“And this is magic, is it? This is gonna get them out of there, yeah?…Fucking Polaroid pictures? Bags full of corn?…”
“Stay with it, darling.”
“I mean, I know it sounds a bit fucking crazy, and that, but maybe we’d be better going up against The Army with, like, guns and rocket launchers, don’t you think?”
“It wouldn’t work; they have better weapons than we do. On the other hand, we have the best corn, darling.
The operate within a rigid hierarchy. They can’t even imagine how to flow with chaos. . . ‘Empty-handed insurrection’. They don’t believe that’s possible.
And they don’t have a clue just how good at doing the impossible we actually are.”
–Jack Frost and Lord Fanny, from Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles
The above exchange has been in the forefront of my mind, much of the past month. In the story I’ve quoted, Lord Fanny (a Brazilian transvestite shaman) and Jack Frost (a future Buddha from Liverpool), with the aide of some friends, use tribal magic to break into a top-secret and top-security U.S. government base in New Mexico (think “the real Roswell”) to rescue other members of their team of freedom fighters. I’ve long been a fan of The Invisibles–a quasi-fictional epic about the ultimate conspiracy of “good” versus “evil”–but currently, my fixation on the quoted dialogue has been largely metaphorical.
I’ve already discussed in these digital pages how I’ve recently been grappling with financial issues. More and more each day, this struggle becomes The San Francisco Story; so much so that it seems on some days as if everyone I know is hanging on here by their fingernails. What’s interesting is that I’m also currently reading a nonfiction book titled Season Of The Witch, which chronicles The City’s shift from the conservative early 1900s into the tumultuous 60s and beyond…and within its pages, I see the same struggles that I witness in my daily life. The more things change, the more they stay the same: redevelopment, displacement, gentrification, the artist underclass, the rich and powerful elite.
I won’t belabor my point with too many details, but after my emotional low and subsequent turnaround last month, I decided on the New Moon that I would cast a money spell…and while there are many who would scoff at such things, I personally found that my magical intent was met with great success; enough so that I have begun to embrace the new direction my life is taking as a possible slow weaning from the teat of traditional capitalism. Nothing of this nature happens overnight, but I’ve begun to let go of my anxiety and ease into this new flow, where I may not need to be tied down to a full-time job under someone else’s employ.
As I was telling my dear friend Suzan last week, there are those of us who occupy an ephemeral role here in SF; we music-makers and dreamers of dreams who are somehow avatars of this City’s wildest, most beautiful essence. Those who would dismiss us as frivolous and unnecessary may try to undercut our value, but the fact remains that we belong here just as much or moreso than they do. We may not run The City with our dollars, but we feed it with our poetry. And I firmly believe that, if you are dedicated to letting that Spirit Of The City flow through you, The City will take care of you, in turn. It isn’t a lateral battle; we can never hope to have the amassed wealth and political power of the forces which try to run us out. We have something else: we have the best corn.
The artist’s life may not be a life of luxury…but it is a life of great riches, and the more we are able to focus on the sort of wealth we do possess, the less that the wealth that we don’t have will matter. THAT is one of the biggest lessons I am starting to finally understand.
