Everything I've done since '66 has been done in something like a state of terror, or sidestepping it, or running from its cause, or going right up against it; but everything's had that weight on it, dragging behind it, there no matter what.
Something big and heartlessly inhuman moving through our lives, over and through them, and waking up to it layer after layer of conscious dreaming nightmare; mostly wanting a break, a place to relax and be where it wasn't. Instead - witchcraft and fire, chanting masses of Hollywood extras bowing to some hollow stucco figure, and something cosmic and sick gloating in an unreachable place.
There was a book I read when I was maybe 11, going systematically through the adult SF section of the local public library. It was beyond me but I kept remembering later this sense, an atmosphere of crux, the point where the hero's people were falling into a slavery that was inhuman, because it was done by something that wasn't human. And he was waking up in that, the hero of that book. It was thick with scariness and something I still can't name accurately, the unbreathable air of evil triumphant, something like that.
Fear and love.
By the time of the Kent State murders it was all past protesting the thing that was killing us, for me, it was about trying to get in front of it far enough to figure out what it was after, what it wanted, and what it had already done to us - and sacrifice in response, the price of defiance - and making it count.
Later on kids were raised with images of hippie buffoons and hedonist excess, but there was an awful lot that still doesn't show up in the generally accepted story. Kent State wasn't an aberration, it was a punctuation mark.
This thing that's renewing itself through the nightmare so many of us still have to live owns the idea of evil, you can't accuse it of that - it's beyond good and evil, the way animals are. Or insects. Good and evil are human concepts.
But you can find your own way to refuse it, deny it, defy it with everything - it's possible. I believe that even now, and Neil Young is a lot of the reason why I still believe it.
I watched him walk to the stage that night, hours after it happened, concho belt and white shirt, eyes wide and dark, a man in a trance of spiritual trial, coming through the fire, alone and alive. Vivid with love.
Four Dead In Ohio Neil Young - with Crosby, Stills, and Nash (mp3).The hatred I have is still so unfocused and big I can't afford to feel it most of the time, just the edge of it immobilizes me. When I try to write from the center of it I go crazy.
Protest Songs
The Vietnam Conflict
Ellen Santora, University of Rochester
It's unfocused in that I don't really have a name for the thing I hate - I think of J. Edgar Hoover, and how he called one of the girls who were gunned down at Kent State a whore. I hate him, I hate his memory. But I've come to believe he was a tool, not even an agent - a drone. And what he served runs this country to this day.
I keep trying to call it Satanic, because it's the vocabulary I was given as a boy, but the thing that gave me those words is what's done all this; it's a con, a scam - the terms are diversions, disinformation. Intellectual property. Part of the plan.
Evil for lack of a better term, then. And it's still with us.
