SOWING THE FUTURE

A posthumous excerpt from Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties honoring the life of Mike Davis with an introduction by his coauthor Jon Wiener

Mike Davis started talking about writing a movement history of L.A. in the sixties a long time ago, in 2007. In 2014, when he asked me to co-author the book, he said he didn’t want this to be a trip down memory lane for the aging activists of yesteryear; nor did he want to tell the young activists of today that they should follow the splendid example set by our generation. He did want to recover a history that had been mostly overlooked by the chroniclers of “the sixties,” and twisted beyond recognition by the forces of the right. He wanted to connect past and future. He also said that writing it together would be “a blast.” I immediately said “yes.”

Mike passed away on October 25, 2022. What follows is the Epilogue to the completed project that we wrote together, Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties more than 600 pages about the movements of people of color, many of whom were surprisingly young, along with participants in the antiwar movement, the women’s movement, and gay liberation, as well as counterculture institutions, starting with the underground press. All faced the unending efforts of the LAPD to crush them. But as John Densmore of The Doors (whose song gave us our title) told us about today’s movements: “the seeds were planted in the sixties.” Herewith, some of the fruit of those seeds.

— Jon Wiener

The Yorty era ended with a whimper in the May 1973 general election. A year earlier the mayor, who had already run for more offices than any politician in American history, had astounded political observers by launching his twentieth campaign this time for the Democratic presidential nomination. Utterly unknown in most of the country, he campaigned on promises to stop school busing, continue the war in Vietnam, and make George Wallace his running mate. The L.A. Times disgustedly accused him of making L.A. “a national joke.” In the event, he won only 1.4 percent of California’s votes cast, coming in far behind Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to contest a presidential primary. Elsewhere, Yorty was almost invisible; in Rhode Island, for instance, he received exactly six primary votes. Despite his buffoonery and exorbitant malapropisms (in a national debate, he introduced himself as “mayor of the third largest city in Los

Angeles”), he still managed to win a majority of white votes in his mayoral rematch with Tom Bradley. But Bradley increased his own proportion of the white vote from 37 percent in 1969 to 46 percent in 1973 and won 51 percent of a Chicano vote, which had gone strongly for Yorty in 1969. The result was a four-point victory over Yorty.

In key respects, however, this was a different Bradley than the progressive candidate of 1969. Although the core cadre of the old coalition middle-class Blacks, Jews, and Japanese Americans from the Tenth Council District remained influential as allies and advisors, the conduct of the campaign itself was turned over to a clique of powerful white business leaders and political professionals. Nelson Rising, a corporate lawyer and future mega-developer who had managed John Tunney’s sensational 1970 Senate race, became campaign chair, while Max Palevsky, the fabulously rich founder of SDS (Scientific Data Systems), coordinated the finances, including his own series of large loans to the campaign. Together they convinced Bradley to hire David Garth, who had invented the modern television-based political campaign in 1965 on behalf of New York’s John Lindsay. Garth’s strategy, as Raphael Sonenshein later explained in Politics in Black and White: Race and Power in Los Angeles (1993), inverted the key elements of the 1969 crusade. “It had become more professional and less ideological. The emphasis would be on mass media, backed by grassroots campaign, rather than the other way around.”

The ad blitz focused on Bradley’s police career and his political moderation. A very reserved and well-spoken man, Bradley radiated strength and conciliation while Yorty simply acted berserk.

His attempts to race- and red-bait Bradley gained less traction than in 1969, in part because the streets and campuses were tranquilized. The last big antiwar demonstration, protesting Nixon’s second inauguration, was held downtown on January 20th and a week later a ceasefire was called in Vietnam. At the same time, the Nixon administration suspended the draft. Robert Hahn, an education professor at Cal State L.A., announced that he was ending the silent vigil he had conducted weekly for seven years in protest of the war. Meanwhile, the L.A. Panthers, US, SNCC, SDS, the Berets, Che-Lumumba, the Chicano Moratorium Committee, and even the Peace Action Council were now either extinct or moribund. The threat of school busing, on the horizon as the federal court finally moved toward resolution of the ACLU’s 1963 “Crawford” lawsuit, roiled white voters, particularly in the Valley, but Barth ensured that the Bradley campaign steered clear of controversies about school integration. Likewise, when Bobby Seale in Oakland endorsed Bradley, the candidate publically rejected his support.

Bradley’s victory was unique and would remain so for many years: a Black mayor elected by a multi-racial coalition in a city whose Black population share was actually declining. The greatest rewards, however, did not go to the neighborhoods or jobless youth, as the 1969 campaign had promised, but to white men in office towers gathered around ambitious plans for downtown redevelopment and multi-billion-dollar expansions of LAX and the Port. Bradley’s election ended the organic crisis of elite governance that had arisen in the wake of Yorty’s surprise victory in 1961 and the schism between liberal Westside and conservative Downtown power structures. With his electoral base stabilized by liberal rhetoric and patronage (mediated by his arch-supporter Rev. Brookins), his relationship with Westside moguls, big developers, major banks, and the Times’ Otis Chandler grew more intimate and eventually more corrupt over the course of twenty years in office. In historical retrospect, his greatest accomplishments were not attacking residential segregation or directing public investment to have-not neighborhoods but rather the rebirth of Downtown property values and the creation of a state-of-theart infrastructure for the globalization of the metropolitan economy in the 1990s. Despite public expectations, he was no more successful than the early Yorty in controlling the LAPD or changing its leadership, which continued to be passed on dynastically to proteges of Chief Parker such as Daryl Gates. Moreover the department continued to blackmail politicians and occasionally destroy their careers, as in the case of Maury Weiner, Bradley’s progressive conscience and deputy mayor, who was arrested in 1975 for supposedly groping an undercover vice officer in a Hollywood theater. Weiner’s real sin was not that he was gay but rather that he was still urging the mayor to tame the cops.

