AT THE HELM WITH LUIS GARCIA: A WALK IN BERKELEY

by Richard Denner

California Hall

Gone is The Black Sheep. Gone the Cinema Guild & Studio. Gone Big Daddy's Bookstore. Cody's Books and Moe's are still there, although both Moe and Fred Cody have left us. The Mediterranean Café is a ghost of its old self, but regardless, Berkeley is still Berzerkeley. Lu and I drop down from the Rose Garden to the campus. We pass California Hall, where The Berkeley Poetry Conference was held in 1965, cut over to Faculty Glade, wander past The Pelican Building and out Sather Gate. Lu is talking.

"Snyder was telling very directly and essentially his view, his perception of what his work was about and what the world was about at that point (in the early '60s), and the way I got it was that he thought there was a real potential for the world to change, and the reason why that struck me as really interesting is because, for one reason, it's because I didn't feel that way. I may have wanted it to change in that way, but I really didn't believe it could, and I still don't, but I think that in some ways I wanted it to be that way so bad that I kind of believed that.

Corner of Haste & Telegraph in Berkeley

But I don't believe that. I believe that individuals can change themselves, if they do, for whatever reasons, if something happens, some kind of catastrophe, something demands that they somehow change, and they usually have to work years and years and years and years to do that, and then they do; they're transformed by that work into somebody who's generally very alienated; and they're out there with all kinds of thousands of millions of people who find no need at all to change. And that's the way it is; and that's the way the world goes; and then the next transformation is being able to survive as an alien in the world.

So, that's kind of where I feel I'm at. I mean I see where a lot of intelligent people have gotten involved, but there's nothing that they receive that they call nourishment, whether it's success or money or whatever, from the world that would force them to change. They never encounter anything, usually, until it's far too late in their lives to change in any way that would transform the world, and so it doesn't happen.

Sather Gate & Campanile

So, Snyder was talking about it in this book Mountains and Rivers Without End, which he started forty years ago, and this new section came out, and I went to his reading at St. John's Presbyterian Church on College Ave., there, in the Sanctuary, beautiful setting, and this one section he read, that he read at the very end of his reading, really hit home, that the world as a whole had a potential to change. Absolutely beautiful. Strong.

I mean, when I was around Berkeley in the 60s I knew a lot of people involved in the Free Speech Movement and all that stuff, you know, Kate Coleman and Jonathan Cott and all those people, Joe La Penta, who were really involved, but I was always kind of an outsider, partly because I didn't go to Cal; I went to Junior College when I went to school; and I was always fouled up on drugs, and I didn't real believe things could change; not that I didn't want them to; I did; but I didn't think that you could change anything about greed and people and who they can't help being, and in that sense I wasn't on board, and they didn't really want me on board, but they let me just sort of hang out, and I was just bearing witness, just like I'm still doing now.

You write a poem. You're feeling really strongly, OK, you're shouting, they're shouting, "Take off your clothes!" but these people aren't going to take off their clothes; they're not ever going to get naked, you know; they're never going to come clean unless something happens to them as an individual; nothing in their whole way of life is going to be an incentive to make them ethical; they'll just go on being pathological liars and crooks because they have to be, because otherwise they would just be slobs like me and a lot of other people in terms of the kind of money they will have the potential to make. It doesn't pay them to think about change, basically. There's nothing in it for them.

Pelican Building

So, unless the world completely crashes, which it nearly has anyway, being so polluted and fouled up as far as I can see...everybody's just in denial about it...I mean there are organizations that work to change the world, and all of this has to go on; it has a purpose unless we just want to throw up our hands.

Ok, I've come to this place where I've done a certain amount of that work, and frankly I'm pretty exhausted, and I'm just resting up for the next round on a very personal level, because it's fine to work for change, to try and change evil, or whatever it is, and that's fine as long as you don't let it kill you. I'm just saying it's hard to change things, and unless you have the skills, it's scary. I'm trying to write the story by looking at the stars and figuring out my bearings by the day to day living."

Luis Garcia & Richard Denner in the Berkeley Rose Garden

Visit Richard's website: http://www.dpress.net