| streetnotes | Xcp | Fall 1999 |
Daniel
Kerr
A Complete Perfect Nothingness: Oral Histories of Three Homeless Men and an Oral Historian on Cleveland's Public Square"
Mixed by,
Daniel Kerr
1. The Motivation
2. The Setting
3. On The Interviews
4. On The Transcriptions
5. The
Analytic Tools
6. Harmolodic
Performances
6.05 On Homelessness
6.10 On the Economics of Homelessness
6.15 On White People
6.20 On the Source of Knowledge
6.25 On the Meaning of Life
6.30 Why Historians Exist
6.35 On Being an Artist
6.40 Sanity/Insanity
6.45 On Criminality and Criminality
6.50 On Greed and Money
6.55 On Armageddon
6.60 On a Better World
The following written performance is a product of my attempt to bring worlds together and build solidarity across material, intellectual, and cultural borders. This is done in the belief that these performances are a necessary in the struggle to build a better world. Borders are designed and built to block movement. Some barriers, like the wall between Mexico and the United States create isolated and fragmented labor pools that facilitate incredible degrees of exploitation by multi-national corporations. The United States/Mexican border presents us with a remarkable visible manifestation of a deeply rooted phenomenon that can be found in perhaps less visible forms in other geographic locations. This written performance meanders across borders of race, class, and disciplines in an attempt to build solidarity and understand reality in a Northern rust belt city.
Two of the performers in this piece posit that we are stuck, immobilized in deep ruts. Imbedded in their belief is a desire that we create movement. This requires we liberate ourselves from the inherent passivity of the spectator and enter into the world of performance so that we may take action upon the world. Once we animate ourselves outside of the routine of our lives, Guy Debord argues that we will begin to see, better understand, and resist the structures in the psychogeography which restrict our movements.1 With this in mind, I attempted to develop and utilize the tools of oral history as a means to cross borders, and travel down forbidden roads.
In her workshop, "The Map of Oppression," the popular educator Maria Lugones argues each of us can be drawn onto both a map of oppression that serves those in power and a map of resistance by which we may undermine our prescribed roles and identities serving those in power. She asks us to take out our magnifying glasses and look at our maps carefully, to trace the roads which go to and from different people's spots. These roads are not in the same state of repair. Some say "forbidden entrance," "rough road," or "dead end," while other roads are made for people without power to travel all the time. The roads between the powerful are well kept, while the roads between the oppressed are marked "travel at you own risk." Lugones argues that we must develop means to come together and redraw the roads in a "mischievous, energetic, active, and creative" fashion. 2
The oral historian can be placed perhaps on both of these maps. The oral historian may serve those in power by collecting, and capture bits of information to bring back, analyze, and develop within the confines of the academy. Especially if these are put to use by the state and private corporations to come to a better understanding of those at the margins in order to develop more sophisticated forms of social control. Many of us however, want to draw an alternative map of resistance, one in which we can understand ourselves. This is the force that has animated my own performance.
The following has been produced by traveling down the rough roads while
at the same time avoiding the impulse to capture, contain, and colonize.
I have employed certain tools of oral history down these roads, while I
have attempted to avoid others options which might have made my return
to the academy a little smoother. This involved an attempt
to build and form new tools by drawing on techniques that have developed
in other disciplines. The intent has been to form a resistant means
of communication that may smooth the path by which we can share liberatory
gifts and develop resistance.
Public Square is located at the center of Cleveland's business district. The interviews were conducted on the southwest quadrant across the street from the a luxury hotel, The Renaissance, and an upscale urban mall, Tower City. From this position, when one looks up they find themselves nestled between Cleveland's largest skyscrapers: the Terminal Tower, the BP Building, and the Key Tower. To the immediate North one sees the Criminal Justice Building with its tower of slatted windows looking into and out from Cleveland's local holding cells. Public Square is Cleveland's transportation hub, where busses from all across the metropolitan area converge. Clevelander's who are reliant on the busses both rush from stop to stop to transfer busses and wait for the bus that will take them on the next leg of their journey. On Sundays, the day each of these interviews were taken, most of the suburbanites are gone and Public Square is primarily left to those waiting for busses, an occasional shopper, skateboarders, and the homeless.