Although Bradley made a number of key Chicano hires at City Hall, he was soon accused of betraying his Eastside supporters by not endorsing Chicano candidates for the City Council, particularly for Edward Roybal’s old seat held by Gilbert Lindsay. (Only in 1985 and running in another, white-voter majority district would Richard Alatorre finally restore a Spanish surname to the Council roster.) Instead of fully integrating Chicanos into his coalition, the new mayor gave priority to meshing his policies with the plans of the major power players in the business community who in turn guaranteed the campaign finances that made Bradley’s tenure unassailable. Otherwise, he might have been more vulnerable to political challenges within the Black community that arose from his “invasion” of the turf controlled by allies of Mervyn Dymally (now lieutenant governor) and Jesse Unruh. Their respective political bases in 1973 were roughly defined by Vermont Avenue. West of Vermont, Bradley support was rooted in stable Black working-class and middle-class neighborhoods whose relative prosperity was based on expanding public employment opportunities for which the mayor claimed much of the credit. East of Vermont, in the 1965 riot zone, Dymally loyalists represented a population was more likely to be badly housed, dependent on low-wage private employment, and served by the worst schools. Far from experiencing a community renaissance under the new regime, the riot zone neighborhoods in the 1970s lost the little ground they had gained through the War on Poverty and temporary youth employment schemes. Watts in particular, once a symbol of hope and Black pride, was now a pit of despair. In 1975, on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the uprising, L.A. Times reporters surveyed the district and came to the grim conclusion that conditions were considerably worse than in 1965. “Unemployment is now higher in the Watts area, welfare rates are climbing, and housing continues to deteriorate.” Ron Karenga, interviewed in prison, told the L.A. Times that “people view the 60s as a failure when in fact the 60s were not a failure but a transitional period in our long struggle.... We can’t look at the temporary disarray that we find ourselves in and be dispirited.” Yet most of the people who talked to the L.A. Times were dispirited and expressed little hope that the Bradley administration, particularly in the absence of federal support, would reverse the decline. As Walter Bremond, the former chair of the Black Congress, put it: “the system whipped the shit out of us.”

By the early 1980s, moreover, a wave of plant closures had shuttered the auto assembly plants, aluminum mills, steel plants, and tire factories that had symbolized greater L.A.’s prowess as the nation’s second largest manufacturing center. Although thousands of older white workers were victims of this industrial collapse, it hit especially hard at the young Blacks and Chicanos, many of them Vietnam veterans, who thanks to federal consent decrees had recently acquired access to more of these unionized high-wage jobs and in some cases risen to union leadership. Many leftists in the 1970s had envisioned the big plants as the new power bases for continuing the Black and Chicano liberation struggles. Deindustrialization, whether or not an inevitable response to global competition, was the asteroid that destroyed Marxist dreams. City Hall, so proactive on behalf of exporters, land developers, and the financial sector, did nothing to stanch the hemorrhage of good jobs. (Bradley and the Council, for instance, could have led a coalition of the region’s industrial cities and suburbs to pressure Sacramento and Washington.)

Meanwhile, gang violence, largely quelled in the wake of the ’65 rebellion, returned to the streets of South Central in a new and more deadly form. A few months after Bradley’s inauguration, investigators were warning his office of the existence of 27 “chapters” of a new, heavily armed gang nation that called itself the Crips. Twelve additional gangs later to be known as Bloods had been formed in self-defense against the expanding Crip empire. Gang membership would steadily increase through the 1970s, then grow exponentially in 1980s as crack cocaine, imported from Colombia and retailed by neighborhood gangs, became the ghetto’s alternative economy. The connection between the decline of Black radicalism and rising gang violence may have escaped the notice of the white media but was widely acknowledged and mourned in the community. The Crips were indeed, as Cle Sloan titled his film made in the wake of the 1992 uprising, the “Bastards of the [Black Panther] Party.”

But it was LAUSD that remained ground zero in the struggle for equal opportunity. Waves of immigration from Mexico, as well as Central America and South Korea, reshaped the city’s demography and added their own baby boom to the school-age population. But new immigrants were typically years away from citizenship, so a chasm opened up between the active electorate and voteless immigrant parents. White voters, their children now grown, had little inclination to vote for school bonds but were enthusiastic for Proposition 13 in 1978, which ended the financing of schools through local property taxes and inaugurated an era of permanent fiscal stress and declining quality of education. The conservative Valley was the cradle of this statewide tax revolt and soon became the principal school desegregation battleground. The Valley-based New Right activists who in 1976 organized

Bustop, an anti-busing group that claimed 30,000 members, went on to win positions on the School Board and even a seat in Congress. They also helped lead the rebellion of local homeowners’ associations against apartment construction and, in the 1994 election, were catalysts in the passage of anti-immigrant Proposition 187 (“Save Our State”) ultimately ruled unconstitutional which among other provisions ordered school districts to expel undocumented children. Their underlying political raison d’être, reincarnated today in the Trump administration, was to deny immigrants and children of color the opportunities that high levels of public spending on education in 1950s California had provided for their own kids.

