neat analytic scheme. tem - I get the same nind-boggling this feeling pouring througn 752 pages audi- of clippings as I get looking at book our history. Maybe the most im- ment portant message of, t.e brok f books books books books conscience comes from its most conspicuous omission, the goal of the move- ment and the book itself--The Revolution. It hasn't happened, and isn't going to for years, may- be never. "If you are trying to tell me you know already what The Revolution Itself will look like, you are either a charlatan or a fool," Oglesby writes. "We have no scenario." That is in 1969, but it holds just as true for 1971. Instead of growing and de- veloping in a neat linear model toward some defineabie and recognizable cataclysm or social achievement, the events and mind changes and processes in The Movement take strange turns. Some fizzle and fade, then reappear in slightly altered form, or some die. The freedom rides became acts of civil disobedience, then riots which left great northern cities charred like bombed-out carcasses after World War II; the Panthers developed the first significant grassroots black pow- er movement, won the ioyalties or sympathies of a majority of the ghetto population, t h e n cracked, gasped, and now may die. Vietnam sparked teach-ins on the campuses, then draft card burnings, the Resistance- bred thousands of young legal traitors and criminals-grew to massive demonstrations a n d bloody riots. Anti-war radicals changed the attitudes of the en- tire nation, but the war is wider and kills more people than ever. Middle class radicals joined SNCC, then SDS, finally meta- morphised i n t o Weatherman, stopped roving the country in peacevans and teaching tha self defense fetal position, went un- derground and started exploding ROTC buildings, burning banks and sabotaging power stations. Then three of its own blew them- selves to bits with their bombs, and their movement retreated. The movements leads, like the pages of Goodman's book imply. to a new strategy : the jab of revolution is a much bigger task than most people thought. Build- ing the movement means mak- ing friends, making contacts, sharing ideas and lifestyles-re- treating from aggressive tactics against a monster we can't yet fight and instead turning back to the local level the grass roots, to quiet talking and organizing mass movements in small towns and city neighborhoods. Bob Dy- lan, our greatest musical pro- phet has lived out the whole cul- ture: he started in the early 60's in folk, became more bitter and aggressive, finally turned to rock with electric guitars and now, after the acid rock apocalypse, he's back singing about the grass roots, mellower and closer to singing about people and living than ever before. Goodman's book is a process -"only because it's a book does it have to stop and be fixed in black ink and set between cov- ers"-and tells us that we must understand ourselves and the Movement as a process of living and changing. Our politics, mean- ing the Movement, are synony- mous with our living, meaning our lives. The more we commit ourselves to a political fight. the more politics becomes, inter- twined with everyday living; the more we throw ourselves into living, the more we realize it is politics. The movement now is about reconciling theoretical and rhetorical politics-what we say we are-with lifestyles-what we are. Communes, collectives, coops, organic diets, all search for a way, of living out of the Movement. Daily acts, no mat- ter how small, become political issues and matters of conscience: how can we walk into an A&P when we understand how it op- presses and exploits workers, how it thrives off stolen resources of other countries: how is serves as a vehicle of the monopolistic, giant food corporations? These questions are easy to confront when a recruiter comes to cam- pus, because most of us don't want to work for Aero-Jet Geni- eral in the first place. When the issue comes into our own lives, we tend to overlook it. Goodman's book :ives a mar- velous sense of the history we've made together. I'm used to un- derstanding history as an ab- stract social process defined by wars institutions and epochs. I've only felt a part of it when I realize that my friends and I are living out our own histories which make a part of the whole. If Goodman's book leaves you with a static view of a decade, you missed its message. The Movement is a constant meta- morphosis w h o s e ambiguity would only be solved by its com- ing to a halt-just as our own lives and relationships will be defined, free from contra dictions and ambiguities, only when we've died. Anon '71: Universal ANON1 1971, edited by Stephen Bluestone, Ken Fifer, Warren Jay Hecht, and Steve Schwartz, Litho Crafters, $1.00 By STEVEN J. LAUTERMILCH One year I would have sworn I wasn't getting anywhere In college I picked Your story up And vowed I would light out soon For a cell. Like this poem "For Thomas Merton,'; by Walter Clark, much of this, year's issue , of Anon is writing with a