Freedom has its forms. However personalized, individuated or dadaesque may be the attack upon prevailing instituions, a liberatory revolution always poses the question of what social forms will replace existing ones. At one point or another, a revolutionary people must deal with how it will manage the land and the factories from which it acquires the means of life. It must deal with the manner in which it will arrive at decisions that will affect the community as a whole. Thus if revolutionary thought is to be taken seriously it must speak directly to the problems and forms of social management.

What social forms will replace existing ones depends on what relations free people decide to establish between themselves. Every personal relationship has a social dimension; every social relationship has a deeply personal side to it. Ordinarily, these two aspects and their relationship to each other are mystified and difficult to see clearly. The institutions created by hierarchical society, especially the state institutions, produce the illusion that social relations exist in a universe of their own, in specialized political or bureaucratic compartments. In reality, there exists no strictly "impersonal" political or social dimension; all the social institutions of the past and present depend on the relations between people in daily life, especially in those aspects of daily life that are necessary for survival--the production and distribution of the means of life, the rearing of the young, the maintenance and reproduction of life. The liberation of man--not in some vague "historical," moral, or philosophical sense, but in the intimate details of day-to-day life--is a profoundly social act and raises the problem of social forms as modes of relations between individuals.

-- Murray Bookchin

There's the world in daylight. If it was

completely dark you wouldnt see it but it would

still be there. If you close your eyes you really see

what it's like: mysterious particle-swarming

emptiness. On the moon big mosquitos of straw

know this in the kindness of their hearts. Truly

speaking, unrecognizably sweet it all is.

-- Jack Kerouac

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of the few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

-- Wallace Stevens

Resurrection

I see now I see

now I cannot see

earth is a blizzard in my eyes

I hear now

the rustle of the snow

the angels listening above me

thistles bright with sleet

gathering

waiting for the time

to reach me

up to the pillared

sun, the final city

or living towers

unrisen yet

whose dormant stones lie folding

their holy fire around me

(but the land shifts with frost

and those who have become the stone

voices of the land

shift also and say

god is not

the voice in the whirlwind

god is the whirlwind

at the last

judgement we will all be trees

-- Margaret Atwood

Poem

The spirit

likes to dress up like this:

ten fingers,

ten toes,

shoulders, and all the rest

at night

in the black branches,

in the morning

in the blue branches

of the world.

It could float, of course,

but would rather

plumb rough matter.

Airy and shapeless thing,

it needs

the metaphor of the body,

lime and appetite,

the oceanic fluids;

it needs the body's world,

instinct

and imagination

and the dark hug of time,

sweetness

and tangibility,

to be understood,

to be more than pure light

that burns

where no one is --

so it enters us --

in the morning

shines from brute comfort

like a stitch of lightning;

and at night

lights up the deep and wondrous

drownings of the body

like a star.

-- Mary Oliver

Surrounded by Wild Turkeys

Little calls as they pass

Through dry forbs and grasses

Under blue oak and gray digger pine

In the warm afternoon of the forest-fire haze;

Twenty or more, long-legged birds

all alike.

So are we, in our soft calling,

passing on through.

Our young, which trail after,

Look just like us.

-- Gary Snyder

The Power of Maples

If you want to live in the country
you have to understand the power of maples.
You have to see them sink their teeth
into the roots of the old locusts.
You have to see them force the sycamores to gasp for air.
You have to see them move their thick hairs into the cellar.
And when you cut your great green shad pole
you have to be ready for it to start sprouting in your hands;
you have to stick it in the ground like a piece of willow;
you have to place your table under its leaves and begin eating.

-- Gerald Stern