The fires of April 1992 that followed the not-guilty verdicts in the trial of the cops who beat Rodney King illuminated the city’s continuing landscape of inequality. South and East L.A. were still policed ruthlessly by the LAPD, but the uprising of angry Black youth and poor Latinos also presented a price tag for the failures of reform in the 1960s. From this perspective, one might conclude that all the dreaming, passion, and sacrifice of that era had been for naught. But the sixties in Los Angeles are best conceived of as a sowing whose seeds grew into living traditions of resistance. Movements rose and fell to be sure, but individual commitments to social change were enduring and inheritable. Thousands continued to lead activist lives as union organizers, progressive doctors, and lawyers, as school teachers, community advocates, and city employees, and, perhaps most profoundly, as parents. Memories of Black power, draft resistance, the highschool blowouts in South Central and the

Eastside, the grape boycott, the Artists’ Peace Protest Tower, Gidra and the Asian new left, the Free Angela movement, the mass arrests at Valley State in the struggle for Black studies, the Black Cat Tavern

“riot,” the women’s movement, the 1970 Teamster wildcat strike, the endless battles to free Venice and free the Strip all of this was transmitted intergenerationally, sometimes providing icons of protest during the massive renewal of labor activism and immigrant rights organizing in the 1990s.

The turning point came after California voters approved Prop 187 in 1994. It won almost 60 percent of the votes statewide and passed in L.A. County by a 12-point margin. But it spurred a massive Latino backlash. Miguel Contreras, a son of migrant farm workers who had picked grapes as a child, became the first Latino head of the County Federation of Labor. He set to work making unions a vehicle for mobilizing L.A.’s vast Latino community. A massive door-to-door registration drive was followed by a get-out-the-vote operation in support of progressive candidates allied with Latino labor. They reshaped the City Council and L.A.’s delegations to the state legislature and Congress, and soon California was solidly Democratic. In L.A., labor organized the Living Wage campaign, which in 1997 became one of the first in the nation to succeed at raising the incomes of workers on publicly funded projects. Next came the Latino-led Justice for Janitors campaign, which, after protracted struggle, mass arrests, and police beatings, won a huge citywide strike in 2000. And the LAPD was finally required to change its ways in 2001. After decades of litigation by the ACLU and protests organized mostly by activists in South L.A., the federal courts forced dozens of major reforms on the department and imposed a court-appointed monitor to supervise compliance. The decree wasn’t lifted until 2013. And history was made in the streets: on May Day in 2006, half a million people marched down Wilshire Blvd demanding rights for undocumented immigrants. Most of them were Latino and most were young. The march had been called by labor unions and immigrant rights groups and endorsed by the pro-immigrant Cardinal Roger Mahony and the city’s first Latino mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa. On January 21, 2017, the day after Trump was inaugurated, 750,000 protested downtown at the L.A. Women’s March perhaps the largest in L.A. history.

But the 2019 L.A. teachers’ strike was perhaps the most dramatic example of the renewal of activism. A coalition of the classroom and the community, it focused on the same issues of overcrowded schools and educational disinvestment (now aggravated by the drain of resources to charter schools) that had contributed to the student uprisings in 1967 – 69. Moreover, thousands of the Latino students who boycotted classes and joined teacher picket lines were proudly aware that they were following in the footsteps of Sal Castro, Gloria Arellanes, Bobby Elias, Carlos Muñoz and all the others who had made time stop in March 1968. The union then capped its victory by recalling L.A.’s most irrepressible sixties veteran, Echo Park’s Jackie Goldberg, from retirement and electing her to the School Board where she had fought so hard for integration and quality education thirty years earlier.

For more than a half century, the right has waged a relentless campaign against the goals and achievements of the sixties’ movements for racial, social, and economic equality. From Reagan to Trump, there has been an endless hammering away at caricatures of dopey hippies, traitorous peace protestors, bra-burning feminists, dangerous Black radicals, and commissars of political correctness.

However, as this book’s two authors have discovered in myriad conversations with their students and other young comrades, this rewrite of history from the standpoint of wealthy white men has had minimal impact on the social consciousness of the young people of color who are Los Angeles’ future. If anything, their own experiences of nativism, discrimination, sexual harassment, and blocked mobility ensure that they will be genuine successors to grandmothers and grandfathers who raised their clenched fists and demanded power to people so long ago. To keep that circle unbroken, this book was written.

Excerpted from Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, Verso, 2020 © pp. 631–638

Hervé Guibert

Autoportrait, rue du Moulin-Vert, porte vitrée, c. 1986

Vintage gelatin silver print

© Christine Guibert / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris

by Sharon Kivland

It is the first day of the month of nivôse in the French revolutionary calendar. The year is CCXXXII. Nature converged with revolution to create this calendar. Time started again, anew, according to reason and nature and the intentions of history. It was Year I of a new order, one in which there was collective time, human time, no gods or masters, tyrants abolished, kings done away with and their queens too, no longer a divine order of the universe: our time, our space, a difference between temps voulu and temps veçu, with nothing but the changes of nature marking the changing of the hours, the days, the years. The short-lived calendar of the revolution was formed of months of three weeks of ten days, of days with ten hours, of hours with a hundred minutes, of minutes with a hundred seconds; a calendar of natural and attractive names: the calendar of Jacobin history. Days that ended in zero were assigned to an agricultural implement. Days ending in five were assigned to an animal. All other days were assigned to a plant or a mineral.

