I read Bakunin, Goldman and other anarchist theory and started looking for ways of creating autonomous zones in my life and cooperative inter-dependencies. I channeled my energy into various projects – including humanitarian (Hugh), progressive capitalist (Art) and counter-cultural (Ted) – that I hoped would create new models for a different world.

Letters

I met Aragorn who introduced me to two books that were, and remain, influential in my life.  Letters was the first.  Critical theory had been responsible for stripping me of any faith in the system or the system’s ability to correct itself.  Letters, on the other hand, was responsible for stripping me of faith in the ability of the leftists and radical projects to have any substantial effects in the world. Additionally, I began realizing the flaws in their methods and my own activism.  All of the roads towards making change were suddenly unappealing because of what was sacrificed in the process, and the results could only reflect that.

For the first time, I also began to consider my desires without shame.  While I didn’t really change my sexual preferences, I did reframe the morality in which they were ensconced. I had more understanding of the connection of my sexuality to accomplishing things, to my relationship with myself, and to being someone’s “woman.”

Additionally, Letters has resulted in some level of paralysis and jadedness, for me. (I do not minimize the contribution of my age to these retreats from so-called political engagement, either.) I am an optimist by nature and I continue to look for possibilities and connections, but my expectations of what they will accomplish are not the same as what they once were.  While I do prioritize keeping in contact with my “comrades,” life is less of a movement and more of a holding pattern.

Bolo Bolo

The second influential book was Bolo Bolo, by PM.  This book presents a model for autonomous community living. After having had so much stripped away from my belief system and my hope, this was refreshing.  As stated on Evolution Zone,

We have offered many of our own “realpolitik” observations as to how we might proceed instead of down the path and over the cliff with the left. Perhaps lurking over our shoulders is our “second reality” and we must consider both what the second reality can be and how to make the move from the reality we don’t want into the one we do want.

My background in geography has overlaid all of my studies and radical interests.  Both Letters and Bolo Bolo have reinforced my belief that the only significant change will happen in the wake of catastrophe.  PM presents a model for rebuilding the local when the current configuration of the global is no longer sustainable; it must be a local that can function within a genuinely revised global.  I suppose the remaining question for all you Insurgent Summer participants is, “Will you be in my Bolo when it is all gone?”

Insurgent Summer

I got a great deal out of this project. Like Artnoose, this is the first time outside of school that I had taken copious notes as I read.  I was forced to pay more attention to the details of the timelines, characters and military actions.  In my prior readings, the mountaintop scenes had remained an elephant in the room for me and I had done little to make sense of Lem or Vesna. I was also either unable or unwilling to criticize Perlman’s work.

My wildest dream was that this project would have hundreds of people following with a dozen participating, and would help popularize the book. We did fall short of that, but I am so glad that it happened. I think the participants got a lot out of it personally and the book did get a boost within the anarchist community.

What we ended up with was mostly a platform for folks who were already “into” the book to articulate why and maybe dissect it a bit more. I think it was an opportunity that we all wanted to have, and I am glad that the book and our discussion of it will take up a bit more space on the internet from now on. It also resulted in the hastening of the ebook and a prod in the development of local discussion groups.

Thanks to everyone who blogged, commented and discussed.

People who live their lives in close proximity to books, through books, against and for books, are often alone, lonely people. You can often tell us by our improper pronunciation of terms we have only ever read, our vocabulary that includes more words than the average 15,000 and uses colloquial terms as readily as modern. We also exhibit the alarming characteristic of having deep relationships with the books we read. Often closer than with people, even when we have access to them. This trait can be seen in embryonic form in the near cos-play of young readers of Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings novels where the richness of the books universe exceeds the suburban cultural poverty of most of its readers. In adult form I work with a woman whose job title is security guard but who in fact spends every day embedded in books–barely interested enough in the affairs of man to lift her head to look at the bank of screens in front of her.

As it turns out I have to fight to not join her in a better world right now.

This novel was part of my process of expelling myself from the gravitational force of fantasy. This was not because I identified so closely with the characters. This reading has really cured me of identification (as I expand on in my comments on letter 7) with the characters, but because the ideas within the novel pushed me out of pages of books. Life is not in there but out here. I still have great love for books and even position them at the center of my affairs but they comprise the set of simple machines from which to build rather than the artifice themselves.

This book, Letters of Insurgents, it turns out, knocked down the piles of books that would have otherwise been the only way that you and I were able to communicate.

Sexuality

The social circles that radicals live in, and I speak largely of post-AIDS crisis radicals in North America (PACR) (which are the only ones I really know), have a tortured relationship with sex, sexuality, sexual relationships, etc. One of the many ways in which Letters of Insurgents serves as a bottle in the ocean from one side of a divide to another is regarding its discussion of sex – particularly taboo sex. Letters of Insurgents‘s entire arena of interest, regarding sex, seems orthogonal to the experience of most everyone I know.

On glancing at the other posts on the book (most of which are written by women) I notice a lot of attention has been given to this topic and this theme in the book. Completely related to the first point I make regarding sexuality in radical circles is the impossibility of me even getting into this issue. I am torn between wanting to speak to it (the topic), against it (the taboo of male participation in the discussion), about my own experiences, and to speak in such a way as to guard myself. Rich material indeed. Let’s at least explore why I view PACR as having a tortured relationship with sex.

I am in the first (and only) wave of children of the free love movement. My parents loved (and had sex) wildly. In point of fact this was the principle way they attempted to break with normal (normative) society . My childhood was around sex. Humans having it near me. Breaking up because of it. Having medical procedures as a result of it. Sex, sex, sex filled their shallow lives with the belief that they were tearing down old values and actually doing something which they weren’t doing at all.

Couple this with the cultural values of Native America. I am not going to dwell long here but it is worth mentioning that modesty has a high value in Native culture and that my time in the Seventies were filled with complications resulting from a modest culture abutting one that prioritized a kind of freedom that was neither free nor modest.

Again, I want to dance along my personal time line so as to speak to the taboos of the book (so forgive me for a break that might feel like a disconnect). Here is a block of lyrics from a band from the Eighties that talked about sex in a way that was compelling to me then… and now.

Oh, but don’t mention love
I’d hate the pain of the strain all over again
A rush and a push and the land that
We stand on is ours
- The Smiths, A Rush and a Push and the Land Is Ours

Perhaps I am straining credibility but the connection seems apparent to me that there is a connection, not a causal, or direct connection, but a connection to a certain kind of industrialized libidinal activity and industrial conflict. Industrial conflict is the utter interconnection between tools and people, in the parlance of this book, in other words, it is how civilization happens. Back to the novel.

I don’t actually find the specific crisis of child sexuality to be a compelling theme in the novel. I believe that many kinds of situations could bring up the explosion that Yarostan inflicts upon his family and that forbidden sex makes the issue titillating but not compelling. I think the same, or similar, pressure was put on Jasna in the final chapter to far greater effect. The question of crisis, what brings iton, how each of us will deal with it when it comes, is exceedingly important. The book demonstrates, through several examples, a point that I find disconcerting in our broader culture and have yet to find my way around. In times of crisis between people who you know, people you have face-to-face relationships with, the most likely outcome is fracture, pain, and cleavage. Because, in North America, political life is so short (between the age of 18 and 25 and then never again) there is very little experience with the constellation of feelings around crisis. Instead life’s crisis is only considered part of family life and that cultural responses are the only ones experimented with.