Public Square is an especially important site for Cleveland's homeless men on the weekends. The public men's shelters exist about twenty blocks to the east and series of scattered homeless encampments run along the Cuyahoga river valley to the immediate west. With most of the temporary labor agencies closed, few soup kitchens open, and no drop-in centers available for homeless men, these men turn to Public Square, the public library (one block east of Public Square) and Tower City. Tower City and the library take on increased importance in the winter months as they provide two of the only places in the city where homeless men can stay warm. In part, because of the existence of several drop-in centers for homeless women on Sundays, a much smaller number of homeless women gather on the square.
I learned much of this social geography/psychogeography as a result
of my participation in a group called Food Not Bombs. A small group
of people including myself began collecting food, preparing it, and distributing
it on the streets of Cleveland. Several people led us and our hot
food on a hunger tour of the City of Cleveland. Like other homeless
men, Food Not Bombs settled onto Public Square on Sundays across the street
from Tower City and the Renaissance hotel. Each week for close to
a year prior to these interviews, I helped bring down hot food, sat and
ate with and talked and listened to numerous homeless men. It was
through this context that I came to be known by JD, God, and Deuce.
Re-opening a dialogue between two human worlds, which long ago ceased to speak to each other is a difficult enterprise, and it causes many burning humiliations.
-Ernesto DeMartino 3
Fieldwork is meaningful as the encounter of two subjects who recognize each other as subjects, and therefore separate and seek to build their equality upon their difference in order to work together.It is a difficult endeavor to build a conversation across the significant divides which separated me from the men I interviewed. Each of the men I interviewed are Black and at the time of the interview were living on the street or as in the case of God had formerly lived on the street (at the time of the interview, God was staying with his brother). Both God and JD are close to ten years older than me and Deuce is approximately my same age. The interviews made it painfully clear throughout that I am a white man with a home and a potential for a successful career. I was the only one who did not grow up in the Black neighborhoods on the near eastside of Cleveland. These neighborhoods have faced incredible pressures in the last forty years resulting from arson, bulldozers, the expansion of the tentacles of the Cleveland Clinic, drugs (specifically crack cocaine), and the war on drugs, which has forced a significant percentage of the eastside population into Ohio's prison system.
-Allesandro Portelli 4
My recognition of these differences was not entirely new and had been partially formed in the conversations I had with people prior to these interviews. Bringing down food to the square week after week helped me recognize to some extent the possibilities I had for maneuvering within my identity and changing the perceptions of me held by the people who came to eat. Numerous comments made me aware that initially I was viewed within the paradigm of the white Christian missionary bringing food to disadvantaged Black folks. With the exception of a few minimal public services, homeless services in Cleveland are dominated by various churches. Through a combination of the way Food Not Bombs shared its food, the conversations I had with people, poetry readings, speak-outs, and flyers we made available about our organization, perceptions began to change. People went from seeing us as missionaries, to a throw back to sixties radicals, to an understanding that our agenda was primarily to help strengthen a setting where people could communicate and network with each other.
This background motivated me to conduct the interviews as well as construct the methodology by which they were conducted. Each of the interviewees volunteered to participate after I asked a larger crowd of people at a gathering around the Food Not Bombs free feast. I asked if anyone would like to talk about their life histories and experiences with homelessness on tape. I conducted the interviews with JD, God, and Deuce on separate Sundays in September 1996. Prior to the interviews JD, God, and Deuce agreed to allow transcriptions of the interviews to be viewed by other people that attended the feast as well as used for future publications. In each of the interviews the weather was typical fall weather for Cleveland. It was brisk and a steady breeze blew off of the lake. People were eating nearby and occasionally would stop over to listen. Pigeons were always fairly close by and cars, busses, and taxis would now and again honk their horns. Dozens of skateboarders could be seen and heard performing a variety of acrobatics.
Rather than approach the interviews with a battery of preset questions, I attempted to engage and respond to what each of the interviewees were saying. The reasoning was to create an interview structure that would push me to pay careful attention to the words and communication of the interviewees and avoid making assumptions about what the important issues were in their lives. At the same time, I avoided the disembodied fly on the wall approach, which would leave the interviewees solely with their own notions by which to evaluate who they were sharing their stories with. By actively participating in the conversation and revealing aspects of myself and my politics, I did not free myself from Deuce, God, and JD's assumptions, rather I attempted to create a setting where they could develop a thicker and more complex understanding of who I was. The spontaneity and improvisational quality in the actual performance of the interviews reminded me of earlier experiences I have had in performing improvisational jazz dance in various subways and theaters in New York City. This prompted the analytic direction the project would later take.