Nivôse is the month of snow, though this year there has not been any snow yet. Mist and frost have passed, while rain and wind arrive, and then later, seed will be sown, and after there will be blossom, harvest, heat, and fruit leading to fine vintage. That is all attendant; for now, it is a matter of keeping warm and keeping the wolf from the door. Three stoves are lit daily, sometimes a fourth. The collection of firewood is endless. I sometimes hear nivôse, which comes from nivosus, abundant in snow, as névrose, a psychic trouble characterized by conflict, hysterical or obsessional, according to the psychic structure of the subject.

TOURBE (peat): Today is the day of peat. When the land is set on fire to clear for new growth, it is not the peat that burns but the blue grass or the heathers rooted in the peat. For hearth-fires it is cut by hand, left to dry in the sun, then stacked; burning, it smells like bacon and grass, sour and sweet at the same time. Today is the shortest day, the winter solstice, associated with Apollo, Dionysus, Mithra (the holly and the ivy, the mistletoe). The young sun was born on this day, the fire of the earth, the sun king, son of the goddess, and he brought with him all the promises of the year to come. Another calendar, here on my writing-table, measures the passing of time: the almanach du facteur. Now I buy this almanach du facteur myself but my neighbor Marcelle, for whom I had both the pleasure and burden of being her “second daughter,” used to give one to me every Christmas Eve. She kept all her almanac calendars, each year marked with the weather, the sowing, and planting, or the gathering, as well the date of the deaths of the dogs and cats all buried in our gardens. When we did not live here all the time, Marcelle always laid a fire in our hearth, in time for our arrival in winter. The house was always cold.

HOUILLE (coal): Coal or coke, houille, is between lignite and anthracite, sometimes poisonous. The silicone death of miners. Germinal. Let them burn, those who oppose us, they said, and they cut down the trees of the grand canal at the palace of Versailles for firewood. Later, they said burn Paris, and later still, others lied, saying it was the women who had done it, the pétroleuses, with their canteens and guns, their bombs and their flames. Later still, cars were set on fire, businesses and public buildings blazed.

BITUMEN (bitumen): Bitumen is black and viscous. Bitumen binds asphalt. Exposure to its fumes is linked to respiratory effects, asthma, bronchitis, to cancer. Inhaling its vapor produces drowsiness and vertigo. The saints and martyrs, the dead, those who died for their devotion, their beliefs, the croyant /es, measured time in the Christian calendar with its distinction between sacred and profane days, indicating the way time should be spent according to the dictates of the church. Such a parade of saints and martyrs but sometimes, on certain days, they were replaced with “great men,” sunkings, for example (after Apollinaire: soleil cou coupé, sun corpseless, sun cutthroat, the sun a severed neck, solar throat slashed, and let the sun beheaded be, and so on), or other illustrious figures, even with Voltaire, imagine!

SULPHURE (sulphur): The king was deposed, and the sovereign body, no longer sovereign, a body now in pieces, ceased to serve as any kind of measure. That sovereign body always was two bodies, a natural one that lives and dies, and an enduring symbolic body assumed by the successor to the throne. The real and symbolic body of the ruler expired, the head (the responsible part) of the body politic quite literally rolled in 1793, “forcibly undressed, his voice drowned out by the drums, trussed to a plank, still struggling, and receiving the heavy blade so badly that the cut does not go through his neck, but through the back of his head and his jaw, horribly” (by then, the king was Citizen Capet, and then, the principal personage was caput). The Romans burnt sulphur to protect the home against witchcraft, sulphurous flames with the odor of rotten eggs, brimstone. The beast and the false prophet were thrown into a lake of fire and sulphur in Revelations, along with the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, all the liars, the immoral, the murderers, the sorcerers, and so on and so on, and fire and sulphur and smoke came out of the mouths of horses of the Apocalypse. As for the wicked, well, fire and sulphur and a scorching wind shall be the portion of their cup.

CHIEN (dog): Dog day, dog days a period of stagnation and inactivity. I supposed that description of lassitude might apply to Christmas Day. One says un temps de chien, and that has certainly been the case, rotten weather, execrable, one would not put a dog outside in it, or dogs were kept outside, miserable and wretched. It is an expression designated by an excess, the contemptible dog, dirty and impure, like the bitch of a life, or the life of a libertine, debauched, living like a dog. What is it like to be treated as a dog? The dogs lie close to the stoves, their fur is hot. Grumbling, when too warm, they slump away. Another calendar, one of lived experience, Sylvain Maréchal’s Almanach des honnêtes gens of 1788, undid the authoritarian measure of time, calling for a reestablishment of things for once and for all on their original footing, their original state, which is to say on the most perfect and most legitimate equality. It was all a story, he said, at the time he wrote it, but he was telling the truth, he said, and it would become history one day. Histoire and history and fable: once upon a time and there was and there was not.

LAVA (lava): Lava will not turn a body to stone no, it burns it to ash and the ash becomes a statue through ingenious means, a negative corpse, flesh and organs decomposed, a shell of hard material around absent form. In Pompeii, a dog straining at its tether to escape left its void. The animal is twisted, its forelegs raised, in the position assumed when the pyroclastic flow overwhelmed it. Its mouth is open, its teeth visible, barking or whining or trying to breathe, inhaling the poisonous gases. Poor old guard dog, tied to a post in the atrium of the house of Marcus Vesonius Primus. The atrium filled with ash and debris and the dog struggled to get free, but its chain, fixed to its collar with two bronze studs, kept it there. Cave canum. Gilles Deleuze could not breathe towards the end he decided for himself, the limit of his chain, tied like a dog to his oxygen tank, desiring an unleashing in the hard winter of his long suffocations. He felt he was treated like a dog by his doctors. It is, he said, not men but animals who know how to die. Saint Etienne, the first Christian martyr, was stoned to death for pronouncing the name of God. His body was left unburied for the dogs, but the animals did not come for it. The disciple Paul moved the body to a secret cave near Jerusalem, and the location of the tomb appeared in a dream to Lucian four centuries later. When the entrance was opened, the earth trembled, and a gloriously sweet fragrance filled the air.

