I became obsessed with Latin America, in particular, Central America, which was in the throes of revolutionary upheaval. I befriended a poet who had just arrived from Colombia, Rodrigo Betancourt, and we began translating revolutionary poetry together, and that was how I learned my first words of Spanish.
Rodrigo was an actor, a poet, an artist, and a revolutionary. He had personally suffered through the years of “la Violencia” in Colombia and had lost a sister who had been killed by the Colombian military alongside of the revolutionary priest, Camilo Torres. So I read Camilo Torres, and his words echoed from another side those of Rosa Luxemburg: “Why do we Catholics fight the communists—the people with whom it is said we have the most antagonism—over the question of whether the soul is mortal or is immortal instead of agreeing that hunger is indeed mortal?”3
That spring of 1981 Dave Smith returned to Calhoun House from a trip through Central America and brought back a green military duffel bag full of books. Dave’s new awareness of the changes wrought by the potent combination of Christian theology and Marxist analysis that comprised liberation theology caught fire. Suddenly our house was studying and discussing the Sandinista Revolution of Nicaragua. We collectively began reading The Gospel in Solentiname series, and used it as the basis of what someone called our “Commie bible study.” The Gospel in Solentiname was a collection in several volumes of transcripts of Bible studies Ernesto Cardenal conducted with a peasant community on an island of the Archipelago of Solentiname in Lake Nicaragua under the Somoza dictatorship. Through the reflection on the gospels the peasants began to understand their world more deeply as well as articulate the revolutionary vision of the gospels. Something catalyzed in me as I read these books and I found my “mission.”
Suddenly my interest in the Orthodox theologians and mysticism was displaced by Roman Catholic liberation theology. I put aside Berdyaev’s mystical anarchism, his religion of creativity, his theosophical conception of unconditional freedom and the ultimate value of personality, and began reading Gustavo Gutiérrez, José Porfirio Miranda, Dom Hélder Câmara and others who dispensed with theological speculations, no matter how profound, to focus on the practice of liberation, or as Gutiérrez might have put it, setting aside “orthodoxy in favor of orthopraxy.” Certainly there were overlapping concerns between Berdyaev and liberation theology, but there were also significant departures. Liberation theology was far less skeptical of Marxism; indeed, it embraced it, often, it could be argued, uncritically. Berdyaev’s starting point was interiority, spirit, subjectivity, personality, but liberation theology was all about the objective, external world of society. Ernesto Cardenal, who was becoming a new poetic mentor for me, called his poetry “Exteriorism,” and it was a far cry from the Jungian erotic mysticism of William Everson.
Calhoun House was going through changes as the Christian philosophers graduated from UC Berkeley and Kevin and Steve moved out to get married. Of that particular formation, only Dave Smith and I remained. The house was big and growing as we colonized new spaces in the basement and built new rooms (literally) where there had been only boxes of the new landlord’s massive book collection. The number of residents rarely went below six, but it reached a peak of fourteen when the house was completely full. And now a whole new group of people began moving in. Among them was Marc Batko, who was also a night desk clerk at Berkeley City Club (the Club). Marc could no longer afford to live alone in his studio apartment on what he made at the Club, so we welcomed him into Calhoun House, and I was glad to be able to return the good favor he’d done me by offering me a place to stay in his studio when I returned a few years before from Switzerland. He joined bob rivera and others who began to change the nature of the house back into a more overtly radical space.
Bob, when he wasn’t building floats for a demonstration or painting placards for a protest, attending meetings of the recently formed anti-nuclear Livermore Action Group, or in his room reading and writing poetry, spent his days pontificating at the house dining table and I sat spellbound, usually accompanied by several other residents. In addition to being an extraordinary poet, bob’s memory was phenomenal, despite all the alcohol, marijuana, and LSD he was able to put away. Bob could recount word for word whole conversations, and could as easily expound on the ideas of Georg Lukács as he could on the nature and aims of the Red Brigades of Italy or the German Red Army Faction, about the latter of which he inexplicably seemed to have much inside knowledge.
In those days the word “terrorist” had not been forced into vogue by the policies of the US national security state, presumably because the US government wanted to keep a focus on the enemy du jour, “communism.” Bob, however, was the perfect combination of both, although mostly in theory. His Marxism-Leninism was detached from any party formation, allowing him to live an entirely anarchic existence and maintain an utterly independent ideological “line.” His line, as I understood it, was “total revolution by any means necessary, moral or not,” and in that way it was fairly indistinguishable from most other Leninist party lines. I found myself at once adopting him as a mentor, and also in a constant disagreement with him.
One incident in particular indicated for me the deep gulf between bob’s views and my own. It was a sunny summer afternoon in 1981 and our house had moved all the living room furniture onto the concrete back-yard patio: the couch, two or three easy chairs, a table, and the television. We were lazing in the sun, late morning, and bob was talking about the forthcoming revolution as the joint was passed from person to person and we quietly listened to bob and sipped our coffee. At some point I had to ask bob the obvious question.
“When the revolution comes, what’s going to happen to all the people who oppose it? That’s probably going to be, what? Ninety percent?”
Bob’s eyelids dropped and he looked at me with a cold squint and leaned back on the arm of the couch as he took a long drag on his cigarette. “They’ll have to be eliminated,” he said matter-of-factly, with a wave of his hand.
I protested, but the conversation turned to other problems that would arise when the revolution happened, or logistics required in bringing it about. The insanity, the cruelty, the utter self-righteous and blind inhumanity struck me and I knew then that eventually the two of us would part ways. But at the same time I found bob’s perspective, while insane, in other ways well reasoned, even if I wondered about some of his assumptions. The utopia would be realized, he had no doubt at all. It was part of the “law of historical development.” Those who were unable to meet the challenges of the future would be disposed of to allow room for the “New Man (sic)” of communism.
I found what I thought to be more humane and reasonable perspectives among the Liberation theologians and their advocates whose books I read. I found Fr. Camilo Torre’s view reassuring: “I have given myself to the Revolution out of love for my neighbor.”4 I felt about bob the way I began to feel about all the secular political activists I met who were struggling against the economic inequality created by capitalism that the socialists, communists, and anarchists were attempting to resolve. As Jose Miranda put it, “ultimately the Marxists have been doing us (Christians) a favor by propagating the idea of communism in our absence—our culpable absence.”5 I was grateful to bob for having demolished my absolutist pacifism and for having shown me a way into the secular Left that I had yet to explore, but I often found myself shocked and disturbed by what I considered to be his more extreme views—and behavior. In the honeymoon period, bob served the purpose of challenging a house that was still predominantly Christian not only to give his Taoist views a hearing, which we did without hesitation, finding in Lao Tzu a very sympathetic and credible teacher, but also to look more closely at ideas current on the secular Marxist, and Leninist, left.
Meanwhile, I deepened relations with Christian leftists and ex-Christian leftists. Among the former was Marc Batko, who introduced me to an entirely different current that flowed into the river that was carrying me away. Marc, a Jewish convert to Christianity, had a particular interest in the German theology of Jurgen Moltmann and other disciples of Ernst Bloch. While I found the translations difficult reading