To put this point another way, when you live in a culture that valorizes effectiveness it is not a surprise that people see taboos as nothing but distracting wastes of time that should be handled violently, sex as for procreation (especially after the AIDS crisis), and winning as far more important than how one wins.

On the one hand Mirna and Yara’s setup of Yarostan exposes his hang ups and lack of ability to handle a crisis appropriately, on the other their setup of Titus and Jasna determined the future of their relationship and demonstrated that impacting another person’s life is much easier than one would believe. The force that it takes to push others around and stand on their land is easier than we may believe and can often be confused for something we would do as an act of love or passion.

Coherence

One of the few points of constructive criticism that I receive time and time again is that I expose interesting ideas in a lot of my writing but never follow them up. I make half my point and leave the rest to die on the vine. This is by design, and perhaps may never change. I am sensitive to an increasing problem in modern discourse that I feel like I have been guilty of but want to try to parse a little bit here. The problem with much of modern discourse is that people don’t actually want to say something that they can be held accountable to later. For anarchists there are obvious problems where one day you may argue for class struggle as the only way in which society can be transformed and then later decide that working with small groups is the only way to be effective in social transformation. By making the simple, strong point earlier you limit your future ability to sound like you know what you are talking about. It makes more sense to bifurcate and hedge, imply and infer, rather than to state smaller points emphatically and accept that former positions are wrong.

To take a more recent example, in the prior section of this little piece of writing it could be read into what I am saying that a certain approach to fucking is tantamount to, or at the very least the antecedent, to genocide. This isn’t the kind of thing I would actually say with much conviction but isn’t an unfriendly turn of my phrase. Just one I wouldn’t use. As a result of not saying things in such a clear, provocative way I am accused of being unclear. This may be the case but is also not the case. Alongside the thread in which I placed connecting sex and booted feet on other peoples land is one about the futility of winning when it fractures a person’s life, the utility of sex as procreation in the shadow of taboo, and several others. When you speak in clear declarative statements you make simple points clearly and dishonor others. As a writer I want to speak to all of these things and not just the crassest of my own points (as firmly as I may believe them).

This confluence between simplicity and coherence can be stacked on the kindling of the irrelevance of radicals in North America. We seem neither visionary nor clear enough to win. Our strategy isn’t possible enough to get behind or impossible enough to embrace anyway. We make a kind of sense but only if one chooses to separate themselves from everything they know, every value that shapes their understanding of the world, every friendship they made till now. There are no surprises in the people who pass right through these crazy ideas and dreams.

And yet we still have them and for those of us stubborn enough to stand still, enjoy the time we have with shooting stars.

Letters of Insurgents is not a book about winners. The victories that occur are quiet victories that make a different kind of sense to those of us who have made the cognitive break from straight society. I imagine others can get a lot of things out of the book but it is a book targeted straight at the heart of a loser like me. I will never be able to put my ideas about how to live into practice in anything other than the most fleeting of moments and spaces. I will never turn back the tanks, hang the bureaucrats, destroy the interstates, erase the bombs and guns of states, or live in a real community that is free from property and violence. Letters of Insurgents made a convincing argument that this was the case and made just as convincing of an argument that I needed to pull my head out of my books and try anyway.

I have been humbled to be a part of this project and to have at least a few other people interested in my thoughts on this book and its impact on me. Hopefully you will share something you love with me next time.

Yara’s Freedom?

This brings us back to freedom. The question of freedom, much like the questions of morality and desire, is an oft-talked about one in anarchist circles, so I won’t linger here long, but for our purposes the essential question is: How can one be sure they are making “free” decisions? This is a question left unanswered in Letters. Not only is it unanswered; Perlman seems to think it’s not a question worth considering, given that he never even attempts to address this subject in any way except through Sophia, and that’s only to show us how repressed and reactionary Sophia is to judge Tina and Ted’s relationship.

In Yara’s case (unlike Tina’s), she was raised in a nuclear family unit, and attended a normal school. Her life looks externally much more like a traditional model, with a clearly defined hierarchy and power dynamic. Yara was raised with people in charge of her. Part of her rebellion is unlearning that, right? Actually, according to Mirna, Yara is the only one who has nothing to unlearn.

“We were all deformed by a world of doctors, police and prying old women. Yara was the only one who knew that by killing the devil inside us, we killed ourselves and she couldn’t help but know because there was nothing inside her but the devil.”

But how do we know she’s not just being another Sophia? I mean she’s following awfully closely in her own mother’s footsteps, much like Sophia. Is Yara even the one who tells us she views the world this way? Even more importantly, why is none of this commented on by Perlman? Is he totally unaware of the similarities between the child of a political revolutionary (Luisa) and a personal revolutionary (Mirna) following the footsteps of their parents fairly closely? And even more so in that case of Yara than Sophia. I mean, Luisa is manipulative sure, but does she do anything like this:

“Yara and I both leaped at [Vesna] and pulled her to bed. The devil drove both of us. We showed her what her father would do to her as soon as he returned. We both turned her and kissed her lips and hugged her until I felt a horrible paralysis flowing through her trembling, freezing body.”

Oh and don’t forget this little gem from way back in the Sixth Letter:

“’Show me, Yara. Come here next to me. Come on, Yara. That’s it. Now lie down. Pretend you’re on the mountain top. Lie still. Pretend we’re alone. Now who am I?’ [...] There’s another silence. Then Yara pleads, ‘You’re hurting me mommy.’ [...] ‘Pretend hard! There, Vesna, lie still. I’m your father. How does that feel, Vesna? And that? Is this how you like me, Vesna?’ ‘No I don’t! I’m not Vesna!’”

Plus, that healthy interaction ends in Mirna hitting Yara so much that Yarostan runs in to save her.

Mirna’s Hidden Authority

Next up on the shining roster of wonderful Mirna actions is when Zdenek realizes Mirna actually faked her catatonic state:

“Zdenek is the only one without tears on his face. He gets up and exclaims, ‘That was a nasty trick Mirna! That whole elaborate performance just to get your daughter to admit her share of the guilt!”

The newest exchange on the mountain top is also extremely cringe-worthy. It’s a great example of how Yara’s “independent” activity is actually often instigated by Mirna. Mirna is the one who was fighting with Yarostan about his standpoint on Titus (among other things). It’s she who links this viewpoint with “repression of his own desires.” Then presumably she and Yara go off to scheme about what to do about Yarostan. Yara tells us that “Mirna promised to take me on an outing today,” and when Yarostan agrees she shouts, “I knew you weren’t what she said you were!” Once actually on the mountain top, Mirna likewise initiates the activity between Yara and herself, not to mention the fact that Yara is extremely drunk. I illuminate the drinking aspect because as we know there are all sorts of competency and accountability issues related to drinking. I won’t touch any of those arguments with a ten foot pole, though, as they are another extremely emotional topic for many people, myself included.  However,  this interaction is not really helping Yara’s case as someone who is really acting completely of her own volition in my eyes.

What was it that Zdenek says about Vesna again?

“The only thing wrong with Vesna was that she grew up in a house between her sister, her mother, and her grandmother.”

