Read Dance the Eagle to Sleep Online
Authors: Marge Piercy
Dance the Eagle to Sleep
Other books by Marge Piercy
POETRY
The Hunger Moon: New & Selected Poems, 1980-2010
The Crooked Inheritance
Colors Passing Through Us
The Art of Blessing the Day
What Are Big Girls Made Of?
Available Light
Stone, Paper, Knife
The Moon Is Always Female
Living in the Open
Hard Loving
Breaking Camp
Early Grrrl
Mars and her Children
My Mother’s Body
Circles on the Water (Selected Poem)
The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing
To Be of Use
4-Telling
(with Bob Hershon, EmmettJarrett and Dick Lourie)
NOVELS
Sex Wars
The Third Child
Three Women
Going Down Fast
The Longings of Women
Summer People
Fly Away Home
Vida
Woman on the Edge of Time
Small Changes
Storm Tide
(with Ira Wood)
City of Darkness, City of Light
He, She and It
Gone to Soldiers
Braided Lives
The High Cost of Living
OTHER
Pesach for the Rest of Us
So You Want to Write: How to Master the Craft of Writing
Fiction and the Personal Narrative
(with Ira Wood),
1st & 2nd editions
The Last White Class: A Play
(with Ira Wood)
Sleeping with Cats: A Memoir
Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt: Essays
Early Ripening: American Women’s Poetry Now: An Anthology
Dance the Eagle to Sleep
Marge Piercy
© Middlemarsh, Inc 2012
This edition © 2012 PM Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-60486-456-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011927958
Cover by John Yates /
www.stealworks.com
Interior design by briandesign
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PM Press
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Published in the UK by Green Print, an imprint of The Merlin Press Ltd.,
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ISBN: 978-1-85425-103-9
Introduction to the New Edition
Billy Batson and the Teentsy Revolution
Marcus as an Underdeveloped Country
It felt strange to read something I wrote so long ago when I was not only quite young but as much an organizer as a writer. While rereading it after forty years, at times I admired my younger self, sometimes I sighed in exasperation, and sometimes I remembered exactly how I had felt during the time I spent writing and rewriting the novel and all that was happening in the New Left then.
I find that the characters I created still seem vital and convincing to me. I knew my fellow activists, their strengths, their weaknesses, their hopes and fears. Corey, Shawn, Joanna, Ginny, Billy—they all still satisfy me. I find nothing off in their characterization. Creating characters that are convincing has been all along one of my strengths as a novelist.
I am not somebody who has turned against the ideals and politics of my youth and rejected them, as so many previously radical writers have done. I have modified some positions, discarded some strategies, and developed others, but I remain a woman of the Left and a feminist. I have no room in my life for
mea culpa
for my political beliefs or actions.
I find my glorification of youth in the novel rather naïve, but not a lot of my analysis of how the society channels people and the willingness of the powers that be to use violence as well as covert means on anyone who defies them and tries hard to change things.
One element of the rhetoric of that era that influenced the novel was a slogan: B
RING THE WAR HOME.
I thought what that would really mean, if the government acted with the same brutality against its citizens as it does against countries it chooses to invade. I wanted to make that vivid and real.
I would have created a more optimistic novel had I come to create such a novel in 1967, but by the time I was working on it—it was written rather quickly in a kind of obsessive blaze—I could see forces from within and from the government that were squeezing the life out of Students for a Democratic Society. I did not understand the degree to which the Nixon COINTELPRO program had infiltrated the New Left, but I saw the results quite clearly.
COINTELPRO was not a new program of the government, but under Nixon, it was greatly expanded. The aim of the program is to maintain the status quo socially and politically. Under President Nixon, the activities of this covert branch of the FBI were exponentially increased. Besides the wiretapping and surveillance, agents joined groups that the FBI did not like. What undercover agents did was infiltrate and subvert organizations from Students for the Democratic Society to civil rights groups, groups opposed to the Vietnam War, women’s liberation organizations, socialist groups, liberal lawyers groups and individuals who came under suspicion of harboring or implementing ideas that J. Edgar Hoover did not approve of.
The agents assigned to infiltrate political groups would act to try to undermine the aims of the groups and would act divisively, often employing extremely militant rhetoric in order to push people out of the group or persuade members that others in the group were their enemies. The infiltrators would sometimes lobby for illegal actions, with the aim of moving the group or at least some members into areas where they could be arrested and thus create the impression that the group was dangerous. They were big on bombs.