Through this methodological approach I have hoped to follow Allesandro
Portelli's lead in using the interview as a consciousness raising tool
for both the interviewer and the interviewee. Portelli argues that
the interview should not be structured as consisting of one abstract person
and one reified person, rather it should be used as a tool to bring two
people together to share knowledge and create a new synthesis. He
goes beyond Antonio Gramsci's concept of the organic intellectual, which
keeps questions of privilege in the background, and Gianni Bossio's formulation
of the researcher as organizer and "upside down" intellectual. Portelli
demonstrates that Bossio fails to deal with the internal contradictions
within the intellectual that are revealed in the process of the interview.
For Portelli, the "awkward word 'I'" is relevant. My desire behind
the methodological approach I incorporated was to create a setting within
the performance of the interview by which Deuce, God, JD and I could come
to a greater understanding of ourselves as well as each other.5
This process perhaps most reveals my inexperience as an oral historian. In this process I followed the lead of Allesandro Portelli with a little more apprehension. Portelli argues that he is not interested in developing closer methods of transcription. He maintains that it is impossible to include in a transcription all the changes in intonation, the switch from one rhythm to another, and the length of significant pauses.6 Although I am entirely in agreement with him that the original interviews can never be accurately reproduced in text, I am less convinced with him that closer methods of transcription are not necessary. The reason, however, that I did not attempt to do this was that I felt even more uncomfortable as a white man trying to use alternative spellings and punctuation to convey the words of Black men. Prolonging the isolated performance of transcribing the interviews held little appeal for me as well. With this said, the reader should be aware that the transcribed texts of the interviews provide very few clues to God, JD, and Deuce's pronunciation, speed of deliverance, intonation, and pauses in narration in their interviews.
Despite this ambivalence, I still believe the transcriptions and the process of transcription provide another valuable consciousness raising tool. Listening to the tapes of JD, God, and Deuce over and over again made it clear to me the parts of the interviews where I had not really heard what they said in their original performance. My isolated performance in the transcription process consisted in my paying even closer attention to the words JD, God, Deuce and I used in my attempt to recreate them on paper. I presented JD, God and Deuce with the transcriptions of our interviews and asked them if they thought the transcriptions were acceptable and needed any changes. I also asked them by what name they would like to known in future publications. They found the present transcriptions acceptable and suggested the names that are found in this publication.
The virtual reality of the transcriptions offered me as well as Deuce,
JD, and God with a chance to analyze from a different spatial and temporal
position our original performances. They also create the possibility
that others can reflect on our words as well as their own selves in relation
to our words in a way that the ephemeral and passing reality of our original
performances could not. It was and is my hope that these transcriptions
can provide an impetus for the creation of a more in depth and complex
discussion among those who gather on Public Square on Sundays, as well
those who do not, on the reality we find ourselves in.
"For some reason America builds a caste system in the business concept. It's a way to avoid having relationships and having relationships with other races and enjoying creativity from outside their identity."In attempting to develop analytic tools, I decided to turn to the writings of a man, Ornette Coleman, who I had briefly met while doing performances in the subways of New York. As a prolific jazz musician, Coleman has traveled down the restricted access roads of radical music theory. The urgings of the oral historian Allesandro Portelli, that oral historians have a lot to learn from music theory, convinced me I was not traveling down a dead end road in my attempt to translate Coleman.8
-Ornette Coleman 7
It is in the organization of the snippets of quotations from the texts of the interviews that I believe I have been most influenced by the musical theories of Ornette Coleman. In order to make his work on harmolodics applicable, I have had to translate it to another artistic medium, the written word. The practice of transcription and translation of oral interviews into text makes me believe that this is both possible and desirable.