Given this environment I personally wouldn’t put a lot of stock in Yara’s ability to be truly autonomous, either. I’m not saying she isn’t free, merely that we aren’t given enough information to know that she certainly is. This is also where I want to chime in about Mirna’s consent/boundary problems.  Of course we find them really frustrating and offensive.  I sure as hell do.  But again, I don’t really think having a conversation about that is interesting.  I mean, we can all agree that she is behaving in a pretty fucked-up way, right?  Soooo…. what’s there really to say?  I find Mirna’s actions much more interesting to consider when we place them in the context of her as a mother, an authority figure.  How do her actions  affect the competency, the cognitive ability, of her children to recognize other people’s needs, boundaries, and desires?  In other words – with Yara being raised by a person who behaves this way, would she truly be able to recognize or understand another person’s desires if they are contrary to her own?

From Yara to Tina

Let’s go back to Tina. Tina is ostensibly liberated, right? Tina was raised as if she had agency and the ability to make her own decisions. I mean, when we are first introduced to Tina, we don’t know how old she is, and are not led to believe she is different in age from Sophia or Sabina. This is actually a common plot device for Perlman. He tells you rather major details significantly after a character is introduced in order to make you realize your preconceptions of this character, which were based on nothing other than your own prejudices. Tina’s relationship with Ted should ostensibly then offer less qualms for the average reader, right?

I mean, think of how judgmental Sabina is about what she considered Sophia’s prudishness. Over and over again, Sophia is called narrow minded and pathetic for feeling uncomfortable about a sexual relationship between Ted and Tina. We are to side with Sabina. However, as we found out in the Eighth Letter… Tina and Ted never were sexually intimate. This rescinding of Tina and Ted’s relationship doesn’t feel that natural. I can’t really square this with the rest of the book. Ted and Tina’s relationship, had it taken place, would have a been a great way to show Sophia’s growth. Already by the end of chapter 8, she hates Ted a little less. If Sophia had accepted Ted even in face of his socially-condemned lifestyle choices, she would really be on her way to being “unenslaved.”  It also would be a wonderful relationship to challenge us, too.  But since Ted and Tina were never together, we never have to consider the idea of a youth-adult (competent, capable of taking agency and making her own life decisions) making the decision to sleep with an adult-adult (someone many years older than her but with shared interests and lifestyle choices).  And, as we now know from the book’s concluding pages, Tina’s peculiar character and behavior bring up all sorts of weird and even unresolved questions! Like, Perlman almost seems to be espousing a biological determinism argument in her behavior that I find totally crazy!

Concluding Thoughts

I keep talking about how Mirna is praised as a “true revolutionary” and that, ultimately, she skates by without too much criticism. I’ll wrap up with a few quotes.  In regard to the mountain-top escapade Yarostan says:

“My own ‘education’ in political ’schools’ has not done much to help me understand this undercurrent, but Mirna’s and Yara’s ‘insane behavior,’ as well as your letters have recently made me suspect more was happening than I was able to see.”

Those ironic quotes around “insane behavior” seem to show he considers those same actions anything but.  The single actual-rebuttal of Mirna’s version of the Vesna situation (as opposed to Yara’s earlier comments which were not an active counterargument) is one measly paragraph long. It’s back in the Eighth Letter after Mirna goes on a long rant about how Vesna’s death was really cause by her repressing her desires.  Yarostan writes:

“I’m half asleep.  I try to repeat what she’s saying in my own words.  ‘Yara convinced you your desires were natural, whereas the guilt, the shame, the denial of desires were alien to you and to Vesna as well.  I’m not sure I agree–’”

Then the subject gets changed.  At the beginning of the Eighth Letter Yarostan says “the genuine rebels in my life have been Jan and Mirna,”  and later when asking truly interesting questions about desire, he holds Mirna and her desires up as the standard by which to judge ourselves.  He says “We’re not asking Mirna’s questions.” It’s true that Mirna gets yelled at a bit, and Yarostan even says, “I’m not trying to exaggerate the lucidity of my two comrades.”

There is a lot more discussion of Mirna that can be had by the conclusion of Letters, and I hope you’ll keep in mind my  feeling about – and criticism of – Perlman’s endorsement of Mirna and Yara!

Non-Sexual Relationships in Letters?

One of the few non-sexual relationships is between Sophia and Sabina.  Sophia says:

“When I saw tears under those long black eyelashes I felt an emotion I can’t describe with words like friendship and love. Sabina hadn’t even been ‘Jose’s Girl,’ she hadn’t ever shared his bed, she hadn’t ever desire him physically, yet she loved him; I understood her love for him only because I thought it must be similar to what I felt toward Sabina when I saw her tears.”

Whoa. We already know Sophia has a sexuality problem but admitting it like this is pretty intense. It’s basically saying she’s never had a relationship not tinged with sexual tension until that very moment. So, Jose and Sabina’s relationship is supposed to be of an example of asexual love, but it is so muddled by Jose’s disgusting possessive masculinity that I can’t really take it too seriously. Remember when Sabina is first telling us about her relationship with Jose?

“It all became extremely complex when Jose started courting me. I assured him I had never been Ron’s girl or any man’s, but he wouldn’t believe me. It was only then that I asked Tissie to move in with me. But it was already too late. I did get Jose to accept me as I was; a warm, mutual friendship replaced his initial unbelieving shock.”

Uh, I wouldn’t want to be friends with someone who I could only get to stop hounding me sexually after I safely tucked myself away into “someone else’s protection.” It wasn’t until Sabina stopped being a possible future partner to Jose, and thus possibly less of a sexual object, that he was able to take her seriously as a person or friend. This is, sadly, not an inaccurate representation of hetero-normative sex relations, but again, where’s the opprobrium? Perlman isn’t showing us Jose and Sabina’s relationship as a thing to critically scrutinize, but as a tale of true camaraderie.

Vesna’s “Repressed” Desires

As for Vesna and those desires of hers,  Mirna tells us:

“The fearful Vesna wasn’t the real Vesna. I didn’t know it then, but Yara knew. The real Vesna, the whole, natural, and normal Vesna had passion inside her just as we did. She’d been twisted into something unnatural. [...] When I heard Yara tell you she’d seen Vesna kissing herself in the mirror I knew my shame had been brought on by a lie. I knew it wasn’t the passion that had killed Vesna [...], that passion made her natural and healthy and beautiful. What killed her was the denial of that passion.”

For me, seeing Vesna kissing herself in the mirror is not an adequate explanation of her desire. As I keep saying, without more explanation the incestuous desire seems to come across as fairly universal in Perlman’s rendition. It seems to simply be that all desire is sexual desire. The point implicit in this concept is that Vesna does, in fact must, desire her family, and to deny this is to deny her free human desires. The only reason given, ultimately, is that she is secretly “like Mirna and Yara,” who are “true revolutionaries.”

Does this mean we all desire our family members and to deny this is to deny our desires? Uh, yeah, I seem to remember Dr. Freud saying something a little similar. I find this explanation boring at best and downright stupid at worst. I prefer the freedom for us to choose to fuck whomever we want, including family members, not the resetting of intra-familial sexuality as the new norm. Even in Vesna’s case, isn’t it possible that she secretly wanted to have sex with Yarostan and not Mirna or Yara? If we are to take Mirna’s story as the objective truth, nothing is said about Vesna’s desire for the women in her family, only the man. Isn’t it feasible that while she was repressing her desire for her father she was still not sexually attracted to her mother or sister? Confusingly, Yara later tells us:

“If it hadn’t been for the old woman, Vesna would have loved you and father – can I call him Yarostan now? – maybe not the way Tissie loved Sophia; not that way at all; but at least the way that Sophia loved Sabina. I know – ”

So… wait.  Back up a minute here. Yara is aware that it’s possible that the passion Vesna had inside her might not have been “just like” the passion Mirna and Yara have inside them?  And… that’s it? This is the whole treatment of the topic? I think this statement adds a whole ‘nother dimension to Yara “forcing” Vesna to admit she was kissing Yarostan in that mirror.