kind of cleanness, with the sort of open and ines- capable strength and force, that Faulkner must have been mean- ing when he spoke at Stockholm, when he took the Nobel Prize. ... the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to b:" afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop, for anything but the' old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of'lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and worst of all without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands. Like Clla r k 's poem "For Thomas Merton," much of Anon 1971 seems to have learned "the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed . . ." I think Faulk- ner would approve of work like this. I liked The way you worked the soul out In fresh air. It seemed A whole lot clearer Than our slog. Of course I went Another way. The poetry of statement is, be cause of its openness, its strong cleanness, hard to write. Prob- ably none of Anon 1971 gets as close to it as Clark's poem does. But what many of these poems and one of these stories do at- tain is the effect Faulkner is set upon stressing. I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has About desire Doubling on its track; And of your brief Astonishment, Far out And sudden In that foreign place. Not farther From Gethsemane Than I am now. Peace, Louis And all your will be harmony. When Thomas Merton left the world of Columbia, The New Yorker, and World War II, and joined the Trappist Monastery at Gethsemane, Kentucky, he took Brother, Reported Missing in Ac- tion, 1943." Its ending: For in the wreckage of your April Christ lies slain, And Christ weeps in the ruins of my spring: The money of Whose tears shall fall Into your weak and friendless hand And buy you back to your own land: The silence of Whose tears shall fall Like bells upon your alien tomb.r Hear them and come: they call you home. Fruths' numbered Zen sayings: the point of the review, I recall, was made very precisely. 1. It. 2. Does take not. 3. Non. 4. Weird sense up mixed. 5. To a reader tell. 6. Naught. 7. T say you have. "A Method Not Unlike Leonardo's and Other Sketches"? Perhaps. At any rate, I must repeat the ending lines of the seventh of these seven sketches. it struck me that it did not particularly matter if the dowel was turned clockwise or coun- ter-clockwise. Since that time I sign in reverse even the let- ters are reversed-so in order to see whom it is who has writ- ten, one must hold . . . no, John must hold the page up to a mirror. I keep wondering whether that applies to typewriters. There is another story in Anon 1971, one that may be the most accomplished work in the issue. Max Apple titles it "A Literary Experience," then subtitles that "A Short Story." The work illus- trates, I think, the point that Faulkner was trying to make about the difference between merely speaking and speaking for a point, for something to say: in. Faulkner's words, between "an inexhaustible voice," and "a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance." Like the poem "For Thomas Merton," the ten pages titled "A Literary Experience" demonstrate the control and responsibility of a man who has a point, and wants it understood. For example: "When my grandfather returned from Detroit," writes the I of this self - conscious narrative, "he claimed there was a restroom on his bus!" "Buses ain't got no toilets," The Chief replied. "You're telling me, when I just rode on one, what they've got?" "Nowhere in the world i there a bus with a toilet," The Chief repeated. "I rode on buses before you knew what they were. Remember that, 'pastooch."' The Chief re- minded whenever he could that he had arrived in America five years earlier than his friend. "I'm telling you, last Tues- day I went to the toilet on the bus." "That," said The Chief, "I believe. But buses ain't got toilets." The humor is real. Faulkner would no doubt acclaim it as "universal," and go on to "veri- ties." Both he and Apple-and maybe Bluestone, Fifer, Hecht, and Schwartz-would know why. "The Chief died last night. He had a heart attack at the wedding." It came out as a whisper, though I expended all my strength. I could not even think of Raskolnikov's confes- sion, only of my grandfather's surprisingly bright eyes looking up from the ancient book. If you're a reader of Dostoev- sky, Flaubert, and reasonably Jewish, you'll probably find "A Literary Experience" simply magnificent. If you're not, you may find you are. Passover Is Almost Here!t The First Seder-This Friday night, April 9 Reservations for seders, luncheon and dinner meals MAY STILL BE MADE at the Hillel Foundation, 1429 Hill St. thru this Wednes- day afternoon, April 7. No reservations thereafter. HAPPY PASSOVER! 'U ' Ir Miss sJ's black satin short-cut to big evenings is the briefest pant of all in the slinkiest coverall around. With an eggshell satin shirt, its the short, shimmery way to outshine everyone. Sizes 5 to 13. Short-cut acetate coverall, $12. Long-cuff acetate shirt, $12. _,#: "> ?:. O