In New Left groups, this push coincided with great frustration that the massive marches and rallies, sometimes attended by 250,000 people, and the many demonstrations all over the country had not ended the war. In fact, the war escalated and the carpet-bombing and use of napalm intensified and moved into neighboring countries, Laos and Cambodia. The less effect we felt we had, the more intense and violent our rhetoric grew. As we talked and acted more vehemently militant, we ceased being able to communicate with those who had not already joined us, and thus we grew more isolated. We were arguing as time went on not to persuade or neutralize others, but only with each other. In a relatively short time, we went from “brothers and sisters” and consensus to “I’m more revolutionary/tougher/more of a street fighter than you.”
Still we finally did manage to put sufficient pressure on the government, on the university, on various professions to change things. I still meet people who hate the ‘60s and everything that it stood for in their minds. Often they seem angry that all that sex was going on and they were left out. It was a period in my life like none other, in which we actually did live in a different way. Communities were created and thrived for a time. We tried to move past patriarchal marriages and relationships into greater freedom and sometimes it worked. Sometimes it did not. Music was important to us. We waited for new songs as if they were speaking directly to us. We believed
in the liberating power of psychedelic drugs with a fervor few would share by now. As the years progressed, we saw the damage that certain of those drugs could do personally and socially.
We were not as obsessed as people are now with outward appearance, with what clothes to wear and with thinness, with constantly dieting and losing weight, with abs and surgically perfect faces. We enjoyed our bodies as they were, we danced, we made love, we thrust ourselves into danger. I still bear consequences from being beaten and being gassed. We believed we could create revolution. We believed in ourselves and each other. Those experiences help mold what I think people are capable of.
If we were sometimes silly and sometimes dismissive of those who did not agree with us, we were also brave and willing to take risks for what we believed in. If we were sometimes mistaken, we also saw the structure of power and property in a way that few do now. We brought up, debated, and sometimes created alternate institutions, dealing with problems that are still critical. We wanted to make a better world, and in some ways, we did.
I chose not to write a realistic novel of the New Left, but to transpose it into speculative fiction in part so as not to give the government more knowledge it could use against groups seeking change, and in part in order to broaden the impact so that it was not about a small or large organization, but about a struggle against capitalism and imperialism. If readers find it relevant now, it will be because I chose that genre rather than a
roman a clef
or a realistic novel about any of the groups that formed that New Left in the late ‘60s.
Marge Piercy, 2011
At age eighteen, Shawn was officially loved by sixty thousand four hundred and eleven girls registered in his fan clubs. His parents found this bizarre and in questionable taste, along with the change in spelling of his name from Sean. If they had been less permissive, they would have stopped the whole episode. Shawn was the second generation born out of the Church, and his name was a sop to the quarter Irish in him. His father was a partner in a prestigious Philadelphia law firm. His mother owned buildings, had studied psychology and been analyzed by Jung, and was still beautiful in a gaunt silvery way. For a rock singer, Shawn was enormously protected and counseled and underexploited.
All three members of The Coming Thing—Frodo and Shep and Shawn—went to the same prep school, where they roomed together and kept up their grades to acceptable levels. When they had to miss exams, they made them up as a group. Their concerts were scheduled inside the rhythms of the school year, and they recorded intensively over vacations. Of course they had their share of bad scenes—oversold concerts in dingy halls with mushy acoustics and twitchy lightshows, and now and then a producer would try to chisel them out of their take. But on the whole, they were exploited as a careful investment, not as a quick-turnover commodity.
Falmouth was ossified in comparison to the primary school they’d all gone to as kids. That was a school almost without walls, a beautiful place with human teachers, and they had played mathematics and music and rattled on in French and German together since they were fat sloppy toddlers.
I am not an ice cube or a stone,
I am not an ice cube or a stone.
Honey, even teddy bears don’t like to sleep alone.
At Falmouth, they were popular but aloof. Frodo called it the Pimple Farm. The lead guitar, Frodo was small and squat and mean-looking and by far the most talented musically. He saw the world as a series of references to earlier rock and rhythm and blues. He was rough with the groupies sometimes, and
perhaps Shep and Shawn could only remain in contact with him because they had had that common childhood. Shep was slender and fair with long fine brown hair, as much dandy in his dress as he could get away with at any given time, the only one who ever took an interest in their finances.