Ornette Coleman offers the following explanation of harmolodics:
Basically what you are doing in harmolodics is relying on the information that goes into composing, playing and improvising forms. You are relying on everything you have experienced as shapes and forms and sounds... So when you are able to play (harmolodics), it expresses what sounds could be if they weren't programmed to represent certain territory. It has to do with what you base a concept of unity on.9
The essence of harmolodics is to make yourself as perceptive as possible to as much that exists in the world that one can. Not only should we be perceptive of this phenomenon, we should allow it to influence our future performances and perceptions. By doing this we undermine our programmed way of perceiving things which rests on a European caste system that needs to divide and isolate. In this process we are attempting to redefine what unity means. For Coleman, the traditional and oppressive meaning of unity is linked to the concept of harmony. This necessitates that individual sounds blend into each other in a hierarchical totality. Coleman has attempted to develop a form of music that does not subordinate certain sounds to others. In what may appear to be a cacophony of noises, each sound retains its integrity while at the same time is given new meaning in relation to other sounds.10
We are programmed to hear certain things in certain ways and read them in certain ways as well. If I listen to the recordings of the interviews or read the transcripts one at a time, I will likely hear them according to my relative position in the structure of power that might further reproduce embedded hierarchies. The tendency in academics would be to analyze the interviews and offer an expert diagnosis. However, Coleman's theory on harmolodics would suggest that if I transpose the interviews together, overlap them simultaneously, different meaning will be revealed from the interviews although they are saying the same things. The polyphony of words, sounds, and meaning will presumably upset our capacity to incorporate the interviews into embedded hierarchical structures. This new meaning can represent a unity which is based on something other than a harmonic unity. Coleman wants us to break out of the European musical caste system to allow for fuller and greater expression. I'm attempting to join in his efforts by translating this to the linguistic caste system found in the written text.11
The manner in which I have spliced and intermixed segments of the transcribed interviews could be viewed as analogous to the process by which DJ's mix beats and vocals of pre-recorded material, in the process creating an altogether new product. Unlike more mainstream DJ's, I have attempted to avoid subordinating certain segments to others. My attempt at using harmolodics theory came into play after I had completed the transcriptions of the interviews.
My initial reading of the three interviews pointed to very few crossovers and similarities. There divergence is in part a product of the open-ended approach I took in conducting the interviews. This by and large subverted any attempt to create a more traditional harmonic and synthetic narrative. Instead I attempted to read the texts in a harmolodic fashion. This required reading, reading, and rereading the transcripts next to each other, one after the other, and in different orders until I began to see/imagine interconnections and associations. The process could perhaps be seen as akin to free association. Rather than developing these associations in a strictly disciplinary fashion, I attempted to take Coleman up on opening my mind to everything I have experienced in terms of words, shapes, and sounds.12 Where different texts other than the transcriptions sprang into mind, I made an effort to locate them and intersperse them with the appropriate segments (Audre Lourde, Michel Foucault, Plato). Far from being an attempt to reflect reality in a direct and "objective" fashion, this is an explicitly and quite self-consciously fabricated creation that could nevertheless lead to insights into reality that may not otherwise have been possible.
I have developed harmolodic linkages by taking sections of transcribed
texts and placing them under a heading that in some way attempts to name
what I perceived to be the textual convergence. Clearly there are
countless other harmolodic links that have been left out or could be formed
by others using the same transcriptions or new ones. This is one
attempt at creating a harmolodic textual performance. The performance,
however, requires some participation on the readers behalf. We are
programmed to read in a linear fashion, one word at a time. For this
reason I would suggest that after reading each section of the interviews
the reader step back from the text and reflect on it in a way that allows
each of the quotations to read in different orders and simultaneously,
allowing the words to interweave themselves. Coleman would suggest
that we especially need to pay attention to particular words that may be
used in altogether different contexts. Although the texts are segmented
and organized under different headings, do not let these block you from
seeing interconnections across the headings. But beware of attempts
to isolate and contain sections of the interviews for the purposes of diagnosing
and controlling them. This signifies that we have fallen back into
the prescribed rut of harmonic production.
"I've been homeless now for about six months. It's time for me now to get myself out of it because of the weather. The weather's been so good... I think I was born to be an outdoors person. I love being outdoors. Especially when I can look up at the stars. I love to fish. I've never really wanted to hunt, because I don't believe in needlessly taking animals lives." -JD
"I'm homeless... this is a choice for me to be homeless, but there are a few things that I've done that have made me like this... I can't just rather just go out and totally be nothing because I don't think no human being as far as being homeless is just going to stand there and not eat and not use the bathroom because of their problem. This is the bottom right here for me. This is the bottom... I didn't really know myself because I was living in the fast lane. So now I'm kind of coming down to reality that now I have to, it's like an adventure every day. Everyday is different... I have my days where I go into depression and think two years ago I was doing this, now look at me now I'm homeless. No place to go, no place to live. I've got to start from the bottom, I've got to start all over again with life. It's like I'm being reborn right now down here." -Deuce
"God does not at this time have no hands, no arms or anything. All he had was a big huge brain floating into space, he then started getting a state of depression... because he didn't have no purpose of his existence. So then God started becoming depressed, unhappy, and crying. So God decided that there had to be some purpose and meaning to his existence." -God
"And I thank God that I did come down here
to be homeless, to see the real world, to see the other people that don't
have nothing as of when I was having something, I should have cherished
that. So this is my punishment. This is not a good feeling.
