Atlas/ Alas/ At Last

They say that to dream of the moon is a sure sign of impending good fortune, but I dreamt last night of the full moon in Beit Ummar, in the occupied territories of the West Bank, where good fortune is notoriously hard to come by. Last year at this time I was working in Israel, putting together the beginnings of a research report that would delve into the Arab and Jewish history of a beautiful small town in the northern Galilee named Safed. During the Golden Age of Qabbalah in the 16th century, this little town was the center of the world: from which vast quantities of art, music, mystical literature, and poetry poured out, and from which much modern Jewish tradition derives. As I found (but which is not widely known any longer), the Arab Sufis had a great deal of discourse with the Jewish Qabbalists at that time in Safed, and these two spiritual communities shared many techniques and ideas for religious meditation and practice. (You can read an article I wrote on that research here)

In the course of time, I traveled all over Israel, and by July I found myself in the West Bank, staying with a wonderful Palestinian family and learning about them and about the political situation in the occupied territories. I was staying in a little guest room they had, with a pretty view overlooking the few farming lands left to the community there.

I woke up in the night, just as the Muslim Call to Prayer was sending its first sonorous echoes across the landscape, sounding like a lonely love-song. Outside on the bare soil between the olive and fig trees, skinny dogs dragged their chains. One uttered a low howl, but the other kept silence, her head down, her black feet raising the dust as she slowly paced the circumference of her captivity. The full moon hung so low over the trees I felt I could touch it. The Call to Prayer seemed to be pulling it down out of the sky. I was sure that unless the Call stopped, the moon would crash into the earth, breaking open and spilling bright water into every pore of the parched soil. The Call did cease, and the night insects (as if they had quieted themselves to listen to its beauty, though they were as ignorant of Arabic as I was) resumed their clockwork sounds, ticking out the time until morning.

I did not sleep again that night; I lay and listened to the sound of the dragging chains, the heavy sounds of the thirsty dogs, the memory of the Call, the night insects, and I watched the way the moonshadows slowly dripped over the landscape, turning black and blue and then fading like a bruise to pale purple as dawn approached.

Last night I dreamed of that night last July. The dogs were black wolves, and the moon still did not break open and water the earth. I woke up as hot as I had been that night in the tremendous heat of summer in the high desert, and with the taste of fresh figs in my mouth.

Atlas was the god with the worst job (or, rather, it would be the worst job if there weren't so very many others). Atlas, while his Titan brothers were imprisoned in Tartarus, was singled out by Zeus and condemned to carry the the celestial spheres on his shoulders, in order to keep the primordial father and mother (the sky and the earth) forever apart. Atlas was a tragic giant with a monstrous burden (which could only have gathered in bulk as, over the centuries, human beings discovered just how deep the sky really went).

I love Atlas for his burden, because the world is indeed a heavy, heavy place. But I think that the god that holds up the universe isn't a strong man at all, but a baby, a madman and a madwoman, a beggar, an animal, a wandering idiot.  A Fool.

The Fool doesn't take on burdens, doesn't try to help or to fix problems or even to heal wounds. The Fool is simply the Fool, ignorant, self-centered, and unable to rise even one inch above personal survival. The Fool stands on the top of a mountain because to a Fool, every direction is down. Any little movement will decide the whole course of existence; the Fool will keep falling, and the direction of life from there on out will be initiated and perpetuated on its own, like a glacier slowly and irresistibly carving a canyon out of a high, rocky steppe.

An innocent adventurer, the Fool is built to learn rather than to help. And in this way, naturally obviating the well-intentioned trap of paternalism, does not rob others of their own powers of salvation. The Fool has nothing to give, and everything yet to understand. The two tails reveal an animal nature: a person driven by physiological needs and the animal instincts enshrined in every human being's genetic makeup. The Fool may someday reach the black sea (or perhaps it is a dark stretch of desert) beyond the mountains, but at present the Fool is frozen in infancy, neither male nor female, whose two tails recall the number zero, an empty shell, a womb, a hollow world inside which to dance out the stuff of human existence.

I went to Israel and to the territories knowing next to nothing, and without any thought of working for peace or helping an oppressed people. I felt I did not know enough to know where or how to help. I traveled and I spoke to anybody who would share their thoughts with me, which turned out to be quite a diverse lot of people; a foreigner of unstated political beliefs can be a blank slate upon which people of all faiths, political positions, and personal values will write in great profusion, if I could only keep quiet and polite, and listen. And I found I could; my curiosity was stronger than my outrage. And it turned out that being there to understand rather than to help ended up helping more than I would have imagined.

Franz Kafka knew all about fools, and he wrote a beautiful little story called "Children on a Country Road". It ends this way:

"There you'll find queer folk! Just think, they never sleep!"

"And why not?"

"Because they never get tired."

"And why not?"

"Because they're fools."

"Don't fools get tired?"

"How could fools get tired!"

 This post is part of a series about my deck, the Cheimonette Tarot.

The Numinous

"I have never grown out of the infantile belief that the universe was made for me to suck." -Aleister Crowley

At some murky time in my own distant past, I saw a few Tarot cards. There were women with horns, and smiling faces with blank Greek statue eyes and insect wings. I could not imagine what the cards were meant to illustrate, but I wanted them so much that they continued to appear in my dreams over the years. I therefore had no trouble recognizing them, when my first boyfriend was teaching me how to read Tarot cards and I happened upon the Thoth tarot deck.

