Last Saturday was Occupy Chicago’s 30th day of presence in the city. My friend Al and I went downtown for a rally outside the Federal Reserve Bank and subsequent march to Grant Park. The crowd started gathering at LaSalle and Jackson around 5pm.

This was to be Occupy Chicago’s second attempt to establish a camp on the piece of Grant Park just east of Michigan Avenue and north of Congress Parkway, the location of the Indian warrior statue known familiarly to the Occupiers as “The Horse.” The previous Saturday, 175 people were arrested there for refusing to leave the park at its stated curfew time, 11pm.

By 7:30, the crowd numbered in the thousands; much more than the sidewalks could accommodate, and the police were compelled to allow us to march down Jackson Street to the Horse. Once there, people from many different organizations spoke, interspersed with drumming circles and music as the night drew on toward the curfew.

Police presence around the periphery of the park started to increase around 10:30. Animated discussions were taking place among the Occupy Chicago leaders at the impromptu podium – the steps next to the Horse. Then, several of them addressed the crowd. It was an intense and heated exchange. Some people felt that it was time to execute a previously discussed “contingency plan,” to vacate the park and march to the Thompson Center, which did not have a curfew. The police, they said, had warned them of a large phalanx of officers (with dogs) ready to storm the park. Others passionately disagreed, saying that the contingency plan was intended to be invoked only if entrance to the park had been blocked by the police. These people were adamant about staying, whether or not it meant arrest.

Anyone was allowed to take the microphone and speak his piece. One person suggested that the police wanted to divide and conquer us, sending most of the protestors off to the Thompson Center in order to make the job of arresting those left behind easier. I thought this analysis was spot on. It sounded like just the sort of thing the police would do, attempt to scare and divide the protestors with threats of massive action and assurances of safety elsewhere.

It seemed like a consensus was emerging to stay in the park when a woman came forward to speak. She was from National Nurses United, a nurses union that had been providing medical attention and first aid to the Occupiers. They had a tent set up in the park. She said, “If any of you at all are staying here tonight, we are staying here.”  No more needed to be said on the matter.

Those of us who weren’t prepared for arrest started moving to the east side of Michigan Avenue. Slowly and fitfully, the police moved in – without canine assistance. Evidently they hoped to outwait the crowd, and many people did leave as the night stretched on. Sometime around midnight, they started arresting people in ones and twos. This infuriated the remaining protestors on our side of Michigan, as shouts of “Shame! Shame! Shame!” crossed the avenue. About half an hour later, the police started taking out the people arrayed on the ground around the nurses’ tent.

At this point, a very young man near me with a megaphone started haranguing the police angrily, swearing at them and calling them traitors to their class. A thirtyish man waited for him to take a break, then pulled him aside and calmly suggested that what he was doing wasn’t helpful at that point, and that the police were not in truth the enemy. The younger man vehemently disagreed, but listened as the older man continued to explain his position, and finally relented.

It was about 1:30 when Al and I left to find a cab. There was so much we had seen that had impressed us: the size, diversity and enthusiasm of the crowd, the resolve, passionate intensity and commitment to democratic process exhibited by the mostly very young O.C. activists, and the courage of those who were willing to be arrested – some for the second week in a row – to assert their constitutional right to peaceable assembly.

There was a palpable sense of something new being born at Occupy Chicago, a movement led by young people attempting to return to first principles to build a community from scratch – based on democratic consensus, mutual respect and economic justice. People before profits. I’m not sure what the pundit class finds opaque about this. We will be back and hope to see ever larger crowds standing with O.C., demanding an end to a criminal, inhumanly rapacious system that serves the elites as it progressively impoverishes the rest of us.

Please consider donating to Occupy Chicago. You can give them money, or tents, blankets, food and other supplies for the long road ahead. They do intend to stay. Inspired by what we saw, Al is working on graphics for signage that convey a sense of what we experienced that night.

If you can look into the seeds of time,
And say which grain will grow and which will not,
Speak then to me.

Macbeth Act 1, Scene 3

I have some friends who regularly go to Battleground, Indiana, in late June for the Fiddlers’ Convention. Every year they invite me, and I say, “Maybe I’ll go.” But I never do. Until this year. I drove down after work Friday.