It's good to know that I can make it. I had it like that. Other
people can't make it, and it's bad to know that." -Deuce
6.10 On the Economics of Homelessness
"I'm going to tell you now, it's hard to make
a living in Cleveland, Ohio. The jobs out here they give you, they give
you Minute Men and Man Talk. Some of these jobs they got right now
should be more than minimum wage, because I've done work those that use
Ameritemp and Minute Men just to get that work done they'll pay you four
and a quarter...I worked at Atlas, Shamrock Steel, Ferrolux Steel, Freely's.
Factory work! Where people should be getting a decent amount of money just
to work those few hours. How can you help somebody and how can anyone
help themselves if they come back after eight hours of work and only see
$25 to $30 dollars on their check and they're homeless. That's impossible.
And with the rent here in Cleveland, that's nothing. You have to
either go through somebody or welfare to get cheap rent. You know,
and everybody don't want to do that. And when you go through welfare
and these little programs to get to where you can get cheap rent, it takes
so long for you to get it. And then at that time, I figure by that
time you could have been got on your feet. But you see you try been
got on your feet, you can't get on your feet making no $4.25. So
it's hard, so as the rent like, $350 a month, how can a man survive on
the street paying $350 a month and he's making $4.25. They say it's
going to go up next month to $4.75. Bullshit! Excuse me, but
that's no money. I think you have to get either seven dollars and
over to live comfortably. Now everything else is extra...You want
a phone. What's the sense of getting an apartment and you don't have
a phone. A phone and then you got furniture, and were talking about
homeless people coming from dirt coming up. So how could you get
a job making $7.00 an hour and you're homeless. The answer is you
can't. So we're out here stuck...I've been out here three months,
and its been the hardest three months of my life. And I figure like
this, I look at the people who have been out here longer than me.
And there's this one guy who's been out here three years. Now if
he saved all his money up for three years maybe he could afford an apartment
as of right now. But if he saved up all of his money for a month,
he couldn't afford it so that's why he's stuck down here. And then
half of the homeless are on drugs. You can't get nowhere if you're
already at the bottom." -Deuce
"So they grow (coca) out of the ground. This is God's creation. Now they use that cocaine in novocaine for numbness and all, that and for medicines in hospitals. Where does the other half go. They make (cocaine) chemically and now that you can mix baking soda with cocaine and come up with crack...Who do you think invented that? The white man did. The white man invented everything. The white man put it on the market for it to sell. Now that was back then. The white people was selling it before the black people." -Deuce
"I, with personal experience, knew that people was people. There was no color and that only a fool would try and judge a person by his color and not his character. I feel these guy's who say things like, "Why do you hang around white people?" I try and understand them, but they're stuck somewhere while the world is still moving. They're stuck. I think they should get on with their lives. I really do." -JD
"I'm not going to sit here and, you can look at me and see I'm a white guy, but I'm certainly not going to sit here and defend white people because I know that white people have done enough fucked up shit to deserve a lot of that." -Dan
"I know that they can be cruel. Some of them can be cruel. But like all people, in all people you will find good and you will find bad." -JD
"I'm reading a book in history about Native
Americans and there is a story in the book that says that about 300 years
ago these two Native Americans were walking through the woods and one of
them saw a rat, killed it and said, "That's a sign the white man is going
to take this land." -Dan
6.20 On the Source of Knowledge
"Some people get their knowledge from the Bible. Some people get their knowledge from other people telling them. You see people believe what they read or what they hear. You see all you have to do is go deep within yourself and find the truth." -God
