Speech given for the release of Cobra Lily Vol. 4
by Zvi Baranoff
I usually speak off the top of my head. I ramble a lot. Today I am using the teleprompter and I will ramble a lot. When you read what I write you will think that my writing rambles a lot.
I was taught that in a standard public speech, you tell them what you are going to tell them, then you tell them. Then, you tell them what you told them. I intend to talk a bit about the nature of creative people, particularly writers and artists and about my work, and what influences me that is what I am mostly going to do.
Anyway, I totally understand if you ignore two-thirds of what I have to say. Don't waste your time. Daydream or think about something more important, or nap. If you listen to a third of what I say, that is plenty.
I was born in the late 1950s so I am now in my sixties. When I was young I never imagined getting old, but it happened anyway, mostly while I wasn't looking. Politically and culturally I am heavily influenced by Abbie Hoffman, one of the founders of the YIPPIES. YIP is an acronym for Youth International Party and is probably most famous for being on the battered end of the police riots during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. YIPPIES also levitated the Pentagon and developed the Marijuana Smoke In as a political tactic. Abbie would be about 20 years older than me if he were still amongst us. I was also very influenced by Kathy Chang who is no longer with us. She would be about seven years older than me if she had not stepped out prematurely.
Abbie was a myth maker. The books of his that I read in the early 1970s are full of all sorts of nonsense. He was a master manipulator. He promoted the myth of the counterculture and ideas such as the Woodstock Nation that offered an alternative reality to the Death Culture of capitalism and the Vietnam War and ecocide and all that. When I graduated high school in 1975 I went off to find this mythological Woodstock Nation that Abbie wrote about.
I met Kathy Chang in Philadelphia in the 1970s. She was colourful and charismatic. High Times named her Freedom Fighter of the Year once, for whatever that honour is worth. Much about what I learned about her past had missing pieces. She kept some secrets and told lies. Don't we all? She told me that she earned her living as a prostitute. I did not know that she had published a children's book. I did not know that she had a fairly famous academic for a father. I was surprised when she told me that she had received a sizable inheritance and urged me to join her and a merry band of social malcontents in squatting a couple of abandoned buildings in West Philly, a quixotic endeavor financed with her inheritance. She promoted an idea of instant change, Transformation, where we all just stopped doing the stupid and ugly things and agreed amongst ourselves to do everything some better way.
In my youth, I imagined myself to be an iconoclast. I wanted to tip over sacred cows and destroy illusion. I mostly no longer feel that way. The origin of iconoclasm is a critical view of the iconic imagery in the churches. I have come to like the artwork including all the statuary, seeing all that as the least destructive and dangerous, and possibly the most uplifting aspect of those institutions. Besides, if one goes about attacking other people's illusions at some point you have to grapple your own illusions and I am all in favour of good, well developed illusions, especially my own.
The problem, however, with loving and working with illusions is that you learn the levers and mechanics of the trickery and all the miraculousness of the illusions fade. This is the fate of carnival workers and sideshow geeks and traveling medicine show hucksters and preachers and hookers and other sorts of hustlers. We know that what we do is fake, but we have a vested interest in it so we are disinclined to pull away the curtain and expose the Wizard of Oz.
I also believed when I was younger that Gutenberg's printing press was a wonderful invention that promoted social progress. During his time, there were doubters. Decades later for me and centuries later for Gutenberg, I am coming around to understand the position of the opposition. With the advent of this new technology the Bible was soon mass produced and distributed widely. With the Book in hand, everyone could now read and interpret Scriptures on their own, drawing their own conclusions and lessons. In retrospect, I can see how that may be a dangerous thing, just making it up as one goes along.
The printing press led to mass distribution of all sorts of nonsense, yellow journalism and propaganda. Good job, Gutenberg! Of course, the printing press allows us to produce things like the Cobra Lily so I guess it is not all bad.
We are artists and writers. As artists and writers we know that we can just make things up. Lots of folks just make shit up as they go along. Some are psychopaths. Some are politicians. Some are gangsters. Artists and writers, of course, are different from those other folks because we serve a higher purpose, which is the claim we make to justify doing whatever we want most of the time.
Marxists historically considered artists, writers and musicians to be part of a subcategory of the working class they called lumpenproletariat. This is a grouping that also includes petty criminals, drug dealers, prostitutes and unemployables and such. According to the standard Marxist understanding, we are lupen until we develop class consciousness and self define as cultural workers and produce proletariat propaganda… Me, I skipped class. I remain lumpenproletariat. Like the country singer said, I have friends in low places. My ramblings are my own and will always be so.