My friends had driven down earlier in the day. They took my tent with them and set it up for me. When I arrived around 8:30, all there was for me to do was to open a beer and eat a big bowl of jambalaya.

Some of us stayed up late; I crawled into my sleeping bag around 3 am. A little before six, the breaking dawn awoke me, as it usually does in summer. I thought that if I relieved myself I might be able to sleep another hour. I got up and walked over to use a port-a-potty. After I finished, I opened the door to see a little boy – standing a few feet from me and grinning from ear to ear. I held the door open for a little girl whom I took to be his younger sister.

“Good morning,” I said.

“This is the best day ever! Isn’t it?” he replied.

I was looking east. The morning light was spreading across a sky swept clean of the previous night’s clouds. The stillness enveloped us.

“It sure is,” I said.

I walked back to my tent, feeling like I was still dreaming. I slept a little longer, then awoke again. I got out of my tent and looked around at a world refracted through the words of the young sage.

Later that day, some of us went for a walk in the woods. I didn’t need to look for things to photograph; the pictures just presented themselves to me and I obliged. The moment is what we have. No more and no less.

This is the best day ever. Isn’t it?



A few more here

- Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory

My friend and fellow photographer, Debra Regur, has a wonderful photo blog. She pairs her photos with little epigrams that resonate with the associated images, in ways that are often subtle and delightfully ambiguous. I’ve talked to her about doing a collaborative project, and hope that we will do one eventually. In the meantime, I wanted to try mimicking her technique; she’s decent and gentle enough to allow and even encourage me in this endeavor. When I started trying to match image to caption, though, I realized how very difficult it is. I’ve written haiku before specifically to accompany particular photos, like this:

But trying to match another’s words to one of my images was much harder. Then, a serendipitous gesture by another friend put me into contact with an epigram from the Greek Stoic philosopher, Epictetus. I guess it’s fairly well-known, but I was unfamiliar with it. In its original context, it is a commentary on a conflict arising between two brothers, but in my current circumstances I immediately saw it in terms of how we deal with grief:

- Epictetus

Song

by Brigit Pegeen Kelly

Brigit Pegeen Kelly is a poet and Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Her second published collection, Song, won the Lamont Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets in 1994. I’ve read a bit of academic analysis of its title work, all of it no more than otiose poking at Song‘s fearsome umbra. You can purchase Song as part of a beautiful recent reissue of Ms. Kelly’s work from Carcanet Press, Poems: Song and the Orchard, here.

Not a cruel song, no, no, not cruel at all. This song
Is sweet. It is sweet. The heart dies of this sweetness.

Listen: there was a goat’s head hanging by ropes in a tree.
All night it hung there and sang. And those who heard it
Felt a hurt in their hearts and thought they were hearing
The song of a night bird. They sat up in their beds, and then
They lay back down again. In the night wind, the goat’s head
Swayed back and forth, and from far off it shone faintly
The way the moonlight shone on the train track miles away
Beside which the goat’s headless body lay. Some boys
Had hacked its head off. It was harder work than they had imagined.
The goat cried like a man and struggled hard. But they
Finished the job. They hung the bleeding head by the school
And then ran off into the darkness that seems to hide everything.
The head hung in the tree. The body lay by the tracks.
The head called to the body. The body to the head.
They missed each other. The missing grew large between them,
Until it pulled the heart right out of the body, until
The drawn heart flew toward the head, flew as a bird flies
Back to its cage and the familiar perch from which it trills.
Then the heart sang in the head, softly at first and then louder,
Sang long and low until the morning light came up over
The school and over the tree, and then the singing stopped….
The goat had belonged to a small girl. She named
The goat Broken Thorn Sweet Blackberry, named it after
The night’s bush of stars, because the goat’s silky hair
Was dark as well water, because it had eyes like wild fruit.
The girl lived near a high railroad track. At night
She heard the trains passing, the sweet sound of the train’s horn
Pouring softly over her bed, and each morning she woke
To give the bleating goat his pail of warm milk. She sang
Him songs about girls with ropes and cooks in boats.
She brushed him with a stiff brush. She dreamed daily
That he grew bigger, and he did. She thought her dreaming
Made it so. But one night the girl didn’t hear the train’s horn,
And the next morning she woke to an empty yard. The goat
Was gone. Everything looked strange. It was as if a storm
Had passed through while she slept, wind and stones, rain
Stripping the branches of fruit. She knew that someone
Had stolen the goat and that he had come to harm. She called
To him. All morning and into the afternoon, she called
And called. She walked and walked. In her chest a bad feeling
Like the feeling of the stones gouging the soft undersides
Of her bare feet. Then somebody found the goat’s body
By the high tracks, the flies already filling their soft bottles
At the goat’s torn neck. Then somebody found the head
Hanging in a tree by the school. They hurried to take
These things away so that the girl would not see them.
They hurried to raise money to buy the girl another goat.
They hurried to find the boys who had done this, to hear
Them say it was a joke, a joke, it was nothing but a joke….
But listen: here is the point. The boys thought to have
Their fun and be done with it. It was harder work than they
Had imagined, this silly sacrifice, but they finished the job,
Whistling as they washed their large hands in the dark.
What they didn’t know was that the goat’s head was already
Singing behind them in the tree. What they didn’t know
Was that the goat’s head would go on singing, just for them,
Long after the ropes were down, and that they would learn to listen,
Pail after pail, stroke after patient stroke. They would
Wake in the night thinking they heard the wind in the trees
Or a night bird, but their hearts beating harder. There
Would be a whistle, a hum, a high murmur, and, at last, a song,
The low song a lost boy sings remembering his mother’s call.
Not a cruel song, no, no, not cruel at all. This song
Is sweet. It is sweet. The heart dies of this sweetness.