Love “Games” and Predatory Pederasty

Yara and Tina’s desires are even more confusing than Vesna’s! Tina is especially fascinating and I will get back to her shortly. For now, let’s focus on Yara. The question of where Yara’s desire originates from is a tough one. Does she enjoy having sexual relations with her family members because she has been freed from her socially constructed morals, or because she was raised in an equally coercive environment, one where incest wasn’t just normal, it was practically mandatory? As Mirna tells us (though Sabina remembers the interaction differently):

“It was I who taught Yara to play her love games that very afternoon. I told her that when you returned you’d make love to all three of us. I threw Yara on my bed and showed her how you’d touch us, embrace us, hug us, exactly as Sabina had once shown me Jan would embrace me.”

So Mirna is the one who taught Yara her love games. “Love games” is an interesting phrase. On the one hand, it has the totally innocuous reference to role-playing. This is an absolutely healthy sexual desire and practice. (Let me pause from all this meandering gabbldy-gook for a sec and say: Woo! Up The Kink-Friendly Anarchists!!) On the other hand, it’s remarkably similar to the language of predatory pederasts today. Sexual abuse is often referred to by the perpetrators as “games. Similarly, one of the red flags of sexual abuse teachers and caretakers are taught to look for in children is early sexual activity. Common examples are children trying “inappropriately” touch or kiss other children, often on the playground in a “game” setting.

However, even in today’s broken society, some amount of childhood sexuality is considered perfectly normal. Not every child who plays doctor is an abuse survivor, and as we are all likely aware, masturbation is common even in infancy. So expression of sexual desire very young is not necessarily worrisome. These varied but related behaviors are often hard to distinguish as an outside observer, and unfortunately I don’t have any clear answers or opinions about a hard and fast rule to adhere to when trying to decipher so-called healthy from “unhealthy” responses. In fact, part of what I am trying to point out is how futile that label is. No outsider can ever be certain of an other’s perception. With children raised to be just that, children (as opposed to a youth like Tina – treated as an adult and capable of making her own decisions no matter her biological age), there might be some socially imposed limit to their understanding of sexuality. Going back to Sabina’s version of her sexual relationship with Mirna:

“Mirna and I were only two years apart and I didn’t play the dominant role. The seduction was as mutual as the most reciprocal love depicted in any poetry. The mutuality of our love condemned the ugliness of all the brutalizing one sided relationships in the midst of which it took place. [...] Our love had nothing in common with all those. It had no blemishes.”

So from at least one perspective, this was a relationship embarked upon by equals, whereas I wouldn’t bank on the fact that Yara’s relationships with Slobodan and Julia were made equally freely.

Often children who are being abused go on to unintentionally abuse others. The abuse victims often teach other children the same “games” they themselves are being taught. In fact, abusers are occasionally caught by this fact. One child teaches another child a “game” that they don’t quite know how to, and often why to, hide and get found by adults who try and figure out where this “game” was learned in the first place. These original abuse victims often grow up feeling shame and guilt about these interactions that they initiated, feeling as if they were perpetrators themselves. These things are complicated by the relative innocence these children have about sexuality as a whole, and specifically sexual power dynamics, causing a weird dual victim/perpetrator identity or alternately feeling resentful and guilty. (This fact becomes even more muddled when hypothetically considering a world where child-on-child or child-initiated sexual activity would be seen without judgment, because then even if the original initiation by an adult was harmful or unwanted, the child-driven activities could possibly be somewhat untainted by the “pollution” of coercion, and thus not a shame-inducing thing? For now, though, let’s stick with a comparison between this world and Perlman’s world.)

My point in all this is that just because Yara has made the choice to have a sexual relationship with Slobodan and Julia doesn’t necessarily mean that decision was a completely free one. In fact, speaking of Julia and Slobodan, we have no idea what they want. They are almost never given a voice, even through a third party filter. If we are to seriously consider the question of childhood sexuality, how can we do that without knowing what the children think or feel? We have no way to gauge how freely they are engaging in these activities and how much is coercion or a feeling of inescapability.

[To be continued...]

* * * * * * * *

My post will be broken up into three parts because I am covering a few chapters in one go. Also, I’m trying to cram an entire book’s worth of feelings into this, which is difficult to say the least. I am focusing on some of the more emotion-inducing topics, namely the incest and childhood sexuality. Childhood sexuality is a very complicated topic, not well understood at all, and I don’t claim to be an expert. My opinions are merely based upon my own experiences as a childhood survivor of rape and incest, nothing more or less. My take on these chapters has ended up a little more theoretical/thesis-y then I had hoped, and I look forward to your comments and thoughts!

Representing Emancipation

I think this book is best read as a series of attempts to challenge us. I read this as an attempt to give us a fictional narrative, a thought experiment where some presumptions of the so-called radical community are challenged. As Aragorn said, most of us will relate somewhat to all the characters, because they are all supposed to be parts of ourselves, parts to be identified and chased out. It should be clear to us that many of the characters represent “types” of radicals we see in the world. Art is a pacifist, Lem is New Age, etc. In these criticisms, Perlman does a pretty good job of helping us see some of the flaws, the falsities, of these belief systems.

When he is addressing political problems, he succeeds fairly adequately in providing us with poignant evaluations of our prejudices. In the “personal” realm, I think he fails miserably. He is trying to show us emancipated people, who he himself has never seen before, and his vision of those emancipated people is so corrupted with his own biases that they feel false. Some of his characters are held up as examples of true revolutionaries, and these characters walk out unscathed, unchallenged to a large degree. We may see their weaknesses, be annoyed by them, but they get no serious comment or punishment within the pages of the book.

Mirna is a great example of this. Mirna is constantly held up and praised. No real criticism of her is ever made. No one ever brings up her appalling consent issues in any real sense. Is this because that is what real life is like? In this world, most manipulators never change. The oppressed do not get justice in this life, nor any other. So is that Perlman’s point in leaving these characters on a pedestal? No, I don’t think so. I think this is much more a case of him having certain points he wants to challenge us on, but not going far enough in those queries. And that is the problem for me. If this book was ultimately a never-ending series of complicated thought experiments that never give you clearly delineated right and wrongs, it would be absolutely amazing. As it stands, it is quite wonderful, but I feel like it shows us as much about Perlman’s shortsightedness as it shows our own. What I am trying to say is that Perlman is trying to show us a series of circumstances we are supposed to analyze and judge for ourselves, with no right or wrong answer provided.  However, the very way he frames the conversations around these situations shows that he actually feels there are “right” and “wrong” answers, that there is a “true” revolutionary and thus a “true” way to revolt.  I think the sexual relationships, and how they relate to the rest of the narrative, are a great example of what I am talking about.

Introducing Incest, Sexuality, and the Problem of Morality

Like artnoose, I feel like I am sort of in the middle road camp. Actually, I don’t really see my view as the middle road at all. To me, it’s completely obvious that (extenuating circumstances aside) anarchists have no compatible-with-their-philosophy reason to be opposed to incest or sexual activity in children. One could easily argue that child-producing incestuous couples should be discouraged for social-longevity purposes, but separate from that we only have “moral” reasons for opposition.  I think the whole “is incest wrong or okay?” conversation is actually really boring.  People just get way too wrapped up and reactionary about the fact that the relationships are incestuous, rather than the issues behind them, like consent, freedom, desire, etc. I feel like sexually active children are a different story.  I think people are less likely to get upset about the idea of an 11 year-old having sex but in many ways I find the arguments behind that far more problematic than pro-incest ones.   Jan’s relationship with Mirna is an incestuous relationship that garners much less attention than Yara’s with Mirna.  I feel people are actually conflating two different topics – Yara’s sexuality should be analyzed because of her age and ability to consent, not because fact that she happens to be having sex with her mom.

