Photo: Stacy Lanyon
I was drawn to Occupy because I had come to a dead end in life. I was doing a reading, and my friends came up from Baltimore to see it. After the reading was finished, we went looking for the new thing that was supposed to be happening called "Occupy." That night, we ran into this group of really sweaty, really excited kids giving off the appearance of some kind of critical mass in the streets of the financial district. For a moment, we thought that this was "Occupy," but it turned out these kids were all just rolling on ecstasy. It was a fitting prelude to my involvement with OWS, though, because the cops were there that night just watching these kids verge on overdose: watching, hanging out, texting - you know, shit that cops in New York do when they're not just taking orders. My friends came up again a couple days later - after the Brooklyn Bridge march - and I met them at Zuccotti Park. That was my first night there. After they went back to Baltimore, I tried to go back home, but I just couldn’t. I just came back to the park and, in a way, I've never left. I kept my job. I was publishing my novel TRAIN TO POKIPSE the whole time I was in Zuccotti and for the months od re-occupation and exhile that followed; but culturally, emotionally, psychologically, I was always there. I was always with Occupy.
The park was so magical. It was like something I had always dreamt of but somehow forgot along the way, and all of the sudden I was living in the midst of this forgotten dream. Everything that made up Zuccotti, once had seemed so impossible, and then, all of the sudden, it was here. You could touch it. It kept you awake at night staring at the stars, your body in a sleeping bag, a friend you were meant to find on your right, on your left. It was a very rupturing moment, almost like a really pleasant electrocution. From the first night I walked up Broadway to Zuccotti Park, there was this feeling I haven't yet understood, but I've never felt anything like it. I think it’s the feeling social body gives off when it comes together in a very real and natural way. There was this amazing energy and this amazing vibrancy. Being a part of the living social body of Zuccotti Park was the experience of really being alive. That was probably what was so magical. I was alive, and I just had been so dead for so long.
It’s important to keep forward with the awakening brought about by Occupy because regular society, status quo society, everyday society can feel so unnatural, so anti-human. Western society seems to have, in one way or another, always been like that, but now it's worse than ever. If you talk to people who are older - I’ve spoken to people in their fifties/sixties/ seventies about this - they say it’s the worst it’s ever been. Especially now, after the Zuccotti moment has faded into history, it’s very important for us to move beyond the traditional spheres to which Corporate compartmentalization has regulated activism. The more we do that, the closer we will be to the possibility of another world.
There is something completely unnatural about a society based upon work and routine, with no investment in either direction between either party. It’s basically a society of clients. Everything is disposable. Everything and everyone are replaceable. That doesn’t only mean the “bottom 99%.” It means everyone. Even the people at "the top" are disposable. It’s a very, very strong sickness that just seeps everywhere. Trickle-down economics was right in the trickle-downness of social sickness. That part they got right, for sure. I can't think of a better manifestation of being in a state of nothingness than finding yourself in a society where everyone and everything are completely disposable, than finding yourself in a society that's so exemplified by a roll of toilet paper.
I'm striving to help bring about a world that is very much like Zuccotti, -with all of the beauty and all the chaos of that space where we were led by the freedom of our assembly. I'm learning that this is most fundamentally effective when it's least sexy; when it's less about marching with your feet than it is about marching with your soul; when it's enacted in the everyday relationships of those closest to me in society and in the never-ending relationship of myself to myself. I'm striving to bring about a world that is very much like Zuccotti by focusing foremost on making the city within a shining city on the hill.
I think that we would see human beings achieve things that have never been achieved before, that we'd see the real meaning of progress, if the world ever moved into a full-scale occupation, Zuccotti-style. I think our natural energies would achieve really, really great heights. It’s not something that could be verbalized because it’s something that would seem totally new, and yet totally familiar. If we wanted to look for it, we’d probably have to look for it in moments of literature and moments of art. It would probably feel like being in love all the time, or much of the time, with all the benefits and negatives, but that feeling is such a heightened state of being that its positives and negatives are better than nothing, better than just a flat line.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon