8:50am—bright & clean
Wake this morning to an email from my union: last week, over 36,000 workers across the University of California campuses voted to authorize a strike ‘if circumstances justify.’ This is 97.53% of respondents! So it begins again.
In many ways, the wildcat strike of 2019 was my first rodeo. In the narrative of one prodigal daughter’s return to her home state, before COVID, before vanlife, right at the opening notes of my Saturn return, there was the wildcat strike. This really set the stage for a new way of relating to ‘the powers that be’ for me.
Now, my Saturn is in Aquarius. The planet of discipline and institutions, the realm of the fathers, is somewhat at odds with itself when found in the sign of the individualistic rebel, the anarchist, the one-foot-in-the-future humanitarian. ‘Smells like teen spirit.’ This tension between the disciplinarian line-toe-r and the stubborn, oddball nonconformist has shown especially over the last few years in my work: the subject matter and angle (radicalized) and study habits (or lack thereof) betray this tension.
My research project began as an investigation into the ways in which certain modern and postmodern poetry and poetics demonstrate an unconscious, yet unmistakable, uploading into ‘secular’ literature of what I have been calling the mystical, or unorthodox, strain of religious thought and feeling. I intended to read the medieval mystical theology of such gargantuan figures as Meister Eckhart in order to isolate and then show how many of his ideas about the soul, the self, and the direct felt presence of God have been transferred over into poems by Rainer Maria Rilke in the German tradition and John Ashbery in the American.
Before any real study could happen came a rash of unexpected experiences: of poverty, the wildcat strike, the pandemic, homelessness, even being brought before the Board of Student Conduct and nearly dismissed from my program for my participation in the strike. All these shifted the focus of my interests. I became fascinated by, in the sense of the word that includes fixed or stuck on, the way the UC ran its operation. In short, I began responsibly to occupy the position of graduate student worker.
I met Fred Moten under a tree on the picket line in January of 2020, before COVID shut us down. I started reading The Undercommons, his book with Stefano Harvey. (His answer to the most powerful strike action? “Feed people.”) I highly recommend this slim, dense, informative book to anyone who has ever felt ‘in but not of’ an institution like academia (or capitalism, for that matter…) and wants words for where and how to go from there.
In my vague and clumsy first-year research on the slippery concept ‘mysticism,’ I was drawn to the majority of instances in the Catholic tradition where the thinker/writer/preacher that the modern scholar might identify as ‘mystic’ was labeled instead heretical, and brought to trial, and punished for taking philosophical and practical positions against the rot of church bureaucracy.
I had never personally had the stomach (read ‘ability to regulate my nervous system’) for direct action in the forms that I had seen in Berkeley and Ann Arbor during my student years at those universities; lacking interest, and not wishing to join up disingenuously out of a sense of social pressure or moralizing guilt or obligation, I instead buried myself in my studies of poetry and languages.
It only took a few weeks at UCSC, however, to recognize that I was not thinking straight—and that it was my material conditions that forbade it: undignified housing, exhausting and unreliable forms of transportation, the poor quality of the food I could sustainably afford, the amount of time I gave to my teaching positions relative to the meagerness of the compensation. All these conspired to keep me from that state (or set of states) of mind that I had always taken for granted, namely, the thinker’s clear, calm, physically-comfortable, focused contemplation. Not even the sight, sounds, smell, and ions of my ocean—for I had chosen Santa Cruz, blindly, unquestioningly, for its proximity to the Pacific ocean—could keep me on track.
Never before had I questioned the motives or machinations of the American institutions of higher education; my means had always been protected, there had been no need. I had been able to think and therefore to work. I had been free to work. My intellectual and creative work has always been the secret to my happiness, that is, to my sense of freedom. That’s what Aquarius does, find freedom, in this case laboring surreptitiously beneath Saturn, forging tools with which to break his bonds and the bonds of all he meets.
So my work was jeopardized, not for the first time, but perhaps most outrageously, when I first moved to Santa Cruz; and when the work stops, there is nothing doing. Saturn says, Change or die. My Saturn return had begun, and chaos and destruction were to dominate the next two years. But before that, there was the sense that something communal and constructive could be done to restore the freedom of the workers of the UC, and this manifested in the wildcat strike. Better ground could not have been laid for my investment and involvement.