TERRE VEGÉTALE (topsoil): We all tell stories in our village, about our village of six houses, with four outliers (considered not as part of the village for reasons I do not always understand, even when the families that inhabit or inhabited the houses are interlinked, enlaced by name and marriage, Bonnier, for instance, or Béréchel or Lemoine, identified as la mère, le père, and so on, in endless family ties, intermarriages, multiple cousinages), though my stories come late to the telling of its history and in the end, they may play little part in what remains to be told when I am gone, and I will not figure at all, l’anglaise, as they call me. Every day I collect wood from the forest to burn in our stoves, the only way we have to heat our granite house. It is a constant struggle to keep warm; we are not as young as we used to be. I determined in October that I would not pay for cords of wood this winter. A corde is three stères, measured imprecisely by a length of string, three meters by one, a measure left over from the Revolution, when all measures changed.

FUMIER (manure): The revolutionary calendar imagined a new time when the laborer would be held in higher esteem than all the kings of the world together and agriculture would be considered as the highest of the arts of a civil society. Time would be natural, as nature itself, most energetic, in all its fecundity in the month of July when the sun is at its zenith, and when the French people also reach their full height and force to harvest the precious seeds of reason and independence, when red is the color of the blood of kings and their henchmen, more livid, darker than the blood of other men. Like droplets of blood, the seeds fall or are scattered: a scrap here, a scrap there. Little bits. It is like the grit from the cat’s paws on a clean linen bedsheet. It is the day of the Holy Innocents: Childermas, the slain children, the first martyrs, the boys. It is also the Feast of Fools when parents abdicated their authority to the rule of their children. A heap of manure will generate heat for weeks; horse and cow dung can be burnt but the fumes produce arsenic.

SALPÊTRE (saltpeter): Saltpeter is incendiary, Greek fire, but also preserving. The salt of Peter is used for salaisons, salted, hams, sausages, retaining the rosiness of flesh, meaty pinkness. The salting-tub evokes blood in Burgundy they said that que ca tourne, c’est rapport a la salaison de la femme, and they meant menstrual blood, that salt and blood were equal. Salpeter has no effect on carnal urges, despite what was once thought; it does not dampen the heat of desire. It smolders when it burns. Mixed with charcoal and sulphur, it is gunpowder, the explosions of fireworks, cannons, and guns. Black powder, white smoke, the color and temperature of flames. Light. The rockrose, cistus, is the rescue remedy against fear. It should be made in a crystal bowl in spring water when it flowers. When fire sweeps through the maquis, it consumes the rockrose: the plant in peril is the specific against terror, the terror of the rampaging blaze that takes everything.

FLÉAU (flail): The flail is a tool to beat the wheat, to separate grain from husk; but it is also a scourge and a curse, a calamity and a plague, a catastrophe and a disaster. Shelling continued in Ukraine; three strikes hit Semenivka, and one dead person was known, it was reported, but no name was given. Ukraine air defences shot down sixteen Russian kamikaze drones. Their sound is like a chainsaw in the sky. Thrushes warbled Greek words from the balustrades of Roman palaces (whose words? A prize might be offered to anyone reading this). Stéphane Mallarmé made a distinction of a double state of speech: here, brute and immediate; there, essential. What is the language of birds? It is mystical, or perhaps it is merely ordinary conversation. They will speak or sing the last human words, in any case. Ukrainians call their language nightingale speech.

GRANIT (granite): The walls of the house are so thick that they retain heat from the stoves in winter, while the house is cool in summer. It is the eve of an old year in the Gregorian calendar and the day of the new in the French revolutionary calendar, 11 primidi of the second decade, granite is in the place of that old Saint Sylvestre, who killed a fiery dragon and built some basilicas, and chased away some evil spirits. Once on this eve, it was the custom that a little piece of lead was melted in a spoon over a flame, dropped in water, the shape it formed telling one’s fortune, a star for happiness, a ball for luck.

ARGILE (clay): A year ago I could not move easily or without pain, following an accident, fractured bones. I clad my leg in a poultice of green clay, leaving it to set. It is supposed to help healing, holding tissues together, ligaments, muscle, skin. The green clay comes from the dust of crystalline sedimentary rock where water has been washed away. The floor of our house once was terre battue, clay spread as thick mud and beaten down before the granite stones were laid in place around it, a house without foundations rising from damp ground. The fire dried the clay floor slowly, and each time it rained, the floor was moist. Once we had only the stone hearth, a fire of logs laid on firedogs, lifting the wood so that air might circulate. Behind the fire was a castiron plaque, showing the annunciation, angel’s mouth to virgin’s ear, reflecting heat into the room, though in truth, most of it went up the chimney.

