Damned and Rammed

 

One of the great books of my teenage life was “The World Turned Upside Down”, Christopher Hill’s masterpiece. Often disputed and disparaged, the book emanated a vibe, implicitly connecting up the Diggers in the English Revolution, and the multitude of wayfaring prophets in the highways and byways of that brief moment of freedom, with the Diggers in 1960s San Francisco, who were not yet through when Hill’s book was published in 1972. Implicitly is the big word here – for readers who were enduring the shocks of Nixon’s re-election, the Vietnam war “winding down” in big big puddles of blood, and the newly militarized younger generation of workers, The World Turned Upside down was not an antiquarian curiosity, but a utopian tract.

Peter Coyote, one of the founders of the diggers, wrote that Winstanley’s writing inspired the name. How did Winstanley arrive on the West Coast of California in 1966? I have to think that the San Francisco Mime Troupe with which both men were involved reflected Kenneth Rexroth’s influence more than the Beats. In Emmet Grogan’s Ringolevio, the name comes from some mysterious British history: “The name “Diggers” had been tossed forward by another member of the troupe who read about the seventeenth-century group in a British history book and felt that Emmett, Billy and their ideas about freedom resembled those of Gerrard Winstanley, William Everard and their one hundred supporters.”  This British history was almost surely Christopher Hill’s, who wrote a number of books in the sixties about the English Revolution. The quicksilver life of a book is something that escapes the academic game of “influence”; a book, a text, a graffitied slogan, a song, these are all things that go out there pentacostally and give people the shakes. Influence my ass - it is a permanent earthquake out there. 

The diggers were all well and good, but among the amazing figures in The World Upside Down, I immediately latched onto the obscure  Abiezer Coppe. This was a prophet to my liking, the kind one sees downtown in any huge urb, begging, getting drunk in the bus stop shelter, wearing garbage sacks. The evangelical movement in America and its awful roots elsewhere has drifted far from its radical beginnings, and is a sort of abusive household writ large. But the English Revolution and its American associates were made of different stuff. The older style of apocalyptic lit digs into the pork and corruption of a world that runs over the oppressed and sees its dark ends – the first who shall be last, here, include the rich evangelical types, being fed into the maw of some rich Bosch-style monster. When the World is turned Upside Down, the values that held it right side up will be turned upside down too – which means that profit seekers will suffer, while the idle will be rewarded for their intense study of the lilies of the field; which means that the pure to whom all was pure – the whores, wankers, tramps, schizos, pennyante artists, Sal Army Hall bedwetters, holy toothless fools, runaways, all the tranquillized children in all the foster homes, etc., etc. – will invade, with much hooting, the halls of power; the meek housewives who took up steak knives and studied their husband’s backs on all those electric lightbulb sick nights, Raymond Chandler’s heroines, will pack like Amazons and destroy the peace of mind we’ve all purchased by disciplining the libido, and banning the Id. Those mean streets, it turns out, are the streets of the New Jerusalem, and the mysteries here are beyond any that Philip Marlowe is programmed to solve.

Coppe, from Hill’s description, was an exemplary Ranter. He believed in free love, and drinking, and throwing himself under the wheels of luxurious carriages. He was a freelance prophet, not connected to the Diggers or Levelers and their more rational political schemes. When he was examined by the court, he supposedly bawled at them and tried to throw fruit about. He was more like Huck Finn’s father crossed with Ezekiel, if Ezekiel had been transplanted to the much colder climes of Albion. Then, of course, imprisonment, Cromwell’s reign, and the Restoration made him as lonely as a recalcitrant Yippie in the Reagan years, and he wilted away.

 Anyway, the intro to his most famous pamphlet, copped from the subgenius site, is rap of the highest caliber.

An inlet into the Land of Promise, the new Hierusalem, and agate into the ensuing Discourse, worthy of seriousconsideration.
My Deare One.
All or None.
Every one under the Sunne.
Mine own. My most excellent Majesty (in me) hath strangely and variously transformed this forme.
And beholde, by mine owne Almightinesse (in me) I have been changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the sound ofthe Trump.…

And it hath pleased my most excellent Majesty (who is universall love, and whose service is perfecte freedom) to set this forme (the Writer of this Roll) as no small signe and wonder in fleshly Israel; as you may partly see in the ensuing Discourse.

And now (my deare ones!) every one under the Sun, I will onely point at the gate; thorow which I was led into that new City,  Hierusalem, and to the Spirits of just men, made perfect,and to God the Judge of all.First, all my strength, my forces were utterly routed, my house I dwelt in fired; my father and mother forsook me, the wife of my bosome loathed me, mine old name was rotted, perished; and I was utterly plagued, consumed, damned, rammed, and sunke into nothing, into the bowels of the still Eternity (my mother'swomb) out of which I came naked, and whetherto I returned again naked. And lying a while there, rapt up in silence, at length(the body or outward forme being awake all this while) I heard with my outward eare (to my apprehension) a most terrible thunder-clap, and after that a second. And upon the second thunder-clap, which was exceeding terrible, I saw a great body of light, like the light of the Sun, and red as fire, in the forme of a drum (as it were) whereupon with exceeding trembling and amazement on the flesh, and with joy unspeakable in thespirit, I clapt my hands, and cryed out, Amen, Hallelujah,Hallelujah, Amen. And so lay trembling, sweating, and smoaking(for the space of halfe an hour) at length with a loud voyce (Iinwardly) cryed out, Lord, what wilt thou do with me; my most excellent majesty and eternal glory (in me) answered & sayd,Fear Not, I will take thee up into mine everlasting Kingdom. But thou shalt (first) drink a bitter cup, a bitter cup, a bittercup; whereupon (being filled with exceeding amazement) I was throwne into the belly of hell (and take what you can of it inthese expressions, though the matter is beyond expression) I was among all the Devils in hell, even in their most hideous hew.”

Those thunder claps – you won’t hear them in any American church. They sound, instead, in Finnegan’s Wake.  Which is a bittercup commentary on what we have all become, my deare ones, in this age of Late Looting.