Free Spirits: Annals of the Insurgent Imagination

The insurgent imagination is the catalyst that draws together libertarian cultural currents in America and around the world. As old certainties vanish and institutions crumble, the free spirits in these annals refuse to succumb to the terrors of man, affirming instead the power to act, to risk, to invent the highest reality. If the 1960s was a decade of hopeful vision and the 1970s one of intensive focus on special issues by isolated radicals, today’s perilous times call for a new unity of revolutionary cultural forces to link daily life with all the arts. This could be called a surrealist anthology in the sense meant by André Breton when he called for the exaltation of reality rather than the depreciation of it. In 1929 there appeared, in the Belgian journal “Varierés,” a now famous surrealist map of the world. Totally missing from it was the United States, then recognized as a utilitarian, positivist, and jingoistic backwater. Today, however, many of the constellations investigated by the first surrealists are rising high over the American horizon: - the radical freedom of the individual: Ornette Coleman on Harmolodic; Nelson Algren and Ruse! Jaque on man’s nature; Franklin Rosemont on Dada poet & boxer Arthur Cravan; Ted Joans on the schizophrenic art of Adolph Wolfli. - the meeting-ground of materialist & idealist heritages: Joseph Jablonski’s long essay on Shaker and Ephrata millenarian communities’ undermining of patriarchy, capital, and private _property; Paul Buhle’s survey of the poet-prophets among immigrant American anarchists and socialists: Jim O’Brien’s view of the country from the standpoint of the beaver. - intersections of unconscious desire and conscious thought: Philip Lamantia on Alice Farley Dancing at Land’s End; Fred Woodworth on Mystery and Adventure: Angela Carter’s brillantly sreeevre “The Cabinet of Edgar Poe.” - seeing through the eyes of woman: anti-nuclear activist Joyce Stoller on Karen Silkwood, & filmmakers Nelly Kaplan, Alanis Obomsawin, and Pat Ferrero who talks with Nancy Joyce Peters on arts outside academies & markets; poets Jayne Cortez and others: Penelope Rosemont’s rediscovery of the marvelous Mary Mac Lane. - the vital poetic spirit of non-Western arts & ceremonials: Jamake Highwater on sacred — clowns and metaphor, Bill Cole on the oral tradition; C.L.R. James on the West Indies, Wilson Harris on voodoo, trance, poetry and dance. - dreaming the social revolution: anarchist Gustav Landauer and Wobbly Covington Hall; . E.P. Thompson on William Blake; a lively questionnaire on Celebrations directed by J. Karl Bogartte; an artist’s diatribe by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.