There have been many conversations about morality, but to sum up some of the points of those conversations, morality or moral judgments have a universality that seems incongruous to an anarchist philosophy. I consider this to be a fairly basic part of anarchism, and thus not really a topic for me to go into in depth here. Similarly, while discussions of Mirna’s consent and coercion issues are fascinating (and I will discuss them later), I find myself far more interested in different points. I feel like Mirna, Vesna, and Yara’s relationships pose interesting questions about objectivity, freedom, and desire. Tina’s life will also factor into my viewpoint. For the sake of this conversation I will define freedom as “lacking external constraints or coercive influences.”

Perspective and Inter-Subjective Experience

First, let’s consider the “objective accuracy” of both the events and character portraits given in the book. Remember, we only ever truly hear two people speak, Sophia and Yarostan. We know for a fact that on “both sides” everyone reads the incoming letters; however, it is not mentioned whether Yarostan’s and Sophia’s family and friends read the letters as they go out. This is an interesting point because we left unsure exactly how accurately others’ words and actions are being retold. We know that Sophia self-identifies as having a memory problem, but there is more to accuracy than merely memory. Look at Yarostan’s perceptions of Luisa or Titus, or even Vesna’s death. His, and everyone’s, perspectives influence their recollection, their retelling of events. We aren’t really hearing Sabina talk, or Jasna, or Mirna, we are hearing Yarostan or Sophia tell us what they said. Unless, of course, the letters are edited for accuracy before they go out. To me, this is an interesting omission by Perlman.

I view this book as ultimately a series of conversations about inter-subjective experience and, again, perspective. Perlman is weaving different aspects of a radical lifestyle together – the political influences the personal, and the personal influences the political. Look at Sophia’s life and politics (lacking direction and a sense of self, turning into aimlessly drifting from scene to scene and lifestyle to lifestyle) versus Jan and Mirna (their desire to have socially forbidden lifestyle causes them to want to change society through a political upheaval). Sophia and Yarostan are also great examples. The way they both remember their plant experiences so differently (not to mention their relationship) is the original basis for conflict between the two of them! Yarostan’s perception is so different from Sophia’s that it is actually causing her to rethink her whole life, and this sharing is challenging and changing her. I would say this challenge, this sharing of contradicting experiences is fairly explicit. While no narrator is explaining this to us, we pretty much get that this challenge is central to Perlman’s message.

So with this as a starting point, shouldn’t Perlman give us some hints that it is not only the past that is subject to slight remodeling? Why is Perlman silent about the “objective” accuracy of the contemporary events related in these letters? (This can also lead into a lengthy and very interesting conversation about what exactly objectivity is and does it exist, but we do not have space for that. Plus, others have surely done a better job of handling that particular topic than I ever could.) For now, I am left with the question: what is an accidental vs. an intentional omission? I mean, jeez, the book is already over 800 pages long. How much more can you frickin’ add, ya know? So are some of these omissions based on concrete limitations, or are they based on personal perception that causes some points to be overlooked or forgotten? You see, if we knew that the letters were read before they were sent out, we could believe that things were fairly accurately represented. As it stands, we can still assume that these renditions are mostly precise, but we should keep in mind exactly whose lens we are viewing events through: not an objective god-like narrator, telling us the “truth” from on high, but a flawed, broken, confused, and lost human, with ignorance, biases, and prejudices just like us. For the sake of this conversation, I am going to assume these events are told correctly, as a fairly accurate representation of the characters, well, character, but I do want you guys to think about this as you are reading the book. Try and remember that just because one character tells us one thing happened doesn’t mean it does.

Vesna’s Supposedly “Repressed” Sexuality

Continuing in the same vein, there are many people who never truly speak at all. We know all these events and stories are being filtered through at least one lens, but what about people like Jan, Ron, Jose, Manuel, and Vesna? These characters are all dead (or M.I.A.), so their stories are filtered through more than one lens. This is especially important in Vesna’s case. Let’s go back to that bit about inter-subjective perception and how a fundamental aspect of the book is showing us the gap between experiences and then challenging them. I keep saying that only some perceptions get critically investigated. For example, we are to believe Mirna and Yara’s recitation of Vesna’s secret desires are accurate, but what basis do we have other than their own words? Just because Vesna is dead and can’t verbally tell her side of the story (filtered through one other perception of course) doesn’t mean she had to be entirely silent. Vesna could have kept a diary or written letters to be found later to relate her feelings. In fact, that would have made her story slightly more credible, because there would be no translation between Vesna and Yarostan; Yarostan would merely have copied Vesna’s words directly into his letter. Mirna and Yara simply telling us their perception of what Vesna wanted means less than nothing. Of course they want to believe Vesna was merely repressing her sexual desires for her family members instead of the possibility that Vesna actually just didn’t want to have sex with them! Mirna’s – and through her, Perlman’s – explanation of Vesna’s desire ends up feeling, well, a little Freudian to me. The reason given for her lack of desire is repression of that desire, not genuine lack of desire.

Let’s analyze that supposed desire. Where does it originate from? Well, actually, no real explanation is given. Yara relates:

“She loves you as much as I did but she pretended to hate you. When we learned you’d return in a year, before mommy and I went to see you, I caught her kissing herself in the mirror. I knew she was kissing you and I forced her to admit it…”.

This simple recital is filled with problems for me. The “love” discussed in this passage is problematic, and also typical of the love found in Perlman’s novel. It seems to be a predominately sexual love, or another way of putting this is that the only time the word love is used is when it is referencing a sexual relationship. While non-sexual relationships exist, it is the rare one that seems to be totally unhampered by sexual tension.

[To be continued...]

The real strength in this section, however – and one of the main themes of the book in general – is how it isn’t too late for Yarostan, or Mirna, or Jasna, or anybody else for that matter. Perspectives can take decades to develop, and that’s okay. Yarostan ends his story apologizing for “twenty years of ignorance” but somehow when I see the person he has become, it doesn’t seem to matter.

Mirna and Yara team up to con former comrades of the carton plant to attend Jasna’s dinner party: Adrian, Vera, and Marc, and also Adrian’s wife (and Vera’s secretary) Irena, whose name we learn for the first time in this chapter. Throughout the long and dramatic discussion we learn what Titus knew about Sophia’s original letters, where George Alberts and Titus encountered Nachalo on the front, and how sexuality had so much to do with Vera’s use of people over the years.

The main revelation of this scene is the role Titus played in the imprisonments of several of the people from the carton plant. “Individualism is a disease!” he says at the heart of one of the arguments, continuing that just like diseased growths on a living being, the diseased personalities of a society need to be cut out. Although he never says that he himself advocates what tools are used for the cutting, it becomes clear that his pedagogy can have no other instrument than prisons or the firing squads. The truth of the matter is that Titus is responsible for the prison sentences of his former comrades, of which Jan never survived. Jasna is devastated, as is Yarostan. They both had been defending Titus, and while Mirna and Yara go into the streets to begin resisting the coming influx of tanks, it is Yarostan and Jasna who find Titus’s dead body, the record in the record player still playing.