ARDOISE (slate): The second day of the old, tridi of the new. Slate, a new slate, wiping the slate clean. Tabula rasa. Turning over a new leaf. Burying the hatchet (never). In French, to pass the sponge, absorbing, mopping, soaking up, blotting; to turn the page, put the counter back to zero. There was constant cooking, for the pumpkins were declining rapidly; cut into slices, trimmed of the bad parts, they must be cut up, frozen in pieces or purées, or roasted, made into soups, stews, curries (tonight)

Hervé Guibert

New York, 1981

Vintage gelatin silver print

© Christine Guibert / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris all week. There can be too much pumpkin, to be honest. I thought about the action of Janine Antoni washing a floor with her hair, her ponytail dipped in dye, crouching, not cleaning, not at all, in the figure-eight swooshing movement, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles scrubbing the steps of a museum, moving to the marble floors inside, on her knees with a rag or mopping for nine hours. These actions were works of art and the acts were work. Endless labor: start, end, begin again. Infinite cycle. Year in, year out. Repeat. Perhaps one would prefer to clear away everything for once and for all. Burn it all down. Ashes to ashes. The wood ashes are sprinkled each day on the compost heaps or fed to the roses, or they are added to the dust baths of the chickens and to their food, the charred wood pecked and nibbled, or a palmful is rubbed into the fur of the dogs.

GRÈS (sandstone): Sandstone, composed of feldspar or quartz, silicates, is used in the production of television screens, but a play on screens and hearth-fires eluded me, though I remembered seeing the television screen proposed as vehicle for reverie replacing the flames, and mysterious signs appeared, ghost images, writing on the wall that the astrologers could not decipher: Belshazzar found wanting, and slain, a long story cut short. The glass doors of two stoves required cleaning; they were blackened and obscure, and the flames could not be seen. The wood was too damp, hard to catch alight, struggling to roar, smoking and sizzling a little.

LAPIN (rabbit): Though today’s date was marked by a rabbit, we seldom see them here now, though there have been many hares. These are not the hares of myth, sacrificing themselves in flames to feed a god or warning of fire or stealing the sun or making the gift of fire. In Dol market there is a stall selling rabbit, from fresh meat to terrines and rillettes. Once I made a first course of these, with a salty radish butter, cold radishes, and good bread, but such delights are now prohibited the meat part anyway. The hunters no longer pass by the house to shoot rabbits and hares and roe deer in the forest. Sometimes their shotguns were unbroken, held readied to shoot over a shoulder as they walked by, calling in vain their rampaging dogs with their brass hunting horns: corne, pibole, trombone.

SILEX (flint): Also flintstone, also firestone. A kind of quartz. Tools, fires. Chips and breaks, sharp-edged pieces. Sparks struck. Smashed against iron. Flintlock. Tinder, a fungus that grows on trees, a dating app: coup de foudre: to get the sparks flying and love at first sight. I had difficulty in lighting the stove in my study. It resisted paper, firelighters, small kindling, sticks and small logs. Three failed attempts. How much time I spend in winter trying to light and keep alight the fires, how much energy dispensed in collecting wood, chainsawing and chopping. Fourth attempt, a spark no more, and I gave up hope. Children used to walk to school, wearing their wooden shoes, often walking as many as 10 kilometers, following the deep tracks there were no tarmacked roads until the 1960s, and then you could go on your bicycle, if you were lucky enough to have one. Sometimes there would be six or seven of you en route, you and your sisters and brothers. The stove in the classroom was lit but still it was cold, for the ceilings were high and the windows large, to let in as much natural light as possible, for as yet there was no electricity, and also because of the prevalence of tuberculosis the air had to circulate, be renewed. On the walls, there were those large posters: geographic maps, human anatomy, steam engines; three blackboards, a new moral passage was chalked each day and you had to learn it by heart. The desktops were stained with blotches of violet ink, there were porcelain inkwells on the right because everyone had to be right-handed and if you were not, your left hand was tied behind your back until you learnt better, and if you spoke Breton, you were put in the corner with your wooden clogs hung around your neck until you spoke French. There was dictation, you copied letters and lines. You had a morning break and you played in the courtyard, skipping, hoop and stick, hopscotch, marbles. The girls pissed in the cubicles on the left, the boys in the pissoirs on the right. You went back to the classroom for arithmetic. At lunchtime some of you went home but if you came from a long way you went to the café in the village and had bread soup, made by the baker, with a little bit of bread and butter, and then you went back to school for history and geography or science, and then the day ended with recitation and singing, or manual work for the girls. Often you got a rap on the hand with a ruler, and sometimes a good point, but not often. But you know, when you lived in a dark little house with a beaten earth floor, it wasn’t so bad to come to school, with the stove, the wooden floor, the window on a world.

MARNE (marl): Marl, once used in agriculture to improve the soil, hardens into rock to become marlstone. Another story:

Augustin Meaulnes turned up at the village school where the father of François Seurel (who tells the story) was the director, teaching the older children, and his mother Millie taught the younger children. Meaulnes arrived as night fell, wearing the felt hat of a peasant tipped back on his head and a black shirt belted round the waist like a schoolchild. He took fireworks from his pocket. François had been ill. He was fearful and unhappy. The arrival of Meaulnes was the start of his new life. And then Meaulnes went missing for a few days, he disappeared into the forest … and found the enchantment of the hidden château, the mysterious domaine, the fête champêtre where the children ruled, which I imagined as a painting by Watteau, and Meaulnes met a girl and experienced wonderment. Green lanterns, red lanterns, extravagant scenes around a fire, a flickering candle: two days of grace and marvels, then the beginning of turmoil and devastation. This is a story that brought me to France. I continue to look for the château in the forest on fine days in winter when one can see through the trees.

