Acknowledgments

            There are various people without whom this book would not have been possible. Firstly, I would like to thank the homeless woman, whose named I never learned, who stood with me outside the New York Public Library in Manhattan for 2 or 3 hours in 1980. She explained to me at great length the result of her researches in the library, where she stayed when it was cold.  She pointed out to me the skyscrapers of Newsweek, Time-Life, and other publishers and Banks and told me that all our problems are dispensed from there. She lucidity explained how much she suffered living on the street. She was fragile, human and honest. Her thinking processes reflected well the suffering she had undergone. Most people would call her mad, but her madness expressed sense that most do not have. She explained, for instance, that the diamond mines of South Africa were part of an effort to offer false riches, and seduce people into inhuman thinking and the rigors of mind control. She said that the diamond mines, and similar economic interests, had corrupted the cultural mind and helped persecute the innocent all over the world. Her research had led her to believe that origin of the inhuman powers that rule us today goes back at least as far as Tom Jefferson, whom she was convinced had betrayed his own people.  She pointed out various corporate sculptures that stood in front of various corporate skyscrapers, notably IBM, if I remember correctly, and explained that the corporation had corrupted art and that such art no longer represented the people. What I carried away from this woman was a love for her wounded humanity, and a respect for a mind that had faced power in its ugliest and most brutal realities, but still held on by trying to explain and in explaining, to find hope beyond the horrors of what she suffered.

            I also wish to thank the homeless woman I talked with in San Francisco some years ago, who explained to me the notion of paradox. I had asked her what the difference was between the complex and the simple and she said that there was no real difference,  a "concrete waterfall" is both complex and simple. She grasped paradoxes which the more literal minded and scientific do not see. I also wish to thank another homeless man, who told me recently that god is merely an advertisement for machines.  I dedicate this book to the homeless, who often see more clearly than those who are exalted in formal education.

            I also wish to think Jack Hirschman, a poet and near homeless friend in San Francisco, who first made me aware, concretely, of the voices of people all over the world who are denied basic rights because of regimes of knowledge and power.

            I also thank my committee,  Don Ramos and Lee Makela,  who have generously helped me steer my way into the paradox of history and my own life. And Jim Borchert, who, perhaps because of his researches for Alley Life in Washington, has been especially sympathetic to my need to raise the flag of non-surrender from out of the trenches of despair.

            Most importantly, I wish to thank my fiance, who saved my life and has helped me crawl some distance out of the trenches.

Previous      Table of Contents       Next