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone

Taibbi’s been writing as cogently about the economic crisis and bailout as anyone I’ve encountered:

What’s taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.

How could Obama let this happen? Is he just a rookie in the political big leagues, hoodwinked by Beltway old-timers? Or is the vacillating, ineffectual servant of banking interests we’ve been seeing on TV this fall who Obama really is?

Well, obviously, the latter. I guess after eight years of the Bush gang, many of us desperately wanted to believe there was something more to this man and his campaign than is abysmally typical of American politicians and politics. We were easily duped by vague and ultimately empty promises. But the War Party and its bankers never lose Congress* or the White House. What is to be done?

*Sen. Dick Durbin, on a local Chicago radio station this week, blurted out an obvious truth about Congress that, despite being blindingly obvious, is rarely spoken: “And the banks — hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created — are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.” The blunt acknowledgment that the same banks that caused the financial crisis “own” the U.S. Congress — according to one of that institution’s most powerful members — demonstrates just how extreme this institutional corruption is. (Glenn Greenwald, April 30, 2009)

It is the object of Zen, therefore, to save us from going crazy or being crippled. This is what I mean by freedom, giving free play to all the creative and benevolent impulses inherently lying in our hearts. Generally, we are blind to this fact, that we are in possession of all the necessary faculties that will make us happy and loving towards one another. All the struggles that we see around us come from this ignorance. Zen, therefore, wants us to open a ‘third eye’, as Buddhists call it, to the hitherto un-dreamed-of region shut away from us through our own ignorance. When the cloud of ignorance disappears, the infinity of the heavens is manifested, where we see for the first time into the nature of our own being. We now know the signification of life, we know that it is not blind striving nor is it a mere display of brutal forces, but that while we know not definitely what the ultimate purport of life is, there is something in it that makes us feel infinitely blessed in the living of it and remain quite contented with it in all its evolution, without raising questions or entertaining pessimistic doubts.

from D.T. Suzuki, Essays In Zen Buddhism, Vol. 1, 1927

Kiddieland was an amusement park in Melrose Park that opened in 1929. I fondly remember going to it as a child, and took Zoe there once (she’s never much cared for amusement parks). Unlike the modern variety, it was a park that catered in particular to young children, with a miniature train running along its periphery. It closed on September 26th, the victim of a feud between family members who owned the park and their kin who owned the land.

I went there on September 19th, just to take a few photos and say good bye. The park was a bit shabby, maintenance no doubt the victim of imminent closure. The Little Dipper roller coaster was badly in need of repainting.

The rides and other equipment will be auctioned off next month. Will someone bid for everything and attempt a resurrection? More photos here.

CEO’s of the Big Three automakers, scheduled to testify before Congress, are escorted to Capitol Hill upon their arrival in Washington. The trio made the trip from Detroit via freight train.