Beautifully painted by Lady Frieda Harris, apparently following exacting instructions from Mr. Crowley (who wrote a characteristically grandiose book about the tarot called "The Book of Thoth"), the Thoth tarot is enchanting. It is brimming with the images derived from an overwhelmingly rich experience of spiritual symbology, with a strongly Egyptian bent. Mr. Crowley himself was an odd man. Photos show him looking like a grim version of Christopher Lloyd. In the priestly raiment of the Order of the Golden Dawn (a prestigious occult society to which the poet Yeats belonged), he looked flamboyantly like a bouncer at the Luxor in Las Vegas. A feckless libertine, Mr. Crowley enjoyed a great deal of sex with both men and women, and was an enthusiastic user of recreational drugs. After dropping out of Cambridge, he wrote prolifically about his spiritual escapades while travelling widely across the globe. Having survived a fall off a cliff in China, a volcano eruption in Mexico, and bankruptcy over a lawsuit in England, Mr. Crowley, alone in the wake of a tragic family life, died of complications from heroin use.

The Thoth cards, despite their freaky beauty and the care with which they were imagined and executed, didn't quite satisfy me. Mr. Crowley seemed excessively devoted to an intricate synthesis of the world's spiritual and occult traditions (he unwisely named his first daughter Nuit Ma Ahathoor Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith). Some of the cards were crowded tight with Mr. Crowley's elaborate language of occult traditions, and I amused myself trying to imagine poor Lady Harris rolling her eyes as he demanded she add more planetary glyphs and symbolic animals to an already full card. Often I felt annoyed by the deck's demanding pushiness; the cards were intended to mean something very particular indeed, and it felt as though my own creative imagination and ideas were uninvited guests.

Mostly, Mr. Crowley never seemed to experience a moment of self-doubt or bewildered wonder. I got the sense, from his Book of Thoth, that he understood every word that he was saying. Frankly, I found that strange. For someone fascinated with as much esoteric magicky spiritualism as Mr. Crowley, he seemed terribly concerned with sounding as though he knew what he was talking about. If there are any general rules of mysticism, they are that there are aspects of the world that are incomprehensible to the human mind, that these aspects give profound meaning to human existence, and that human beings are able to experience the incomprehensible. Ultimately, Mr. Crowley did not seem to have that experience (despite having heard a disembodied voice which he believed to be an Egyptian god). He had reasons for everything.

As much as I love the Thoth deck, and will always love it, I wanted the freedom to interpret the images according to my world and my internal mythology, rather than according to the impassable mountain ranges of the many traditions of human history. Tarot cards, to me, have always been a modular way of telling stories about the mysteries of the world. I like that the cards themselves should remain mysterious and interpretable in a variety of ways. I was dissatisfied with the man behind the Thoth tarot, and I believe that this is what inspired me to make my own deck of Tarot cards.

 This post is part of a series about my deck, the Cheimonette Tarot.

Flight

When I was a kid, my bedroom window faced what I still believe to be the most beautiful alleyway in San Francisco. The alley sloped upwards from our house, which stood at the lower end, with the surrounding neighbors’ driveways and back yards connecting all along the alley’s spine. Our neighbors’ gardens overflowed with camellia bushes and rose trees, edged by fences piled high with climbing morning glories and honeysuckle and clematis. My room was on the second floor, and I could see right into everyone’s back yard. Our neighborhood was mostly full of elderly couples even at that time, and I would watch an old man though a picture window, at the upper end of the alley, slowly mount his stationary bicycle at 6 A.M. every day and stare gloomily into space for an hour while he pedaled. There was a dyed, painted, and very sour-looking lady with silver hair who often worked in her rose garden, and whose livid purple gardening gloves I could see even through the heaviest fog. A little, speedily balding cantor from the neighborhood synagogue used to trot out on sunny afternoons in flowered Bermuda shorts with a plastic lawn chair, and listen to opera music while sunning himself and dreamily turning the pages of a ragged newspaper. Around the time of my thirteenth birthday, the couple next door to us, a truly ancient man who looked entirely constructed of dried papyrus, and a bedridden lady who I had never seen, put the house up for sale. I found out that the lady had died of cancer, and her husband did not want to keep the house. Within a few months another couple had moved in. The man was an uninteresting-looking businessman with a bland face and grey hair, in appearance not unlike the father in “Calvin and Hobbes”. He would shuffle out into the garden on occassion to watch his young wife and two small children play together. Once I was delighted to see him hand his little girl a bottle of beer and let her sip it a few times, but he never again displayed any vestige of personal distinction. I thought his wife quite beautiful, and often wished to peek over our fence and talk to her. She had curly brown hair that fluffed all around her head oddly and made her look like a slovenly angel when the sun shone through it. She wore jeans and men’s shirts, was wonderfully tall, and her lean arms and neck were covered in freckles the color of pupils in sepia photographs. My favorite thing about her was that she would sometimes pause over her children, who were docile and blond like Golden Labrador puppies and only rarely whimpered for attention, and she would gaze for a long time up into the sky. There wasn’t anything up there to see, except clouds. I made sure to lean out the window and follow her line of sight several times, and there was never an aircraft or a bird or a stray balloon to watch. I thought that she looked up into the sky to use it as a blank canvas to receive the rich artistry of a profound imagination.