PIERRE À CHAUX (limestone): In my study, there are ashes in a jar labeled “I am toxic.” The black ash was sent to me from LouisGeorges, at a time of suffering, along with a small bottle of homemade absinthe, labeled “Drink me” (we did). I sent him a jar of quince jelly in return, and later some black poppy seeds. The ash is for spells. Sorts. It is still with me. Sortir. There are different ways of cutting, digging, working the land. They are divided between men and women. Alain Testart, the anthropologist, brings the division, the differentiation, back to a matter of blood and an origin in prehistory.

Blooded thought. Sacrifice. Transfusion and transformation. Same old, same old. Limestone is the stuff of quicklime, which preserves corpses and eradicates the odor of their putrefaction, the stuff of tombs. Dust to dust.

MARBRE (marble): Marble is the stuff of monuments and I had nothing to say about it during nivôse. Let them burn, I thought, let all the vile statues and foul figures and malevolent markers of history burn, but marble is most resistant to fire and does not singe or crack. The endless recuperation of firewood. The woodpile is worrying low. I am unable to use the heavy chainsaw. The stove in my study refused to light again. Blowing on it, I singed my hair and gave myself vertigo. I found the pair of bellows Marcelle gave me many years ago and blasted away with them. At times I wondered if my collecting of firewood was theft, but after all, Karl Marx argues that, in the case of fallen wood, nothing has been separated from property, for the wood is already apart from property as the owner of the tree possesses only the tree and the tree no longer possesses the branches that have fallen from it: “The wood thief pronounces on his own authority a sentence on property.”

VAN (winnowing basket): Yes, an object used to separate grain from chaff after flailing, and from the woven basket the grain is tossed high in the air to allow the wind to blow away what cannot be eaten. Fabre d’Églantine said the calendar must show the people the richness of nature, to make them love the fields, and to methodically show them the order of the influences of the heavens and of the products of the earth. A basket is a worthy object. Églantine went to the guillotine with Danton on 16 germinal year II, convicted of corruption and the destruction of national representation. One account said he cried on the way, for he had been unable to finish writing a poem; another said he hummed the song Il pleut, il pleut, bergère, as he mounted the scaffold. It was a song from his opéra comique, Laure et Petrache, of 1780, and poor Marie-Antoinette became the shepherdess, the storm from which she should bring in her sheep to shelter was the forthcoming revolution, the thunder approaching, the lightning cracking.

PIERRE À PLÂTRE (gypsum): It is a soft sulphate mineral, alabaster, satin spar, selenite, but I was heavy-hearted, brokenhearted, and in consequence, I did not write about gypsum, pure and translucent, soft and moist, preventing the spread of flames, strong against fire.

SEL (salt): In the kitchen: a small glass jar of fleur de sel from the Guérandes, fine light crystals, cultivated for several centuries, the flowers from the surface of the salt marsh harvested by the paludiers in the evening during the summer months, before the crystals are destroyed by rain, with a tool, a lousse, made of chestnut wood; a rectangular white lidded terrine dish with small handles of a lion’s head on each side, found at the recycling bins, containing Maldon sea salt, brought back monthly from London, harvested by hand by members of the same family for over a hundred years; smoked sea salt from the fish shop in Hastings, in an old Le Parfait jar; a German Weck preserving jar containing large salt crystals and lavender flowers, a present, I think, from Kristen. Above the stove, an old blue enameled sheet-metal salt box with a wooden lid, sel in a black ornate script, a raised sunburst design on the back, holding gros sel, rough, gray, slightly damp. The salt of my tears. Pure salt has no odor. Tears have no odor. I am weighed down by sorrow. Sadness has no odor, but it fills the room, and when women weep, it is said, their tears undo desire, dampening its flames. Salt extinguishes fire.

FER (iron): On the news, from Ukraine, the report of a field of bodies, Russian infantry, the foot soldiers sent out in wave upon wave as if from the trenches of the First World War. It was the day of Saint Tatiana in Ukraine, patron saint of students. Her eyes were torn from their sockets with hooks, for she refused to offer sacrifice to an idol, but four angels surrounded her, protecting her and striking her tormentors. Her wounds healed by the following day, such miraculous healing, and then she was stripped and beaten, her body slashed with razors. A sweet fragrance from her bleeding wounds filled the air. Her torturers felt that they were being beaten with iron rods wielded by angels, and nine of them fell to the ground, dead as doornails. The next day she healed again, had no wounds, no bleeding, and she called down thunder and lightning in the temple, destroying the idol. She was hung up, lashed, her breast cut off, healed again, so this time she was thrown to a lion, but the creature just licked her feet. She was thrown into a fire, but the flames did not burn her. At last, as clearly this could not be allowed to continue, she was beheaded with a sword and that put an end to Saint Tatiana, for heads do not grow back but instead circulate as relics.

Allegedly, Maximilien Bourdaloue “dipped his handkerchief in the blood of Louis XVI after his decapitation.” The handkerchief was stored in a calabash. Robespierre asked the legislators, who should be the organs and the interpreters of the eternal laws that the divinity dictated to men, to erase from the code of the French the blood laws that command judicial murders, and that their morals and their new constitution reject. But the king must die so the republic can live, and a people does not judge as does a court of law. It does not hand down sentences, it hurls down thunderbolts; it does not condemn kings, it plunges them into the abyss.

CUIVRE (copper): The 24th day of the revolutionary calendar and Friday the 13th of January in the Gregorian calendar. In the Julian calendar, it appeared as 23010, which seemed more or less the same I did not understand the Julian measure of time, and time is always a great complication, as Eleonora and I found this morning in a confusion about where I was and where she was, and in which time zone (this was one of the reasons my Capital reading group in two continents stopped meeting we were either too early or too late). Copper smells like blood, dulled and old, or blood smells like copper. I inherited some of my father’s copper pans, but they are of poor quality, heating too quickly and tending to burn, their tin linings melting.

