The song, "Man Without A Country" and the community it came from is great. But it also reminded me, that a lot of intentional communities are in retreat. Thirty years ago, another man without a country, “The Ladybug Man” walked a little town out west called Tucson, measured its sprawl with his body, and gave out mesquite and wildflower seeds and gifts from “The Invisible Community” a community of strangers who are joined by common concerns. Ever since I’ve been wondering if there could be a community based on the idea of crossing instead of creating borders. A community based on the idea of outreach, with the figure of OUTWARD at its masthead.
Somewhere inside me, it will always be sundown on Main Street in Carlsbad New Mexico, where I saw an old hobo and asked if I could buy him dinner and we went into a little café’ across from the La Caverna Hotel, and he said,
I’ll always work when I can but I’m getting a little old for it now. Got something wrong with my foot. Doctor says I have heart trouble.
Everybody does.
Yeah, that’s right, reckon they do. But people don’t want an old man like me, rather have a kid like you….course I guess you’re not a kid anymore. You must be a man by now….you been to college?
Yeah.
You going back again?
It got to be too much of one thing.
Oh…I think I know you. You’re a citizen of the world. Don’t belong to this country or anybody’s country. Belong to man.
Ah…I dunno….
Thinking about Monroe, what do you suppose that was, too much time?
Ever see a monkey at a zoo, when a crowd comes by, how he hides?
Yeah I seen that, but with me, I guess it’s just time. You know two things that always win’re old man time and John Barleycorn…
There’s a place down by the river where you could sleep tonight, has grass and trees….
Naw I’ll just sleep by the railroad, maybe catch a train in the morning. You’re kind of a nice kind of feller. Goodnight.
And it’s always Delancey Street in Manhattan and I’m sending a 6 foot painted cardboard word mobile and a TV set I found on the street and rigged up with long rolls of painted paper in the top and bottom which you could roll from one side to the other with big dowels sticking up through the top…sending those and some painted window shades to El Diagonal Cero in Argentina with a cover letter about how I couldn’t seem to find an audience anywhere. And the guy on the other end is replying in a letter, how he knew it was hard but hang in there,
You have my solidarity.
Your solid what? We don’t have any of that stuff here in America. Can I get coke and fries with that?
And it’s always after a rough day working on the Air Conditioning at The International Arts Center and this tall, young German guy who just decided to just camp out there in all the dysfunctionality that just seemed to be the sickness unto death of that place, was reading a book of my poems and liking them and having A CONVERSATION about them with his GIRLFRIEND??!!….I mean, what kind of person (outside of a mental institution) does THAT?!
And it’s late at night at a wedding party for a friend of his from Sweden, Anne Carrel, and Flower The Clown is preparing to hold up a big empty cup before a broken ladder pointed at a full moon full of clouds, but he’s having trouble getting through all the noise and jabber of the crowd and she stomps her foot and says,
SHUT UP! DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND?! IT’S BEAUTIFUL!!!
And they hear her passion and are actually quiet and….this can’t be happening in America where crowds have an inalienable right to relentless banality….says so somewhere in the manuscript for Guy Debord’s SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE. Guy Debord? O well he’s French so that explains a LOTTA things. The French are kinda funny about art and music, maybe that’s why so many artists and writers and musicians found refuge in Paris…you know silly people like Ernest Hemingway…the guy who blew his brains out with a shotgun after this mental institution took away all his memories…it’s kinda sad in a way…
And some working people in Nogalles, Sonora, are sitting on the floor during their lunch hour to watch an unknown artist from the U.S. named Robert Bray do a performance. It’s kinda weird, but you gotta give ‘em some slack, they’re foreigners you know and don’t know everything like we do so they have to listen a lot….
Somehow, like Blanche in Streetcar Named Desire, my art has always depended on the kindness of strangers. I’ve always found that crossing borders crossed some line inside myself and always believed the rest of the world is the rest of you. Sometimes, if I take notice of who really seems to know me, or if I pay attention to time at all, there is no PLACE like home. One of the best times in my life was when I hosted The Dark Bob, Giudetta Tornetta, Carol Leigh and Michael Peppe here in Tucson, and when I could interview Karen Finley and other performance artists for KXCI. That was when I first understood, personally, what the word “Renaissance” meant. But that place too, is gone.