During my earlier childhood (say, ages five to eleven) I was bold in the use of our alley. I visited the neighbors and peered over their fences until they complained to my mother, and made friends with all the cats and dogs who frequented the neighborhood. I built a structurally unsound go-cart out of wood and wagon parts with my father and sped down the alley, crashing deliberately into garage doors when I frightened myself by going too fast. In the evenings, I liked to blow up an old balloon and use a Ping-Pong paddle to keep it from falling to the ground, bumping it gently into the air every time to catch the golden light from the sunset. My parents sometimes allowed me to earn five dollars by washing their car, a job I executed poorly but thoroughly. On weekends I put on a leotard, a homemade set of cat ears, and a tail I later learned was meant to be part of a rat costume, and climbed over our fence and up the alley to wander around the neighborhood by myself, meowing when mothers with strollers and men walking dogs looked at me strangely. The majority of this boldness vanished during the year that I was twelve, after which I preferred to read and draw and write, and watch the daily activity of the alley in the safety of my room.

So by the time the young wife moved in next door, it was too late for me to just lean over the fence and say hello to her. I had grown shy, and my peculiarities as a little kid began to catch up with me in high school. It was the 90s, and I felt bewildered with my classmates’ obsessions with dating and fashion and modern music. I bungled my way through 18^th century philosophy books while the other kids watched MTV. While the computer nerds learned how to code in the dank computer lab, and the potheads were stealing bites of a piece of space cake in the bathroom, and a blond boy with eyeliner was kicked out of his mother’s house, I wandered around the little garden behind the music room, gnawed on unripe pomegranates, and pretended I believed in tree spirits and fairies. Although I never excelled in much besides art and English literature, my teachers seemed to find me refreshing after having to suffer through the petty sea of hormones and impulsive thinking that largely constitute up the lives of teenagers. I don’t think that I was really less superficial than the other kids; I simply had no group of friends. Quentin Crisp once said that no one is boring who will tell the truth about himself. I agree, and the fact is that people of any age behave more honestly when they are alone.

By the time I was fifteen I was desperate to make contact with an outside world of which I knew even less than most fifteen-year-olds. The Internet had just begun to rise from the primordial ooze, and I ventured into AOL chat rooms, armed with not-quite-clever-enough lies and a murky soup of desires that I was unable to articulate even to myself. After sneaking out of bed late one night and watching a gangster movie in which a house was set ablaze from a flaming brick hurled into a parlor window, I got the idea to start sending my young neighbor anonymous notes. I began to write terrible poetry. It wasn’t blank verse about love or being a misunderstood genius, and it wasn’t a poor imitation of an admired writer, all of which I understand is the usual literary output of teenagers. Therefore I did have the merit of being original. What made my poetry awful was an overly wordy, melodramatic style, combined with truly radioactive levels of self-importance (these are not terrible qualities by themselves, but combined they make for some seriously clumsy and pedantic writing).

I don’t think that my notes ever frightened her. My romantic attentions were entirely taken up by a tomboyish blond girl at my school who had a lumbering boyfriend who looked just like her (a truly impressive obsession that I was far too cowardly to reveal to anybody at the time), and even then I had a fairly good sense of how to, at the very least, appear to respect personal space. I never wrote about myself, or about her or her family, or made any oblique references to love or sex. I simply wrote imaginative poetry about dreams, metaphors, philosophy, or the bits and pieces of abstract physics, which I picked up on the sly while I was supposed to be studying Newtonian mechanics. I would write to her on a piece of lined paper, fold it up carefully into an airplane, and send it sailing into her yard, always under cover of night. I never knew if she read them. The planes usually sank out of sight beyond the fence, and I never saw her pick one up. She continued to dreamily alternate between watching the sky and watching her children play in the garden, for three more years. I then went to college, and when I came home after my first semester, she and her family had moved away.

Although my poetry was forgettable (except for a single line that I recall, about children praying to the ceiling through closed eyes), I had never written such private things to anybody in the world before. I was a fairly secretive child and had been an outrageous liar when younger (I once stubbornly insisted to my entire cabin at summer camp that I had grown up on a farm where there were nine cows named after the Greek Muses, several ostriches and a monkey named Lester). At fifteen, I discovered that what I really wanted was to be understood. I believed that my young neighbor and I thought similar thoughts and saw similar visions. I imagined that she would find my white, lined airplanes, and be secretly delighted that the sky she stared up at so often had finally yielded strange gifts meant only for her. I believed that she would see herself in my poems, and that they would be little passages communicating intellectual kinship and solidarity, that when she would lie awake next to her boring husband, or fix breakfast for her vapid, blond, puppy-children, she would feel that there was someone else in the world who thought as she did.

Oh, the solipsism of youth. But you see, I never knew for sure. I never spoke to her. I have thankfully developed many gratifyingly material relationships with the outside world, which has in return grown from a mere macrocosm of myself into a universe of previously unimagined proper nouns. Nevertheless, my experience of being a creepy teen that watched my young neighbor and sent her paper airplane poetry was my first lesson in how to be an artist. Many begin their lives learning how to blend gracefully into shared social habituation and normalize themselves to the lives of those around them. Like me, many do not begin this way. We usually find, later, some other way to make contact, from the inside out. As though I had travelled deep into the Arctic Circle and discovered there among the icebergs a perfect replica of my own room, I suddenly realized what an artist was, and that I was one. It would be about ten more years before I began to shake myself free of my reluctance to leave the safety of my loneliness, and now, nineteen years later, I can say with complete, self-aware honesty that I have indeed discovered my own dear room in the howling, icy wilderness, in the shape of my community and my partners and my ever-increasing sphere of friendships.

I would like to thank my young neighbor, wherever she is now, for being the recipient of my writing. C/O neighbor woman, golden brown hair, freckles.

Thank you.