The tanks are invading, and some characters I have come to love are going out to greet them, and I’ll never know what happens to them definitively. It’s one of those moments in which I’m a little sad but I’m smiling at the same time.

. . . . . . .

Sophia describes her experience reading headlines about the tanks in Yarostan’s country, in the letter that she later admits never reached him. Her final part in this story is definitely a denouement, more or less tying up loose ends of the story. Tissie pieces together several plot holes with her confession in the mental ward. She says that Seth admitted to her that he had killed Jose, thinking he had snitched. Tissie says, however, that it was she who called the cops on the bar, causing it and the garage to be raided. This happened to coincide with Alec and Carmen going to the bar to kill Seth because Alec saw him as a dope-dealing rat. Tissie heard gunshots which she assumed had been Seth being killed, but of course it was Alec.

Sophia and Minnie visit Hugh in his fancy house in the suburbs. He represents one kind of young activist – the one who after a few years of poverty and hard living realizes that a middle-class lifestyle affords many comforts. Sophia pukes on Hugh’s porch and leaves.

Tina and Pat return with their political group to face Ted, asking him to give up his political incoherency. I remember that at one time the print shop that Fredy and Lorraine were involved with also had this question come up: whether to require that everyone involved in a project have the same political philosophy. Ted (and I believe Fredy felt the same way) is of the opinion that good printing is the only prerequisite, as far as he is concerned. Tina and her gang differ, and this reflects a large tension within the anarchist milieu: that of exclusivity. Anarchist soccer, for example, is never comprised entirely of anarchists. I do take seriously the question of whether everyone involved in a print shop needs to be an anarchist or not, mostly because I want to have one myself, and I might want to start figuring this out now.

In the course of this argument between Tina and Pat on one side and Ted and Sophia on the other, Pat insists that there can be no friendship without political coherence. (Pat is someday going to find himself with few friends.) Tina’s transformation from free-spirited youth who has never attended compulsory education into a councilist tool represents for me the politically precocious young people I have met, people who got their political analysis down pat as teens. These people don’t all become tools, but it is often interesting to watch them age from anarchist prodigy into adulthood with all of its baggage and responsibilities.

Oh, and a few weeks ago, I got a text one night from an out-of-town friend. I might be misrepresenting the LOLspeak, but it went something like, “omg look on pg 808 – ted isn’t white!” Luckily I was at a collective house with a copy of the book so I was able to look it up. My friend and I had a meaningful text message exchange about it, and I went back to my date. I remember being surprised the first time I read that page, which I think is the point. Many people will assume whiteness if a clue to racial background isn’t made. And then 800 pages later – “omg :0″ – Ted isn’t white. Sophia’s shock at Art’s subtle racism seemed a little unbelievable, or else I’ve had a markedly different experience that Sophia’s. Really, Sophia? Never met a racist activist? Ever? Gee.

This book ends with Sophia’s somewhat ambivalent declaration of love for Ted. She understands that all her life she has desired unions with people who have projects already planned out. I guess this is what she feels ambivalent about, not so much her love for Ted. This is where I’m not sure I agree with Sophia’s self-analysis. Even though Ted is the one spearheading the idea of rebuilding the print shop, it is Sophia’s enthusiasm and support which makes it possible. Not everybody has to have the bright ideas all the time.

. . . . . . .

There’s a similarity between how Yarostan’s and Sophia’s halves of the book end. In Yarostan’s tale, we see a character, although flawed, transformed and somewhat redeemed. Sophia is a less dramatic version of this, what with no tanks invading her city, but after experiences that have turned many of her former friends into tools, she along with Ted and Sabina are embarking on another new project. They could have given up but they didn’t, and they are better friends because of it.

This reading enlightened me to a new bit of self-reflection. I used to see myself as pretty much 100% Sophia, but this time I realize how much I’m like Ted. I know, we’re both printers, but it’s not just that – so is Tina but I don’t feel like she and I are alike. I have always been struck by Sabina’s (and later Sophia’s) description of Ted knowing the difference between people and things. Although he is mechanically competent, I don’t see him as someone who knows the difference and prefers things. I think that Ted likes people so much that he hates to see them reduced to things. You use a tool; you do not use a person as a tool. It might be some vestige of humanist morality, but Ted has that outlook, and so do I. I’ll tell you, it makes it hard to be an egoist, where people are slated specifically to use one another as it suits them. I can’t say that I have never used anyone, but I always try my best to remember that people are in fact people and not things.

In the course of this summer project, I took 77 pages of notes and wrote thousands of words in response. Although this book does tend to tear down all the constructs and illusions that we have built for our own comfort, ultimately I take from it an acceptance of living a life as an imperfect person. Yarostan defended murderers for decades, and even he can run to the barricades. Sophia allowed her choices to be made by others her whole life, and even she can start a collectively run print shop with people with whom she has meaningful friendships.

I can’t imagine that anyone reading this right now has not read the book yet. If so, you made the wrong choice with your order of operations, I’m afraid. Although I sometimes feel like an evangelist trying to convince people to read this book, I remember that all it took was for one friend to recommend it, and my life was the better for it. Therefore, I encourage all my friends, lovers, and comrades to read this book without delay. It’s why I offer handmade merit patches to anyone who finishes. I think it’s that important.

When you read this, you will understand me better.

Daman – The perfect student-teacher turned ideological director

“He apparently decided that the only meaningful human activity was the total destruction of the capitalist class in all its manifestations, in the colonies as well as the ghettos. That attitude coincided perfectly with our tendency’s political program.”

Perhaps this is a sign of my generation but I have known at least a dozen people who approximate the Daman of this story. I’d like to believe the characteristics were less prevalent in another time but the combination of this period of political ineffectiveness (especially from a radical perspective), the existential confusion people have between sub-culture and reality, and the popularity of certain sets of ideas (Postmodernism, the Situationists, Identity Politics) has made this type all-too-common. Take a boy whose first steps into the world are buttressed with liberal doses of books and now the Internet, who comes from enough privilege to not have to doubt their secondary education, and who is brave enough to be in the club when the fights break out but has no reason to fight themselves and fuck, maybe I’m being too conservative by saying I’ve met a dozen Damans. I’ve met hundreds.

But I have stopped becoming close to them. Not because they always disappoint. I am no longer such a purist that I require a lack of disappointment to be friends with someone. I am just less interested in mentoring them. I am happy to meet Daman once he has established himself, but I will not be part of creating another one. They just exhaust me now and odds are about equal that they go one way or another.

The Daman I was closest to just faded out of my life. I guess he got caught on the other side of a burning bridge of mine. I heard later he went from being awkward and pudgy to being quite a looker and a bit of a Lothario. Went to grad school. Swam around in precarious gigs for a couple years and then fell off people’s radar. I guess he never found a Luisa to make him complete.

Alec – Dope dealer who died in battle

“During his last weeks here he’d spend hours pacing. He was like a caged animal. He said all he wanted was to help make a revolution, with his gun in his hand, and not to talk about it or read about it or support it at rallies or demonstrations. He apparently met people with similar views, and he started going off to political meetings. One day he simply failed to return. I made no attempt to find him; we were free individuals.”

I am including a eulogy I wrote for the Alec in my life:

Dear Alec,

We never had a habit of writing letters. I know I was just as much to blame for that since I am just as capable of putting pen to paper, or fingers to the keyboard, as you are. Or were. I write you this last letter to remind the both of us where we were when you left, and to understand why you went without me.

