“On the last of these excursions it was my turn. I should have known something was up. Two of my three passengers had been with me on earlier trips, a practice not forbidden — ‘prohibiting is prohibited!’ was a conspicuous slogan — but not encouraged either. On the outward leg I was suckered into relating my love affair with poetry in preposterous detail; no sooner had the drive back begun than my ordeal began as well. My passengers started needling me rather gently, and they were never less than affectionate, but soon they were pitching it in red hot; for a while I tried dutifully to stick it out, but I was gradually and meticulously divested of my addiction. I was made to see where it was leading me: a place where poetry would be a refuge, a line of defense to keep me safe from the active world — that world being then an obviously threatening one. I had no use for politically committed poetry — revealing injustice is better done with prose. I knew that one way poetry could be revolutionary was by subverting the conventions of language, by addling its normative expectations, by showing that words were almost never saying what they claimed to be saying. Could I have followed that path? Maybe. On that car ride my one-time friends showed me . . . they reminded me of a Situationist tag: most of us were like people in prison who kept going through days of confinement by remembering moments of being free and imagining future moments of freedom, and as a poet, I remembered past moments of ecstasy and imagined future ones, but like the prisoner I was, I was limited to surviving my present condition.
“And I’d learned another way of using language. After a few days in May I knew how to talk to men and women, how to wake up their dormant possibilities — I could ‘manage’ them, not by psychological manipulation but by provoking them into moving on.
“When most people talk about May 1968, they say its political and social effects were disastrous. It’s true that an uprising launched to defend the independence of the university in the end destroyed its authority. It’s true that many activists ended up in cushy jobs under Mitterand. It’s true that many others less fortunate drifted into poverty or bitterly gave up their progressive ideals. That was especially true of those from the middle class. They felt they had to create valid identities for themselves, they went to work in factories or started communal farms. Those people missed the point.
“What was great in the best days of May was the exuberance not only of direct democracy but of winning. We brought about the longest general strike ever in an advanced economy. We had the government wetting its collective pants. Cabinet members were renting apartments in Brussels to escape imminent disaster. De Gaulle went off secretly to beg the army not to desert him. We were on a roll, not for long, just a few days. Not then or afterwards did I ever think about having a valid identity, it was never a concern for those of us who didn’t want to lose what we’d experienced. As a poet on the fringe I’d learned enough about being ‘downtrodden’ not to have to wreck myself running a machine!
“For some of us there was a good way out: keep on changing life and lives by starting with our own. To someone like me who’d been addicted to Freud this was obvious. Just as it was obvious that you can’t change people by bashing them with good ideas. (Shaw said, ‘Reformers have the idea that change can be achieved by brute sanity.’) Women understand this better than men. They see that politics begins in participation, in socialization, they’re easily committed to what one of them called ‘a critical renewal of everyday life.’ Me too — when I met Margot, who’d been through rough times as a belligerent feminist in Seattle, she took to me partly because I was no dogmatic leftist but a pragmatic, day-to-day saboteur.
“Listen, that’s the best I can do.”
Andreas: “I wish I’d been there.” It was an honest remark; but Andreas still couldn’t understand why his friend stopped writing poetry. Geoffrey’s enthusiasm for the innovative lab showed that acting directly on the way people function brought him a meatier satisfaction than the slow, indirect notation of poetic thought; but what of the slow, indirect side of him, where strange sights and sounds coalesce out of nothing, or nothing more than the caressing or crashing encounters of words aspiring to be pure as music, as mesmerizing as the sky on a cloudless night?
Andreas had time to go home and have a refreshing nap. With Berenice he then went back into town to keep their appointment at the Hunting Horn with Wicheria.
She was waiting at the bar. She waved to them as they walked in, as if there could be any doubt that she was the one they were looking for. Berenice immediately allowed herself the pleasure of detailing her appearance: high-heeled black patent-leather sandals; a flounced red taffeta skirt, half-calf length; a broad belt of green snake skin; a loose muslin blouse