WHOSE CITY? Occupy Wall Street and Public Space in the United States

Abstract:  Since September 17^th 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement has inspired, confused, and empowered people across America. It has illuminated an important aspect of urbanism: conflicting goals for the use of publically dedicated urban space in the United States. Public space is conceptually at the heart of the Occupy movement. The vision of reclaiming public space has been a metaphor for reclaiming power since the movement’s inception.  Providing for political dissent is one of the founding principles of America, but this right has never been secure. The Middle Eastern countries of the Arab Spring revolutions have not tolerated groups of any size publically speaking against their government, and American authorities currently tread perilously close to making the same mistake. The United States has a strong history of preserving the institution of urban commons under public control, but regulation of publically dedicated spaces has increased dramatically.  In modern America these spaces are increasingly privately owned, heavily programmed, or dominated by stringent liability regulations.  Urban planning can and should be instrumental in making our cities democratically controlled and publicly accessible. Occupy Wall Street has provided planners with a blueprint for creating socially equitable space that tangibly, truly belongs to the American people.

Keywords:  Occupy Wall Street, Public Space, Social Justice, Urban Planning, United States

Part One: Theory

Land is power.  As old as civilization itself, the right to control land has signified the security of continued survival and the freedom of self-determination.  Throughout history, the control of land meant the ability to produce food to provide against future uncertainty, it meant the ability to construct housing facilities, and access to natural resources such as water, vantage points, building materials, fuel, and game.  Land has remained the most concrete and overt, the most primal, symbol of power.

Occupy Wall Street uses peaceful occupation of public space as a multifaceted tool of grassroots empowerment.  The movement claimed that power not only in its occupation of publically dedicated land, but also in its choice of location.  It chose to occupy Zuccotti Park, near New York City’s famous Wall Street financial district, to create a visible contrast with America’s iconic corporate bureaucracies. The New York Stock Exchange and the other financial markets at Wall Street, the policy and legislation that supports them, and their collective culpability in the 2007-2010 financial crisis, is the target environment of the Occupy Wall Street movement.  As a strategy for being seen and heard in an environment where the movement could have the most contrasting socio-economic and ideological backdrop, Occupy Wall Street was an instantaneous success.

When I first saw the Occupy Wall Street encampment at Zuccotti Park in New York’s financial district, I was immediately struck by the rarity of seeing people using public spaces in American urban centers for anything other than getting to and from work.  Before the protests, Zuccotti Park and its surrounding streets were filled with professional men and women during morning, evening, and lunch rush hours, hurrying to and from work, hastily eating their lunches so they could get back to business (Austin, 2012).  In New York City’s imposing financial district, with its monumental expanses of stone, concrete, and glass, it’s famous bronze “charging bull” sculpture, and little Zuccotti Park, geometrically paved over and planted with a uniform stand of manicured trees, it is clear who really owns the public spaces.

Calling a public space “programmed” means that there are specific intended uses that the designer of the space had in mind.  “A program for an environment, whether a park, an office building, or a mall, is the menu of activities that the space is designed to facilitate.” (Austin, 2012)  To the extent that programming is a reaction to the specific needs of a space, it is an appropriate consideration.  Hiking trailheads, for instance, benefit from drinking fountain and restroom facilities.  Streets with bike paths need bike racks.  Sidewalks should be designed to be both safe and comfortable for pedestrians.  However, urban spaces are increasingly designed for highly specific activities, with little truly flexible space for creative or adaptive use.  This increase in programmed space is enhanced by New York’s Privatization of Public Spaces Incentive program, which gives legal benefits to developers in high-density areas for providing spaces for public access.  Programming space is also an approach to addressing security issues: deciding whom the developer is intending to serve, and what activities the developer would like to encourage, are issues that are usually implicitly addressed by a combination of design and regulation.

Privately owned public spaces such as Zuccotti Park are situated in an amorphous legal no-man’s land, due to a lack of clearly defined regulations, the loophole that allowed Occupy Wall Street to set up camp.  There was an obvious breach of the owner’s intentions for how the space should be used.  In lieu of the Occupy Wall Street encampment, Zuccotti Park’s legal owners, Brookfield Office Properties, wanted to “restore the park to its intended purpose [of passive recreation].”  (Berg, 2011)  As political protest was ostensibly one of the intended purposes of civic space throughout American history, what the Occupy Wall Street protests have done is to highlight how Zuccotti Park is not a civic space. “First Amendment protections don’t really apply when the owners of a space are non-governmental.”  (Reynolds, 2011)  Thus, Occupy Wall Street has shown the world that the phenomenon of privatized public spaces are slowly taking away the civic spaces, and the rights that go with them, from the American public.

So what’s going on here?  How have private interests come to be in such conflict with community interests in the public realm?  Big business, structured for economic gain, has been granted by the American government the right to own what were once public institutions, “public spaces that are not really public at all but quasi-public, controlled by their landlords.”  (Kimmelman, 2011) Private businesses are not structured with the goal of protecting public interest, but of making money.  A financial district where people don’t act out, where people are encouraged to move along to work, and discouraged from eating a leisurely lunch in the park, is simply aimed to increase productivity.  “There’s a basic tension between the public purposes these kinds of spaces are supposed to serve and the actual interest of the private property owners”. (Yglesias, 2011) The privatization of civic spaces is an effort by the government to finance public services through imposing regulations on private entities, but this places public services under the yoke of private interests, which are ultimately aimed at increasing profits and not at community benefit.