"I've heard that accusation, that I'm contributing to the stereotype, that I'm saying the province of intelligence and rationality belongs to the white male. But if you're traveling a road that begins nowhere and ends nowhere, the ownership of the road is meaningless If you have no land out of which the road comes, no place that the road goes to, geographically no goal, then the existence of the road is totally meaningless. Leaving rationality to the white man is like leaving him a piece of that road that begins nowhere and ends nowhere." -Audre Lourde13
"I met some of the smartest people in the world (in the penitentiary). I met some of the most talented people. That's why they say this world out here is so full of fools. Because all the wise people are behind the walls. I got so much knowledge from those people. I learned more in my seven years than I've learned my lifetime out here." -JD
"I listen to these older guys and I learn off of them, but then I ask them as in the present as in right now what are you going to do. They have no questions, they have nothing to say then. That's when I can really relate to them. because I'm not as old as them, you know back in the day they would have told me better. Whatever they told me, "Well this is your fault, this is what I done, this is where I am, but I want you to do better." But I want them to do better too. Just as well as I'm trying to do better." -Deuce
"And some of the times crack will make you think that you are smarter than another." -Deuce
"And as for the man who would try to set them free and lead them up to the light, do you not think that they would seize him and kill him if they could?" -Plato, The Republic, Book VII
"I used to think it was a conspiracy, but
now I think it is a plan they now already know. There could be one
of these guys in the office probably selling keys right now and we don't
know about it. And you can never know. If you know too much
you can wind up in jail or get set up or you're going to get killed.
So it's a dangerous life when you mess around with drugs."
-Deuce
"You see I know that if you find a bunch of
garbage and put it in a trash can and someone else finds a bunch of garbage
and puts it in a trash can and the sun hit it, you can grow life in the
sun. You see life is what we can call a basic bad accident.
There is no purpose to it." -God
"Then (God) decided that man would one day
wonder where his existence had come from so he created a type of history
for mankind. And this is why mankind believes the history that's
on earth, because God set up the whole history of the meaning of life.
He directed certain people to write a Bible, certain people to plant dinosaur
bones, and certain stories to have people believe there was a George Washington,
an Abraham Lincoln, and a state of slavery. These are all basic fabrications
to give people a story of where their existence comes from."
-God
"I draw in order to ease my mind. But the only thing I have to ease my mind is because I'm in this society...You (referring to his friends) want to see me in a studio in New York, for what? Your benefit?...So what I get me a studio and then I do all this great art work and then I die and then you sell all my paintings and then you all get rich. Not me man. I had enough. I've had enough of this society. I want to leave. I want to go. I want to be somewhere, where the animals can come up to me. Well I suppose here there are some pigeons. But I try to keep the pigeons away from me." -JD
"Well see if you want to know the difference
between the buildings you can tell by the old construction. You see
the newer buildings don't have the designs on them. You see that
building over there? Do you see that eagle over there?...And you
see the Terminal Tower, do you see all the flowers, eagles and designs
and you see the May Company with all the flowers and the clock up there?
You see these buildings are over a hundred years old. The artistic
design is better. They're more sturdy and more strong. It took
a lot of patience and love and work to develop these buildings...Let's
say I'm the one that did all the architectural work for all these buildings...You
can tell by the designs of my buildings that they are my buildings.
My buildings have a distinctive trademark on them, all of them...What would
you think God's love is? What is the beautification of God's love?...Okay
the most loving thing in our existence, if you can't see it, is a flower."