When I first entered your social circle I was only 15. You already had a group of ‘rebels’ who you hung out with, but you all were my first. In hindsight it was amazing what a happy group of people it was given the times in our life, and the shit from which we were emerging, but so it was. Most every trope from the coming-of-age movie we all spectacularly see our lives as being was represented in that group. There was the brooding future Nazi who drove us all around. The more generous than you could imagine fat guy was there. There was the troublemaker (that was you, of course), the good kids who didn’t belong with us, the quiet nerdy guy who exposed us to the culture we were entering and the boys who were cuter than wise (that was most of us). I guess I wasn’t as definable at that time in my life, as I was just figuring out where I stood. But, as you know, I had lots of secrets and was pretty good at keeping them to myself.

Other people’s secrets… That was another story.

The experiences that we had are some of the most memorable of that time in my life for me, but your social group became only a part of my social life. You all lived, seemingly, a bit too far away from me, and once the scene had settled into a fixed location I was focused on being there, so that I wouldn’t miss anything. It’s so much easier and more difficult for kids in our town today. Every time I go back I crack up at how much better dressed the ‘rebellious’ kids are. Maybe it’s just because there is more money, more Internet, more retail, but it also seems like a veneer covering an essential vapidity in what being a misfit is all about today.

We would have had a blast making fun of them, if we were only the right age for it today.

There is a prime thing I take from our relationship that I have never found again. We were both good natured and totally spiteful. It kind of makes me think of sarcasm as being a lost art or something, and it is, but fuck if I don’t have to pad about everything I say nowadays with caveats and apologies just so all the well-adjusted people around me don’t get their fucking pants in a bind. Whatever. We each had our own styles of the put down too. That was always a blast. You tended to go for the direct insult tempered with an escape hatch if the victim wanted to take it. You were more directly confrontational than I was. My insults always seemed innocuous, but spoke more deeply to the inadequacies of the target. Usually people missed what I was trying to say until a bit later, but I gave less room for escape. As I am sure you remember, I am much better at that now. That is the one partnership that we had that I will never replace, we were the best tag-team humiliators I have ever met.

But your trajectory through our teens ended up being a bit lower of an arc than mine. I guess that says something about potential, since you have always been seen as having more, but you were always more fully committed to frittering it away. Our one major split came when you started to get more and more involved in drugs and, like with everything else you engage in, you started to gain a reputation for being the biggest bad-ass of drug taking. Great achievement in hindsight, eh? Anyway we were at a party at the Domicile and you had done some ungodly amount of coke and were being very dramatic about it all. I’ll speak to your main drama later, but you were in full effect that night. You pulled out some box-cutter blade and slashed the hell out of your arm. I think it was motivated by removing the tattoo on your arm…

I’ll always remember that first tattoo. In the end you had it covered and ended up with a bit more of a stylish ‘back alley crew’ montage of tattoos but your first one, which you got on your 16th birthday and came over to my place right after, was totally fucking ridiculous. Obviously you were entranced by the flash on the biker shop’s wall so you must have picked a #47 or some such, since it was a skull and kind of tough or whatever, but what you ended up getting was what looked like a skull eating spaghetti. It was fucking hysterical, you were the first one of us to make the jump to permanent ink and it was the silliest thing we had ever seen. I even recall, for the first couple of months, you ripping the sleeves off of all your t-shirts to make sure that everyone saw the damn thing on your arm only stopping when you couldn’t stand us all making so much fun of you.

… so you cut your arm in a highly public attempt to cut the stupid tattoo off of your arm. Of course you cut too deep. Of course you could only manage one cut out of the four or five that you would need. But you cut pretty fucking deep into your arm, enough so that the bleeding would not stop, which didn’t stop you from staggering around the place like a drunken sailor spraying blood and your issues all over the place, not accepting help from anyone, not settling down (as you were obviously high as a kite and in quite a bit of pain), forcing the confrontation to either stop your shit or we were calling an ambulance.

I didn’t really hang out with you for years after that phase. I moved away, you spent some time in jail, and we both chose our paths.

When we saw each other again it was as if no time had passed. Our partnership was intact with the added bonus that we both had thick enough skins to include each other in our sights. We had much to account for it seems as we each went on and on about the other’s promiscuity and lack of seriousness but we each needed to hear it. We both had not been criticized half as much as we should have been by loving people. It was too easy to get defensive when the only barbs thrown your way are by the incompetent, the hateful and the people passing through.

But there still was distance. I lived over here, you stayed there, and we were all-to-human. You filled your life with martial arts and your uncritical admirers, I with our (priorly) shared counter-culture and then radical politics. This meant that every time we would spend time together we would shake things up, knock the dust off of each other’s wit and sharpen our tongues, but without presence we stopped growing together. I think we both grudgingly accepted this.

What I cannot accept, and only see now that it is too late, is how much you needed the only thing I was unquestioningly better at than you. You needed a critical friend who wasn’t afraid of you, worshiped you, or wasn’t sleeping with you. At some point something changed, and I would have seen it, but I was there only en absentia, and too much time passed. One time I visited and your life was stumbling along, partial and in the shadow of your potential but not entirely awry. The next time I came you were gone. By your own hand and in your uniquely dramatic style.

What we all expected when you were a teenager you only accomplished 15 years later, surprising us with your patience but not your rashness. You always had to tell your stories of whoa, you had to make sure of your legacy. I remember one time when you had gotten into a fight – was it with metal heads? – you had been beaten pretty badly. They had broken your nose at the very least, which was no amazing feat as you had a formidable proboscis, but the blood was everywhere. You were wearing a white t-shirt covered in it, and it was only after hours of prodding and a considerable amount of female attention that you cleaned yourself up and allowed the center of attention to move off of you.

This I cede to you lovingly. You were at your best when you were at the center. You weren’t the clown, like I am, you weren’t arrogant about it, but your brilliant potential was enough to make everyone smile. You weren’t an affectionate friend, but I never doubted your loyalty to us. You didn’t become all that I would have wished for you, and I imagine you knew this, but you were still twice the person of almost anyone else I have ever met. Our friendship, and my understanding, goes with you to where you have gone.

This circle is closed.

Ted – The Western ideal: Scientist, human, friend

“This is Ted, the printer.”

I am not going to use this as opportunity to talk about my utter revulsion at the Western man. He is a doomed creature that I can’t summon up enough energy to despise today. I have already given him too much time. I am trying to move on.

In that spirit I have gained a respect for the competence of Ted. In our time of social, organizational, structural ineptitude Ted can do something. Call it printing, programming, fixing bikes or cars, we have so far to go that just having skills, a skill, is something. If only Ted didn’t get chased out of every group, meeting, or social circle for not being Daman or Alec we might turn something into something real.

This circle is closed and we are on the outside of it.

First, Yarostan begins to doubt the re-emergence of liberation that he had earlier thought he was witnessing in the workers’ unrest.  In her radio broadcast, Vera had come out in support of the worker actions that had already been taking place, such as striking and abolishing censorship. Yarostan realizes that he had mistaken such tepid support of bureaucrats like Vera for the people’s desire to eradicate these politicians. Instead, many workers remain perfectly willing to accept the bureaucrats, so long as they present the appearance of putting control of production into the hands of the workers.