As American society has expanded its acceptance of the diverse communities it consists of, it has at the same time become more homogeneous in its behavior. The existence of Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park (and in cities across the United States) as encampments, assemblies, and marches across the public realm has highlighted the ways in which the country has grown to favor corporations and the wealthy by integrating capitalist interests into policy and legislation.  (Moynihan, 2011.)  Privatized public parks are just one example, and Occupy Wall Street has ventured into trade ports, disused farms, and abandoned buildings, and has attempted to interfere with evictions and hold general strikes.  All these actions are meant to reclaim public interests by reclaiming the space that has been appropriated by corporations and wealthy institutions for the purpose of making money. Whether these measures are successful or not is immaterial to the concept that land that exists for the public good must belong to the public, and not to private interests.  The theory of Occupy Wall Street is: we own the space we occupy; let’s occupy the spaces which supposedly exist for our welfare, and remind our government and the American people that these places belong to us.

Part Two: History

The nature of public space in America – its purpose and its limitations – has changed with the years, and Occupy Wall Street is by no means the first instance of civil dissent to challenge perceived social injustices by leveraging their right of assembly in a publicly dedicated space.  The most significant example in recent history, the 1971 May Day protests against the Vietnam War, blocked Washington, D.C.’s key bridges and streets, and overflowed the city’s jails.  “The protesters failed to shut down Washington, but they made clear that the government could not wage war in Vietnam and have peace at home.” (Mills, 2011)  What makes Occupy Wall Street singular is its lack of a central demand or specific goal.  This revolution is more of a state of mind and a flexible outlet for frustration, disconnection, and a wide variety of grievances against American government, institutions, and corporations.  It is precisely because the movement does not have a single goal that can be satisfied that it has been so internationally appealing.  The lack of a list of demands is itself a demand of the systems and individuals in power: we are angry, and it is your job as community leaders to help us change the systems we live in.  We are not going to figure out the solution for you.  We are going to have to work together on this, and we will not cooperate with you until you cooperate with us.

Occupy Wall Street, the beginning of the international Occupy movement, was initiated by Adbusters, a Canadian activist group.  It began on September 17^th, 2011, and a few hundred protestors began to camp in Zuccotti Park, which was open overnight, an anomaly in New York City’s municipal public parks, due to its status as a privately owned public space.  It was inspired by the Spanish anti-austerity “indignado” protests and Arab Spring revolutions of 2011, especially the Egyptian Revolution’s protests in Tahrir Square.  The Arab Spring, primarily depending on civil resistance and social media as tools for organizing, communicating, and advertising their grievances against oppressive regimes, though taking place in a far more overtly hostile political climate, was a blueprint for Occupy Wall Street.  The Arab Spring has so far toppled four governments and widely provoked governmental changes, and, although Occupy Wall Street and the other Occupy movements around the United States have not aimed to overthrow the American government, the themes of nonviolent protest, online networking, citizen journalism, and, most of all, occupation of public space, have proved consonant with the objectives of the American Occupy protests[1].

And what are those objectives?  This question has circulated in American media and academia endlessly because traditional society and traditional politics have little context for a movement with no central leader and no central demands.  This state of affairs was confusing to the American public and governmental agencies alike, but the purpose of Occupy Wall Street began to be clear, nevertheless.  When I traveled to New York City to see the demonstrations in Zuccotti Park, I didn’t know what to make of what was happening.  Exploring the encampment, talking with demonstrators, and participating in the general assembly all showed me that what was taking place was a microcosm of the kind of small-scale, community-based urban structure that the protestors believed was possible.  There was a medical tent that served as a free clinic, a library with open donations and borrowing policies, a kitchen where free meals were served, funded by donations collected online and at the park.  The camp wasn’t clean, but it wasn’t filthy either.  There were cases of theft and harassment within the camp, but for the most part, everyone looked out for one another.

Before I arrived in Zuccotti Park in November 2011, I didn’t understand the purpose of the protestor’s insistence on the encampment, but after I spent a few days at the park, it was clear.  The movement needed to build a community, and living together was the quickest way to accomplish that.  The challenges the group had to face together – day-to-day living, internal conflict resolution, dealing with troublemakers, helping every person who wanted to speak be heard in the “human microphone” of the daily general assemblies, where a person speaks and the group repeats her words – bound this community and made it strong.  And the Occupy communities, in the cities in which I demonstrated, Oakland, New York City, and Washington, D.C., were very eager to work together.  They seemed hungry for the companionship, for the power to be seen and heard.  Above the din of petty name-calling and grandiloquent analyses in the befuddled media during Occupy Wall Street’s early days, the voices of the protestors could be heard, chanting, conversing with protestors and onlookers, and challenging the police.  They became citizen journalists on twitter, livestreamed video footage, posted photos, and interviewed for news casts around the world.  I arrived shortly before the November 15^th Zuccotti Park eviction, and, after a long night of reconvening, protesting, and avoiding police barricades, I found myself sitting for the emergency general assembly at Foley Plaza as the sun rose.  Later that day I would be interviewed on broadcast radio by the BBC, and I told them what I told the NYPD officers who were telling us to go home: this is our land, and we have a right to be here and to be heard.

Throughout history, American governance has struggled with balancing security with freedom.  While there are foundations for using public space for congregations of political discourse and dissent in the United States Constitution, there are also foundations for retention of central power by elected officials for the purposes of security and freedom for the public majority.  Democracy demands that public property be ruled by popular opinion, but there are many entities (corporations, institutions, activists, and government itself), which attempt to influence and manipulate popular opinion.  As more of the public realm continues to be privatized, manipulating public action and opinion becomes increasingly a matter of good business practices.  At their worst, public spaces in the United Space have become a free-for-all of fearmongering and greed.