-God
"When I went to CPI (Cleveland Psychiatric Institute) it helped me really because I used to like being around those people to see how they feel. Because these are interesting people. Most of them are not crazy. Most of them are so talented that people think that they are crazy. But the bottom line is we all have a little insanity. No one is completely sane. You show me one sane person and he should be president. I don't think there's one out here." -JD
"(C)rack will make you go crazy. It
will make you lose your head." -Deuce
6.45 On Criminality and Criminality
"I never was a thief. The way of my drug habit, if I couldn't have it, I just didn't have it. But when I got the money, I'd probably try to sell and try to flip the money, and use the... see, now I've been clean for thirteen days now. Thirteen clean days. And I never smoked a pipe. I never smoked a pipe, I smoked it primo, crack and reefer." -Deuce
"I was stealing. When I went to Atlanta, that was when I committed my first robbery. But I wasn't going on the street robbing people. I robbed a business. I used to rob stores like Sears Roebuck that used to be on Euclid and Giant Tigers used to be on Euclid. That's about as far as we used to go. We'd steal some stuff out of Giant Tigers. We used to occasionally even steal something out of somebody's house, but I wasn't going around with hoodies saying, "What do you got, empty your pockets." When you pull a gun on someone you have to be ready to pull that trigger...You have to be ready to die." -JD
"It was evident that the great spectacle of punishment ran the risk of being rejected by the very people to whom it was addressed...(T)his is why the disadvantages (of the public execution) became a political danger - the people never felt closer to those who paid the penalty than in those rituals intended to show the horror or the crime and the invincibility of power; never before did a people feel more threatened, like them, by a legal violence exercised without moderation or restraint." -Michel Foucault14
"This crack comes from the system man, just
plain old downright the system. To my knowledge I think you know
when they make drug busts, these policemen do, we never see these drugs
to where they're taking it...Where do all them drugs go to? It goes
right back on the street...So I think they put it right back on the street
and it's not fair to take a man to jail for selling the drug and then you
put it right back out there on the street to sell it again to take somebody
to jail." -Deuce
"Sometimes, I'm not going to lie, sometimes I think the devil get in me, the devil get in everybody. And that's what he's doing now. The little white devil is controlling a lot of people. And you see he's a sneaky motherfucker because he only controls you when you got the money. You know and then again he controls you when you don't got the money too. Because he leaves you to see how can you get some money to get high man. How can you get some money to get high? And you see if they homeless, that makes it even worse. So now they can go rob and steal, they don't care if they go to jail. As long as they get that hit. And that's where we are stuck at right now. That's where our people are stuck at." -Deuce
"I believe we'd have things a lot more together if it wasn't for the greed factor...Like if you throw some bread down you'll see a few pigeons trying to beat up the rest of the pigeons to get some bread. You could throw enough bread to feed them all, but there will still be a few that will try and chase the rest of them away. He's so greedy he'll think he has to have it all. There are people in the world like that. Like if there is fifty dollars I'm putting on the table and there's five of you all, you all split it. And then I say it will be on the table in the morning when you all wake up. You'll have one greedy person who is going to get up while everyone is asleep and take it all." -JD
"But that example seems to pail in comparison to the greed we see out here." -Dan
"Yeah, that's what I'm saying by greed.
Like this guy, whoever owns this (pointing to the Terminal Tower) is greedy.
And this guy (pointing to the BP building) comes along and says I'm going
to do one bigger than that, he's greedy. Now look at here (pointing
to the tallest of the three skyscrapers, Key Tower) He says these
guys think they got it going on. I'm going to build one bigger than
him. These people, they are all going to pay the price when the price
is coming. Places like this, we'll never see the top of it.
If I went to the top of it right now, security would drop me off onto the
street. These buildings aren't for the people." -JD
"Well one day very soon, we all will one day very soon, one day very soon we will all reach a state of non-existence. You see it says in the Bible that when a person is born in the world you're supposed to cry and feel sorry for them. When a person dies, you're supposed to party and feel happy for them. So one day very soon everything will be completely non-existent. It will be the end of existence very soon...You see I have proof and bunches of examples of our non-existence by the year two thousand...I mean what I am saying is that the more it gets closer to the year two thousand, the worser the examples are going to be." -God
"This is how the world is going to go out. This world is going to go out by using drugs and killing each other." -Deuce.
"I don't see nothing getting no better. This is not the worst. I hear people saying well things can't get worser. That's the biggest piece of doodoo I've ever heard. Things are only going to get worser, because these are the signs of the time. It is getting close to the time where our messiah, Jesus is on his way." -JD
"Cocaine with the devil can damn near kill
you. And that's what it is doing right now in this whole entire world.
That little white devil. It's taking over." -Deuce
"I don't think this shift from conquering
problems to experiencing life is a one generational shot or a single investment.
I believe it is a whole signature which you try to set in motion and have
some input into. But I'm not saying that women don't think or analyze.
Or that white does not feel. I'm saying that we must never close
our eyes to the terror, to the chaos which is Black which is creative which
is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy which is sinister,
smelly erotic confused upsetting..."