In last year's edition of the Cobra Lily (Vol. 3) I wrote about self-created mythologies. In this issue I touch on a variety of mythological themes. I flow them together. Ancient Gods, epic imagery, Ancient Heroes, Biblical references, folk tales. Go ahead and accuse me of cultural appropriation and I will readily agree to the charge.
I sometimes feel that I keep turning things over and over to look at it from another angle and then back over again and everything has changed. The more things change, the more they stay the same. There are themes that repeat throughout literature and the Bible and epics and such and they involve being lost and being found and being reborn or resurrected and seeking a better way and truth and beauty and failing and carrying on. There is nothing new under the sun, or so I have been told.
I am conflicted. I believe we can each create our own realities based on our own myths. Unfortunately, when others do so, they sometimes have terrible myths and create horrible realities with adverse effects so I am not sure I want to promote this idea that we can alter reality in such a way, although it is actually true. So, when tyrants and bullies adopt mythologies - and I suppose they have as much of a right to them as anyone else, but damn...how they can ruin a good thing.
We have fascist, misogynist, racist, thuggish, brutish…have I left anything out? We have these types that, for instance, claim both Odin and Jesus as their own. Now, I wasn't raised with either Odin nor Jesus as part of my primary pantheon, but I am not quite ready to give up those mythologies to the dark side. Both Odin and Jesus work their way into my contribution to this issue of the Cobra Lily.
For years I told anyone that would listen that you can recreate the world in your own image. I imagined a world where each of us would seek out our pathway, following our own Muses and finding our own inner truths. I had hoped we would choose better illusions to live by. Perhaps we will soon. I never expected America to elevate a carnival geek to the Presidency. Nonetheless, we did.
So, I think we may be forced into a struggle to defend imaginary territories in an ongoing battle of the creative unreal against the manufactured falsity.
My Grandparents all came from what was Czarist Russia. My Grandparents spoke Yiddish in their homes. When they didn't want their kids to understand, they spoke Russian. My parents spoke English, but resorted to Yiddish when they were trying to keep secrets. I speak in metaphors and parables and sometimes I am not even sure I understand what I am talking about. I am sure that I carry with me the sense of displacement of the past generations. I speak about displaced humanity in this issue of the Cobra Lily that we are now celebrating.
Imaginary lines on maps are imaginary portrayals of the Earth. Very real fortifications enforce the belief that these imaginary lines are representations of something true and important and that people that live on the other side of the line are somehow different from those of us born on this side of the line.
Yet, we all come from somewhere and have been through stuff and have scars and bruises and trauma and other such baggage. It might be in our immediate past, perhaps. It may be in our collective history, our families and tribes and nations driven by floods or earthquakes or war or famine. It might be our ancient historical memories. Our distant ancestors were sea creatures and choose to crawl up on the shore and seek a different life. Long before that there was the Big Bang and Creation and we were flung across an infinity of time and space, moving forward, thrust forward, always forward, ever expanding. Everything is constantly spinning. Sometimes I just want to cling to this very spot on this spinning globe and pray that I am not flung loose and I doubt that will help because there is just too much momentum.
Abbie Hoffman was 52 at the time of his death on April 12, 1989. He died by gulping down 150 phenobarbital tablets and booze. Shortly before his death he had spoken at a conference I had organized in Philadelphia, and he spoke eloquently and with clarity. I remember where I was and what I was doing when I learned of Abbie's death. We were on our way to New York with a load of weed destined for the underground medical cannabis market when we stopped at my parents place in Jersey. The TV news came on with the report of Abbie's very untimely death.
About seven and a half years later on October 22, 1996, Kathy Chang, who had begun calling herself Kathy Change to emphasise the Transformation, doused herself with gasoline, in front of the Peace Symbol, a stainless steel sculpture on the Penn campus, and set herself on fire. I do not remember how I learned of this. I have yet to make sense of it.
So, these were two incredibly talented and intelligent people that wove and created the world of their own choosing and yet could not find a way to continue to live in this world as it is. They were both so incredibly right on in so many ways and yet… And, I was heavily influenced by both of these but I ain't going out like that.
So, are there conclusions we can draw from all this? Yea. We get to make it all up as we go along. And yea, we live in this world as it is. True and untrue are intertwined and overlap and maybe at some level it does not matter. All of our heroes are deeply flawed and there are parts of every story that are hidden behind veils of illusion. But, if we are making it all up as we go along and inventing our own mythologies, then let's choose ones that are useful and pleasant. We live by grace. We carry on. We are writers and artists. That is what we do.
Volume 4 of the Cobra Lily is available on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/Cobra-Lily-Review-Southwest-Literature/dp/1945824190/