In Oakland, where law enforcement is chronically overtaxed and underfunded, and where police are rigorously prepared for the higher level of crime specific to that city, the Occupy protests received some of the worst treatment by law enforcement in the entire movement.  Oakland became a national example in the early months of the protest, as television, news, and YouTube were flooded with images of the Oakland Police Department pepper spraying protesters at close range, firing flashbang grenades and rubber bullets, and manhandling unarmed protestors.  The protestors, too, responded with anger, and there were some instances of assaults and vandalism, eroding the support of the local community and worsening the relationship between Oakland’s municipality and the Occupy Oakland movement.   Oakland, and other cities across the United States, showed the world that at least one system, law enforcement, needed to reform its techniques.  How many of our economic and political systems, many asked, also needed reform? The movement was a beacon: as more bureaucratic systems were suddenly called into unexpected action, problems in local and national legislation came to be identified.  Rather than a movement with a list of demands, Occupy Wall Street served as a catalyst for Americans to ask questions about the framework of their country.

As a professional with a background in landscape architecture, ecological design, and urban planning, it seems natural to me that raising public awareness, pinpointing problems, and effecting positive change relies directly on the accessibility and visibility of the public realm and its legal protections.  For instance, it is easy to overlook a homeless problem that is stowed away into disused areas of a city, difficult to fix building systems that are not easily accessible, and natural to spend more time walking instead of driving when there are safe, attractive, and comfortable routes to jobs and other destinations.  Transforming the anger and frustration of the underserved 99% of American society into the visible entity of the Occupy protests, which invites interaction and participation, follows this line of thinking.  Returning American public spaces to their originally intended use for congregation and the exchange of ideas and resources, explicitly inclusive of peaceful political dissent, is an act with which planners of sustainable urban spaces can connect.  Give a common space to a neighborhood, ensure resources for its maintenance and safety, and community gardens, barbecues, playgrounds, and music events will arise on their own.  When Wall Street business men and women walked past the Zuccotti Park occupation last fall, they stopped ignoring the human aftermath of the economic crisis in 2009 and began either listening to the protestors, or defensively speaking out against them.  Either way, a dialogue was begun, by making a problem normally invisible to Wall Street workers into a full-fledged encampment, at the very steps of their workplaces.

By October 9^th of 2011, Occupy demonstrations were active in over 600 communities in the United States, many forming organized encampments with shelter, medical services, libraries, meeting points, and places for general assemblies.  This was a strong statement; the Occupiers were literally living in the public spaces that were presumably dedicated for their use.  Different cities responded in different ways, with evictions, compromises, ambushes, and crowd-control measures, some brutal, some not.  Such efforts usually increased the power of the movement.  Marches swelled in size after encampment evictions and instances of police brutality.  This wave of reactive energy was strong, and the message that came across was of power and autonomy.  “The people no longer trust their leaders and are even starting to indict the system itself.  They think we can do better.  We are all leaders.” (Gautney, 2011)

Protest, like all public gatherings, builds community.  I knew this before I joined Occupy Wall Street in New York City.  What I didn’t know, and in fact discovered quite suddenly, while I was marching in a crowd of over 50,000 over the Brooklyn Bridge during the November 17^th, 2011 demonstration, was that public protest inspires patriotism.  I realized that I had never felt particularly like a citizen of the United States.  When I traveled to other countries, I felt about as much at home in any city I happened to like; it wasn’t until I took part in the protests last fall that I felt involved, even at home, in the politics of my own country.  More than reading a history book, or the newspaper, or visiting the D.C. monuments, or even voting, I felt like I was doing something effectual and important when I was with the demonstrations.  I was talking with total strangers of all different backgrounds about politics and history and what kind of country we wanted to live in, and we had a chance to act on what we came up with.  One day I felt moved to link arms around a building on Wall Street and block workers from getting to their jobs, and another day I did not, and simply showed my support by talking with angry business men and women about what we were trying to say.  I had never before felt as though I had actively participated in my country’s political system, and this experience, more than anything else in my life, made me love my country enough to want it to change.

Occupy Wall Street is patriotic, and it is distinctly American.  It quickly developed its own proud, inclusive subculture: language, organization, resources, and online presence.  It drew musicians, religious leaders, performers, and celebrities with its infectious culture.  People who felt marginalized, powerless, and alienated, found solidarity.  Those dispossessed of their houses found a home.  The right of the public to stand up against perceived political injustices is as critical to democracy as it is to universal suffrage.  Despite all the confusion and complexities, occupation of public land was an elegantly simple approach.  Everyone took notice.

Part Three: Rebuilding Democracy

The events surrounding Occupy Wall Street in New York and other cities across the United States have shown that the public realm is less friendly to the right to public assembly and public political dissent than it has a constitutional right to be.  A material reason for this, derived from New York City’s Privatized Public Spaces’ total lack (and understandably so) of advocacy for civic and community interests, is that corporations and capitalist business interests have intruded into the public realm.  As an urban planner interested in building and retrofitting green, connected, sustainable communities, I believe that an abundance of publicly owned space is essential both to building healthy communities and to furnish a stage for political participation, locally and nationally. These spaces cannot belong to private entities if they are to truly serve the public, they must exist as publically owned property, and their rules must be based on democratic decisions, preferably on a regional level.

One issue with Occupy Wall Street that has repeatedly surfaced is a conflict about security.  Law enforcement and municipal authorities argue that their actions are for the sake of keeping the peace, protecting innocent civilians, and protecting property, and protesters make the same argument.  That law enforcement is willing to use weapons and force and the vast majority of protesters are not is where the clash becomes most visible.  When I saw police in New York, Washington, D.C., and Oakland crush unresisting protesters against the ground, yank a cameraman off a bus shelter, and punch an angry middle aged woman in the face, I thought about what security means, and where it comes from.  In every instance of police violence I witnessed, I could see the crowd of protesters get angrier.  The crowd-control tactics of tear gas, rubber bullets, kettling, and pepper spray did not calm the crowds.  At most, they might send people home or to medical care for a day or so, and then more would return, with more energy, more assurance, more anger.  This is not where lasting security comes from.