-Audre Lourde15
"If it was my vision, I would envision all these buildings, all them planes, all these things that make men look great, I would have them abolished and wiped out. I would have it where people would live in their log cabins and all their fire wood to where we would hunt our food, grow our food...It ain't so easy where you can run these cows through the slaughter machine and all these chickens, chickens behind chickens running through a thing getting their head cut off. No, you have to go out and hunt for that food...You could keep a few chickens. Everybody would get a couple of cows, a couple of pigs. That's enough to live by. Everybody would get a little piece of land and you could plant yourself some potatoes, carrots, greens, whatever. It will work. It will work. I always said I would love to live in this kind of place. Preferably in a warm hot climate where I wouldn't have to worry abut the winter months. Where I could build me a nice little cabin, go where the fruits and vegetables are so I could get some fruits and vegetables, and always around some water where I could fish. And always keep me a few chickens and I would be happy. I wouldn't even need the radio or tv." -JD
"The solidarity of a whole population of people that we would call petty offenders - vagrants, false beggars, the indigent poor, pick pockets, receivers and dealers in stolen goods - was constantly expressed: resistance to police searches, the pursuit of informers, attacks on the watch or inspectors provide abundant evidence of this. And it was breaking up this solidarity that was becoming the aim of penal and police repression. Yet out of the ceremony of the public execution, out of that uncertain festival in which violence was instantaneously reversible, it was this solidarity much more than the sovereign power that was likely to emerge with redoubled strength." -Michel Foucault16
"The only way we can stop people from using crack cocaine is if they want to come together to stop themselves. Because if a person say I'm not going to use that and the guy say you want to buy this twenty, he don't have no sale. He's not going to buy no product from the big guy, and the big guy knowing that he can't find nothing he can't distribute to the little guys, he's not going to buy it. So the big guy knowing that he can't find nothing he can't distribute to the little young guys, he's not going to buy it. So the big guy is not going to distribute it out because he knows that he ain't going to make no money in Cleveland. That's the only way it's going to stop. It ain't going to stop with the police cracking down, because the police are going to put it right back out here. It ain't going to crack down if they just get a few drug guys off...it's got to crack down with the person that's using. If the person that's using that don't want to use just say no to the people that's distributing, their little peddlers, and then from the peddlers knowing they can't make no money to maybe now they want to get a job. They aren't going to buy from the big man. And then the big man ain't going to buy from the other big man. So that's my version of how I think people can get along better and how the drugs will stop." -Deuce
"And you see he told people that when they
die they would go to a heaven and hell. Which in reality the heaven
and hell is already here on earth. And he knows that if you don't
exist, don't exist at all, you'd be better off than being in any heaven
or hell living for eternity trying to keep yourself entertained and happy...We
can't look at it as being a reality that there is no such thing as heaven
or hell. It's something we call non-existence...So when you have
the whole world, the whole universe in a state of non-existence, you have
perfect nothing, non-existence. Anyone would be happy. You
would have no pain, no suffering, everyone would be rich. Everyone
would be in a state of being where they would not need anything or want
anything. It will be complete perfection, a complete perfect nothingness."
-God
Some of the works on homelessness that
I have found compelling include, Gregg Barak, Gimme Shelter: A Social
History of Homelessness in Contemporary America, (New York: Praeger,
1991); Stephanie Golden, The Women Outside: Meanings and Myths of Homelessness,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Kim Hopper and Jill Hamberg,
The Making of America's Homeless: From Skid Row to New Poor, 1945-1984,
(New York: Community Service Society of New York, 1984); Joanne Passaro,
The
Unequal Homeless: Men in the Streets, Women in their Place, (New York:
Routledge, 1996); and David Wagner, Checkerboard Square: Culture and
Resistance in a Homeless Community, (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993).
(c)3FC3 Publishing 1998
Reproduced by permission from
the author.
Daniel Kerr has
been active in homeless and housing issues for the past six years. He squatted
in New York City in Dos Blocos (RIP) from 1994-1995, Helped form the Squatter
Theater Action Brigade (STAB) and was an active participant in Eviction
Watch, NYC. In 1996, he returned to his home town, enrolled in Case Western
Reserve's Graduate History Program and co-founded Food Not Bombs, Cleveland,
AKA Food for the Formation of a Collective Critical Consciousness (3FC3).
A Complete Perfect Nothingness is one of 3FC3's original projects
and is a part of an ongoing attempt to build dialogue on Cleveland's Public
Square about the complexities of the homeless experience.
| top of page | streetnotes | xcp |