CHAT (cat): In Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, the two copyists attempted to adopt and educate a horrible boy and his nasty sister. Their own Émile, Victor, boils a cat, which bursts from the pot, howling terribly, its dilated eyes as white as milk, and it dies as it rolls in agony in the ashes of the fireplace. It took a long time to clean up the kitchen; Bouvard quoted Rousseau, saying that a child has no responsibility, and cannot be moral or immoral, as if seeking an excuse for the child’s act. Pécuchet thought they might follow Bentham, that the punishment should be in proportion to the offense, a natural consequence, but none of the deprivations they considered would affect the odious Victor, whom they decided to treat as if he were ill, putting him to bed, but he was quite contented with that, lacking intellect and heart. They tried to cram his head with literary fragments, and following the advice of Madame Campan, selected the entire works of Rousseau. Victor and sly Victorine were left in the kitchen to become servants, and Flaubert’s manuscript broke off. Trying to get the stove to light in the dark of the early morning, I thought of all the cats who had passed through here, and especially Smudgelina, who would place her front paws neatly on the ledge beneath the doors of the stove and gaze dreamily into the flames.

ÉTAIN (tin): The day of the cat is snuggled between copper and tin, elements that, when mixed, form bronze. The bronze of bells and cymbals! The sounds of celebration! The commissioners serving the Directoire were instructed to note if the bells were still rung, in their observation of communal life. If the churches and chapels were shut, well, people could kneel in the village square, but sometimes the clappers were removed from the bells in the church towers, or the bell towers were demolished and the bells melted down. The days were no longer broken up by the bells. One can see how difficult it must have been, the villages and small towns, in the provinces, to adhere to the new measure of time, now there was no longer any religious authority over its distribution. If the only day of rest was a décadi, a day that had to prevail over the Sunday of the past, that would make for a long working week and a rather exhausting rhythm of time, despite Rousseau’s ideas about a natural religion in which every day was a shared collective holiday and nice work if you could get it, in that neat circle of equality. Sunday and décadi had to meet on equal terms, or rather the first be subsumed into the latter, despite the arithmetic and the disruption of seven into 10, 10 into seven, and an hour being twice as long, a minute a little longer, and a second a little shorter. A bitter wind blew, and the fires did not warm the rooms.

PLOMB (lead): Lena sent me her book Memento Mori pour Ni Une Mas! In 2003, she made her first plomb, her first lead tube, in an old factory for the production of ochre in the Bourgogne. Each folded lead was in memory of a murdered woman in Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua. The site Casa Amiga, established by friends and families of the victims, published a list of the murders, the disappeared. The leads were sent or given to people to carry, to hold, and where Lena knew or could find the person, the keeper of the lead, the memory, she photographed them. On each page of her book there is a photograph, the lead held in a hand or hands or lap, the keeper anonymous. The image is preceded in each case by a short account, the name of the woman commemorated, and with whom, where, and how the photograph was taken. In 2004 I carried the lead in memory of Miriam de Los Angeles, holding it like a baton in my right hand, resting the right wrist on my left hand on my knee.

ZINC (zinc): Zinc was burnt by alchemists to form philosophers’ wool, white snow, and of Saint Roseline. I signed an agreement for a crown of porcelain at the dentist this morning, fifty euros more than the composite. I should have called upon Saint Apollonia, saying the novena prayer: O Glorious Apollonia, Patron Saint of dentistry and refuge to all those suffering from diseases of the teeth, I consecrate myself to thee, beseeching thee to number me among thy clients.

MERCURE (mercury): Mercury or quicksilver is used in measurements of temperature and weather, and speed and mobility are the characteristics of the messenger to the gods. As Hermes, winged time, he also is the god of travelers and boundaries, of fertility, of sheep and shepherds. When mercury is found as cinnabar, it is ground to make vermilion pigment. Once it was used for tooth fillings, quicksilver crowns, an amalgam of mercury, silver, tin, and copper, but fear of mercury poisoning made people anxious. I found a small painting that had disappeared, a 24th or 25th birthday present to my son. It is a baroque gold mirror frame painted loosely on a dully reflective metal plate, like the tain of the mirror, the lusterless back, a surface without which no reflection is possible. Mirrors once had a tain of mercury and tin, the point of touch separate from its reflection, sparkling and crystalline. In Cocteau’s film Orphée, the Underworld is entered through a mirror, the molten effect produced by a bath of mercury which, unlike water, made no ripple, no concentric circles.

CRIBLE (sieve): I finished the final volume in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. The narrator ends Hearing Secret Harmonies as snow falls, quoting from Robert Burton’s An Anatomy of Melancholy: “I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumors of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged […]” The novel’s last line is “even the formal measure of the Seasons seemed suspended in the wintry silence.” Samuel Beckett returned to Ireland six years after the death of his mother, that “divil,” “all this stopping and starting again … devilish, devilish.” It was, he wrote, a dangerous place to come back to for any other purpose. Land and sea. A buried wasteland. Ashbins. Ashes (phosphorus ashes of the ink). Derrida writes: “The spirit which keeps watch in returning [en revenant, as a ghost] will always do the rest. Through flame or ash, but as the entirely other, inevitably.” The evening draws in. Night is falling. The month is at its end. I continue to light the stoves each day, as I will until April and the clement weather.