Governmental backlash against dissent, protest and revolution has tended towards violence to the extent that the government in question distrusts its relationship with its own people.  The impetus to control what one fears is a part of human nature that is as old as the drive to procreate.  What isn’t so readily apparent is that the softer aspects of control, such as the progressive marginalization of grassroots empowerment by a governing body, also leaves a trail of blood.  A people who are systematically stripped of their right to challenge their government, their right to use their own judgment in regards to their safety and happiness, their right to use land that has been deeded in perpetuity for public use for peaceful purposes, will not be contented. Discontent manifests itself in many ways, erupting not only in revolutions and riots, but also in self-destructive action and directionless violence.  The micromanaging of public spaces in the United States will only increase noncompliance.  Lasting security doesn’t come from tighter control.

Security does come from a balance of consensus government and individual self-determination.  By creating an environment that enables individuals to form communities, to challenge authority, to educate themselves, to live decently, and to think for themselves, a governing system becomes flexible instead of brittle, and thus achieves enduring strength.  In other words, governing bodies and corporations do not deserve protection as much as people do.  The concept of corporate personhood, a term that has suffused some of the political discourse that Occupy Wall Street has generated, is a good example of this.  Giving corporations some of the same legal rights as American citizens is a development conceptually related to the privatization of public land; both are representative of modern policies where private interests take priority over community interests. Occupy Wall Street re-created community by bringing the intentions of individuals back into the public realm.

Advocating the use of public space for peaceful protest is one of the most meaningful symbols possible of a democracy.  One of Occupy Wall Street’s most valuable functions is to make social injustice and hypocritical policy visible.  Indeed this is in part the function of all protest.  When people participate in their own government, which is the ultimate intention of all democracy, they must share ideas, they must be seen and heard by both their elected officials, by their own communities, and by the general public.  When corporations and government institutions become more worthy of protection than individuals and public needs, the foundations of human rights and social justice are threatened.  Through acknowledgement of the public realm as the property of the public, ultimately governed by their communities and protected by the active consensus of local businesses and residents, a country can uphold democracy on a very tangible and visible level.  By empowering individuals to use the space dedicated to them, while remaining peaceful, active, and engaged, a nation can achieve the best and most long-lasting security: a strong, participatory citizenry.  On every level, cities must belong to communities rather than businesses or institutions that do not represent public interests, and the Occupy movement in the United States has made it clear that changes need to be made for cities to be returned to their rightful owners.

References

Books

Danver, Steven L. (2010), Revolts, Protests, Demostrations, and Rebellions in American History: An Encyclopedia, Vol. 1. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, LLC.

Purdy, Jedediah (2011), The Meaning of Property: Freedom, Community, and the Legal Imagination.  New Haven: Yale University Press.

Electronic Publications

Austin, Drew (2012), “Overprogrammed Cities”, Blog, Kneeling Bus, April 26. Accessed on 05.11.2012 at http://kneelingbus.wordpress.com/2012/04/26/overprogrammed-cities/

Berg, Nate (2011), “Occupy Wall Street Protest Poses Public-Private Conundrum”, The Atlantic Cities, Politics, September 29. Accessed on 05.11.2012 at http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2011/09/site-wall-street-protest-public-private-conundrum/219/

Boykoff, Jules (2011), “Occupy Wall Street: Reclaiming Public Space, Reclaiming Dignity”, Oregon Live, Opinion, October 12.  Accessed on 05.11.2012 at http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2011/10/occupy_wall_street_reclaiming.html

Brown, Eliot. (2011), “What Occupy Wall Street Owes to Zoning”, The Wall Street Journal, Developments Blog, October 17.  Accessed on 05.11.2012 at http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2011/10/17/what-occupy-wall-street-owes-to-zoning/

Cristiano, Robert J. (2011), “Arab Spring – American Winter”, New Geography, October 29. Accessed on 05.11.2012 at http://www.newgeography.com/content/002503-arab-spring-american-winter

Davies, Pete (2011), “AIA Ponders Public Spaces in the Age of Occupy Wall Street”, Curbed New York, December 19. Accessed on 05.11.2012 at http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2011/12/19/aia_ponders_public_spaces_in_the_age_of_occupy_wall_street.php

Erikson, Amanda (2011), “How Occupy Wall Street is Reinventing Public Space”, The Atlantic Cities, Politics, November 7. Accessed on 05.11.2012 at http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2011/11/How-Occupy-Wall-Street-Reinventing-public-Space/398/

Fractenberg, Ben (2011), “Zuccotti Park Can’t Be Closed to Wall Street Protesters, NYPD Says”, DNAinfo, September 28. Accessed on 05.11.2012 at http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20110928/downtown/zuccotti-park-cant-be-closed-wall-street-protesters-nypd-says

Gauntney, Heather (2011), “Occupy Wall Street and the History of Force”, The Washington Post, National, November 15,  Accessed on 06.08.2012 at http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-leadership/occupy-wall-street-zuccotti-park-and-the-history-of-force/2011/11/15/gIQAalBlON_story.html

Goodman, Amy, with Denis Moynihan (2011), “Globalizing Dissent, From Tahrir Square to Liberty Plaza”, DemocracyNow!, October 26.  Accessed on 06.06.2012 at http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2011/10/26/globalizing_dissent_from_tahrir_square_to_liberty_plaza