I met many workers who described reforms as enthusiastically as strikes comparable to the one that broke out at Mirna’s plant, and who praised reformist bureaucrats even while they were describing the possibilities for doing without them.  The inability to distinguish the realization of one’s own desires from the “victory” of the representatives of “everyone’s desires” is particularly ominous in view of the disaster you’ve just described.

But he still has hope:

I’m still convinced that the people around me want more than the seizure of power by their “comrades,” their union, their revolutionary tribunes.  Maybe I’m nursing an illusion, but I’m convinced that below the enthusiasm for revolutionary demagogues there’s an undercurrent of desires which are seeking gratification, desires which cannot be vicariously satisfied, which cannot be carried by politicians the way programs can be carried.

The other thing that Yarostan is realizing is that when Titus speaks of “liberation” he is really only talking about shifting the control of the means of production, not eliminating it – thus placing Titus well behind the striking workers in terms of revolutionary consciousness.  At least the workers wanted to realize their desires, even if they continued to confuse these desires with the continued existence of bureaucrats!  Yarostan now admits he had failed to understand the deficiencies in Titus’s politics, reaching all the way back to the carton plant takeover. In challenging Titus and his robotic theorization, Yarostan opens himself to a new conception of revolution and subsequent liberation.

“I had thought the point of the struggle wasn’t the proletariat’s existence but its disappearance, its replacement by a human community,” I objected.

To which Titus responds, in his constant refrain:

“The class struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat will mean the emancipation of all humanity only when the organization of the proletariat is adequate to that task.”

Placing emancipation after organization is the profound flaw in all all revolutionary activity.

* * * * * * * * *

Meanwhile, Yarostan’s ongoing influence on Sabina has enabled her to understand her own confusion between people and things. Her commitment to a scientific project of human liberation was as “inhuman” as those of Titus and Alberts.  She confesses that,

“It was Yarostan who made me see the incompatibility of my friendship with Jan with my commitment to Alberts’ project. It was he who helped me understand the contradiction between my rebellion against an inhuman social order and my desire to build an inhuman social order with the lowest strata of society.”

Happily, we also see that Ted – earlier described by Ron as the exemplar of knowing the difference between people and things – seemed like a creepy child molester only because he had no one in the garage (besides Tina) that he could trust, at least until Alec moved to the garage.  Ted was opposed to the dope dealing from day one, and didn’t understand why no one else really saw the differences in the activities or the importance of those differences.

Daman may have the oddest relationships with people of anyone in the book. He is able to compartmentalize the various aspects of his life so cleanly so as to not disrupt any of them.  He rarely has emotion or desire that play into his activities. Sophia yells at him, trying to shake up his rigid boundaries:

“You have a perfect sense for timing and placing and cataloguing! You have a different mask for every cubby hole you move through: anger for political meetings, condescension for classrooms, courage for strikes, submissiveness for meetings with superiors, kindness for animals and decency only in the privacy of your apartment.  You’re not a human being but a filing cabinet!”

Lastly, we see the complicated relationships between Sophia, Luisa and their trail of ruined lovers.  Several of Sophia’s lovers died in the wake of trying to fulfill her ideas of political action.  Alec and Jose both became obsessed with the ideas that she studied but didn’t act on, and ultimately gave their lives attempting to follow through on the passions awakened by Sophia. It is difficult to hold blame to Sophia for this because, as most things happen in her life, it happened fairly passively around her.  She wasn’t all that directly involved other than sharing her books, ideas and experiences with them. But understandably, each new revelation of a dead or broken ex-lover tears her apart.

Luisa, on the other hand, pretty explicitly used her sexuality to recruit men to political groups. Her paradigm, like Titus’s, seems to be that people are simply puzzle pieces that need to be in place for revolution to happen. After so many years, still unable to distinguish Things and People…

Jasna announces an engagement party with Titus, setting up the grand finale of Yarostan’s half of the story. Meanwhile an extremely wild incest scene happens on the mountain top. Yarostan smacks Yara to quell her sexual advances and is demonized for it by Mirna and Yara. It has been clear that he sees her as a daughter and not a potential sex partner – having monodirectional arguments with Mirna when Yara herself is trying to participate in the conversation, and redirecting her sexual innuendos into playful parental exchanges. Mirna and Yara push the envelope this time and try to force Yarostan into having sex with Yara, to decide which side he’s on: the side of the tanks or of limitless freedom. They bring up a certain hypocrisy, that Yarostan applauded the abolition of social barriers when it was Sophia’s story about the garage, but he maintains the mores precluding incest. This is what I mean when I say that the incestuous angle is one of the most brilliant parts of the story. Yarostan can’t tell if the problem is with him or his family, and any critical reader has to examine this as well. I think one of the strengths of this book is how the question of boundless freedom is pushed to a level found intolerable to most readers. Each of has a line, after all.

It’s hard to move on past the mountaintop scene, but there are so many interesting things to address. The mystery around Titus develops further – Mirna really lays into him when they confront him directly, and yet it’s clear she’s not done with him yet. Sophia later relays information from Luisa that Titus and George Alberts encountered Nachalo “on the front” but it’s also pretty evident that it was not on the same side.

Sophia’s letter really strikes a chord with me and illustrates what I think is one of the books other main strengths – the description of the multitude of ways that different people can tackle the same issue. I sometimes describe this book as “all the paths to failure” which is why I sometimes don’t recommend it to young anarchists. I’ve given up that reservation, though, over the course of this Insurgent Summer project and decided that people get whatever they get out of it according to their experiences, and I should get off my high horse and let them do it.

The way in which Fredy Perlman was able to show the routes that these characters took to failure is the time lapse between the events being described. It’s possible to see what happens to a character in college and then a decade or so that follows, and how characters did such different things – factory work, doctorates, armed rebellions, etc. Another result of the decades of experience delineated in this book is that the characters develop close friendships. The intimacy of the friendships comes out during this letter. The first times I read the book I felt confused about how Sophia maintained friendships with Minnie and Daman that lasted through many years not even on speaking terms. It seemed forced. Maybe I’m just at a different point right now – after all, this time I’m Sophia’s contemporary age – but I’ve been thinking about how despite the ups and downs of friendships over the years, simply having decades of history with people really means something.

Sophia’s continued friendships with Minnie and Daman allow her (and the readers) to gain some insight on what happened to people she had known. We hear the tragic story of Alec and the infoshop. Sophia’s making up with Ted lets his character speak about his own story before and after the garage project, revealing a further tragedy of how Sophia could have befriended him back then and changed the course of each of their lives. Rich-boy activist Art continues his style, letting Sophia pay for his lunch after asking her out to coffee, but on the other hand she gets his perspective on events and tendencies. Daman is fleshed out with more complexity as the horrendous pedagogue in the political realm and yet a thoughtful man who takes housekeeping equality seriously. Luisa and Sophia finally clear the air about Luisa’s history of conflating political and sexual conquests. Gaps in the story begin to fill in as characters are allowed to describe to Sophia their perspectives on shared events.

As I said in my introductory blog post, the first time I read this book I was struck with the idea to write a novel myself because this one was so amazing. What I didn’t reveal was that the person I recorded the audiobook with responded at the time that for him, the book was so all-encompassing that he wasn’t sure that another novel ever needed to be written again. I thought of this conversation when I read Sophia’s ninth letter because again I was struck with the impetus to write a novel. And yet I’ve apparently assimilated the other side of the argument because when I think about the characters of my own life (and psyche) that I would include, I have a hard time not naming them Ted, or Pat, or Lem, or Sabina, or Yarostan.