Activism – Page 4 – Empty Hands History

After Coronavirus: Intervening in an Explosion of Potentiality

Coronavirus has accentuated the isolation and alienation that so many of us already felt. The short- and medium-term outlook is bleak. But once the crisis is over, I anticipate an incredible flowering of blocked potentiality and I am eager to see and experience the possibilities of what may come. New forms of life, new ways of relating to one another, new commitments to a joyful and meaningful daily existence, will proliferate across the country and the world.

The exhilaration of coming back together, of non-distanced life, will explode into thousands of new encounters. For a crucial moment, going back to our previous way of life—the drudgery and anxiety of life under late capitalism—will be unthinkable. This will be an incredible opportunity for those of us with alternative visions of life to intervene and propose—nay, demonstrate!—the possibilities for living, organizing, and relating differently.

I have been reading Tom Wolfe’s invigorating book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test chronicling the acid-fueled bus trip that Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters took across the United States in 1964 spreading new forms of life and consciousness across the country and helping kick-start the ‘60s counterculture. Last night, I got pretty stoned for the first time in a while (I’m getting old, give me a break) and watched Across the Universe, which features the Merry Pranksters in a great scene. And I suddenly thought: this is it. This is the intervention—or better, one of many interventions!—to be made in the post-coronavirus moment.

I have so many dear friends scattered across the country. Five years ago, I took a mostly-solo road trip around the US in which I reconnected with old friends and saw their amazing experiments in life and politics, from the “Avant-Gardeners” in Eugene to the rollicking fun of a Halloween weekend in New Orleans. It seems that this should be repeated, but this time in a bus with a collection of friends, comrades, and fellow travelers spreading anarchy and living communism: distributing literature, propaganda, art, music, puppet shows, perhaps even a talk or two based on my research. An autonomous zone in every park, a block party on every street!

Crucially, we would see firsthand and participate in what is happening across the country. Everywhere we go, we would ask the same questions to folks involved in infoshops, communes, alternatives to policing… what are you doing? How is it going? What is working well, what is not? What do you think others could learn from your experience? And then we would spread their answers in other cities through zines and talks and fireside conversations. After so many months communicating digitally, we need to come into contact again.

As the Invisible Committee put it in their ever-relevant book Now: “the thing to do, it would seem, is to leave home, take to the road, go meet up with others, work towards forming connections, whether conflictual, prudent, or joyful, between the different parts of the world. Organizing ourselves has never been anything else than loving each other.”

The Merry Pranksters’ bus named “Further”

Learning from Bread and Puppet

Late at night after a Bread and Puppet show, we sat around our kitchen table with several puppeteers chatting over handfuls of leftover Halloween candy. I had noticed a certain presence from the Bread and Puppet members: a sense of ease and warmth that rubbed off on everyone they met. I found myself smiling more around them, talking and laughing freely, feeling more alive. After a round of Laffy Taffy jokes, I couldn’t help asking how they did it. What produced this sense of comfort, this easy joy and connection with others? The oldest of them laughed kindly and responded: “it’s just early in the tour.”

Bread and Puppet’s bus outside the Moth Mother Collective (2019)

A fair response. But what exactly is it about Bread and Puppet that generates this feeling of comfortable humanity, this ease and presence in the world? My partner and I discussed this for weeks after they left. Of course, the answer is not hard to discern. They are a group of lovely people who live collectively on a farm and spend their days making beautiful art. A few times a year, a number of them pile into a painted old school bus to travel from town to town sharing their creations with the world. Bread and Puppet has been producing and sharing incredible art, puppets, theater, and (of course) bread since the 1960s, and their method works. They put an incredible amount of life into their art, which in turn sustains so many thousands of people. My own house is filled with Bread and Puppet art that brings me daily joy.

I have yet to actually play the game featured under this Bread and Puppet poster in our living room

Of course, not all of us can spend our days making art on a collective farm in Vermont. How can we find a similar sense of happiness and fulfillment as do the puppeteers? It is perhaps a banal observation that some form of self-directed creative labor is key. Capitalism devalues our creative projects, forces them into niche “hobbies” to pursue in our precious little free time away from work. We find ourselves having to justify every hour spent on our projects—or conversely, we feel guilty when we don’t have time for them. As Marx pointed out so long ago in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, the problem is that work under capitalism alienates us from our humanity and our sense of creative possibility. The only real solution is to collectively regain control over our time and labor.

Until then, making art and puppets seems like as good a way as any to find some happiness and relief from the soul sucking despair of the present. Puppets are also, as David Graeber reminds us, vital for fun and provocative demonstrations and for sustaining our culture of resistance. So a few weeks ago, in the doldrums of coronavirus melancholia, we at the Moth Mother Collective cleared out our garage of junk and transformed it into an art and puppet studio. (We have big plans for it to double as an infoshop space and pop-up zine distro in the future; stay tuned!) We’re still a little way out from finishing any puppets, but we are making progress. And I’ll tell you what: it feels good.