Kimmelman, Michael (2011), “In Protest, the Power of Place”, The New York Times, Opinion, October 15.  Accessed on 05.11.2012 at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/sunday-review/wall-street-protest-shows-power-of-place.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Miller, Aaron David. (2011), “Arab Spring, American Winter”, The Los Angeles Times, Opinion, November 13.  Accessed on 05.11.2012 at http://articles.latimes.com/2011/nov/13/opinion/la-oe-miller-arabs-america-20111113

Marcuse, Peter (2012), “#10 – The Changes in Occupy and the Right to the City”, Peter Marcuse’s Blog: Critical Planning and Other Thoughts, March 25. Accessed on 05.11.2012 at http://pmarcuse.wordpress.com/2012/03/25/blog-10-the-changes-in-occupy-and-the-right-to-the-city/

Marcuse, Peter (2012), “#11. Reforms, Radical Reforms, Transformative Claims”, Peter Marcuse’s Blog: Critical Planning and Other Thoughts, March 25. Accessed on 05.11.2012 at http://pmarcuse.wordpress.com/2012/03/25/11-blog-11-reforms-radical-reformstransformative-claims/

Mills, Nicholas (2011), “Wall Street Protest’s Long Historical Roots”, CNN Opinion, October 11.  Accessed on 06.08.2012, at http://articles.cnn.com/2011-10-11/opinion/opinion_mills-occupy-history_1_protesters-historical-roots-vets/2?_s=PM:OPINION

Moynihan, Colin (2011), “Park Gives Wall St. Protesters a Place to Call Home”, The New York Times, City Room Blog, September 27.  Accessed on 05.11.2012, at http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/park-gives-wall-st-protesters-a-place-to-call-home/

Orlov, Dmitri (2012), “The Strange Logic of Dreams”, Blog, CLUBORLOV, April 19. Accessed on 05.11.2012 at http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2012/04/strange-logic-of-dreams.html

Reynolds, Francis (2011), “After Zuccotti Park: Seven Privately Owned Public Spaces to Occupy Next”, The Nation, October 14. Accessed on 05.11.2012 at http://www.thenation.com/article/164002/after-zuccotti-park-seven-privately-owned-public-spaces-occupy-next

Roy, Ananya (2011), “Occupy the Future”, Society and Space – Environmental and Planning D: An Interdisciplinary Journal Published by Pion, November 18.  Accessed on 05.11.2012, at http://societyandspace.com/2011/11/18/occupy-the-future-ananya-roy/

The New York City Department of City Planning (2012), “Privately Owned Public Space”, NYC.gov, the Official Web Site of New York City.  Accessed on 05.11.2012 at http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/priv/mndist1.shtml

Yglesias, Matthew (2011), “Another Problem with Zuccotti Park: It isn’t a Very Good Park”, The Atlantic Cities, Politics, October 13. Accessed on 05.11.2012 at http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2011/10/another-problem-with-zuccotti-park/294/

Radio Broadcasts

Chomsky, Noam. (2011, December) Arab Spring, American Winter.  Speech presented at the University of New England’s Center for Global Humanities, Westbrook, ME.  Accessed on 05.11.2012 at http://www.mpbn.net/OnDemand/AudioOnDemand/SpeakingInMaine/tabid/294/ctl/ViewItem/mid/3480/ItemId/19364/Default.aspx

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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street, accessed on 06.08.2012.

The City of the Winds

Last week I took a two-day trip to Safed, an ancient city in the northern Galilee.  My main project at work is to spearhead the process of getting Safed's old city registered as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  My organization wants to help the city achieve this goal in an effort to make Safed into a pilot for Israel, an example of economic growth, inclusivity, and focus on regional assets.  Safed is a lovely little city with a rich history in Jewish and Islamic mysticism, but it is also one of the most racist cities in Israel.  It is a highly religious and segregated city with complex social issues and economic stagnation (currently 40% of the city's residents are on welfare).  It's a city with three absorption centers for African immigrants, is over 99% Jewish in the city center, has a large Palestinian presence in its excellent college and Faculty of Medicine, and includes in its municipality the little village of Achbara, completely cut off from the Safed center.  It's a complicated project, to say the least.

I was generously offered lodging by Livnot Lehibanot, an organization that runs several programs with Birthright Israel programs, volunteer groups, and tourists.  I was given my own room, which was charmingly outfitted like a 19th century Spanish orphanage, and spent a pleasant two days visiting the city's historic sites, pouring over the library's books, and attending classes at Ascent, one of the centers for Kabbalah in Safed.  There is a restaurant that serves traditional Yemeni food, where I ate a kind of crepe made with handmade local goat and sheep's milk cheeses, Za'atar, vegetables, and a spicy mash of sesame and chilis.  I interviewed several residents, and took a walk down the steep mountain into the graveyard where famous 16th century Kabbalists are buried, called "The Graves of the Righteous."  The city also has the ruins of a crusader castle at the very top of it's mountain, where I hiked up one morning to watch the sun rise over the Sea of Galilee.

As much as I like this city, which is a welcome, fresh-air respite from the smog and humidity of Tel Aviv, I feel utterly like an outsider there.  This isn't necessarily a bad feeling, but it makes me feel like I can't quite reach into the information I am collecting there.  During my two days there, I met a little chocolate brown dog.  He seemed to like me, and followed me around while I stayed there, even sleeping outside the gate of the hostel while I was in my room.  He didn't belong to anybody in the city, and neither did I.  It felt good to wander the place together.