SLSL Intro "The Way of Communication"

[edwin honigire]

.            "The situation is completely different as
regards the radical, or socialist, or anti-capitalist,
or "intellectual" Left - the group that spends most of
its seemingly ample free time bitching about Labor's
"sell-out". In fact, all of the very genuine
achievements of the Labor movement since World War II
have been made despite, rather than because of, their
contribution."

Yes! 

Most of the retrospects have been written by white
male activists from elite backgrounds and reproduce
their relationship to these movements. Almost all
books about the new left note a turning point or an
ending in 1968 when the leadership of the movement
turned toward militancy and violence and SDS as an
organization was collapsing. The retrospects commonly
identify the key weakness of the movement as the
absence of effective organization, the lack of
discipline, and utopian thinking. 

Breines points out in "Whose New Left?" the movement
was not simply unruly and undisciplined; it was
experimenting with architectural organizational
forms…There were many centers of action in the
movement, many actions, many interpretations, many
visions, many experiences. There was no
[organizational unity] unity because each group,
region, campus, commune, collective, and demonstration
developed differently, but all shared in a spontaneous
opposition to racism and inequality, the war in
Vietnam, and the repressiveness of American social
norms and culture, including centralization and
hierarchy. The most important contribution of
activists were their moral urgency, their emphasis on
direct action, their focus on community building, and
their commitment to mass democracy. 
One reason was the presence of real,  invisible class
force fields in the way of communication between the
two groups." (SL, "Intro,"   p. 7)

There were more than two groups. 


Of course Pynchon takes all this up in VL. We see his
view of labor change here from what it was in V. In VL
he will address that real, invisible class force field
and come down on the side of labor. I think this is
evident in M&D too. 

Lines for  Neruda   

We were the men who worked the machines, 
each one annointed with oil on his knees-- 
when our families dreamed, machines came awake 
to search for us.  I don’t know, I don’t know where 
poetry entered.  The thousand smashed windows 
that watched empty alleys, did the virus 
of poems blow in them with the night breeze? 
Or the poisonous voices of wet oleanders 
on Interstate 5, were they calling my name?   

The electrical smell, the machinery smell, 
the cannery smell, the armpit smell, 
the tuna fish smell, the bakery smell, 
the gas station smell, the gunpowder smell, 
the Thunderbird smell, the V-8 smell, 
the dirt street smell, the tortilla smell, 
the ashtray smell, the brown teeth smell, 
the Tijuana smell, the cheap perfume smell, 
the refinery smell never hinted at poems. 

The first verse I ever read 
was the letter V sketched in a 
lemon sky by gulls escaping 
the city dump at sunset 
cutting through thin clouds 
over the projects 
going to a sea I knew 
was right across the city 
but never saw.  

Our lullabyes in those years were the inexhaustible
keen 
of overhot gears beseeching grease.   Our fathers’
nightlights, 
40 watt bulbs strung up on orange power cords: lynched
stars 
that swung over their heads, their shadows flapped 
like wings of the machines.  Old angels squinting
their eyes 
at nudie magazines they couldn’t read--coffee break
black and white 
braille--the smudge of fingers on thighs, 
Pall Mall gasps pipelined on high--a touch of paper
skin 
colder than snow.  

How did the Word ever hunt down our hearing? 
The engines of hunger drove us deeper to silence. 
What was it that urged us to sing?  What beat handle 
disengaged the gears, by what chain were we dragged 
from the brink.  To idle a moment long enough to
think. 
We lost singers each day: one lost to pistols, 
one lost to flames, one coughed dry by cancer, 
one erased by the highway.  Each one wore black shoes 
with working man soles, rippled as waves on a tar
shore. 

The ironwrack pounded unceasing around us, 
the glass crash, the tire burn, the shotgun, 
the shouting.  Blue exhalations sighed from our
Chevies-- 
were the vowels of my song gasping into the air? 
Was the ratchet of pistons this consonance drumming? 
Why did poetry come forth from cables, from coils, 
punctured by nails in veils of rust 
to the rhythm of Border patrol helicopters 
made of words like compadre, amigo, esperanza, dolor 

to lay mothwings of poetry to burn on my tongue? 

This poem originally appeared in Hayden’s Ferry
Review, Spring/Summer 2000. 







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