Where Strength is Cached

Now, in a moment of crisis and cold, they point out where the warm ash of the old fires can give you warmth, where strength is cached.

—Meridel Le Sueur, from The Crusaders, The Radical Legacy

of Marian and Arthur Le Sueur

She repeats herself. And this is also a promise, like the example of Demeter: not death but re-birth. In conversation as in life, for conversation is life, she repeats, not the straight line, not that lie leading directly to the bomb from the linear mind, the mind formed by print. Charles Olson turned this awareness into theory: Projective Verse, “COMPOSITION BY FIELD, as opposed to inherited line...”. Long before Olson left the post office to be a poet, she was composing “by field.” She said and lived it all of her long life, from the year 1900 to near to the century’s end. She repeats herself in those of us who remember, as she repeated in every conversation I had with her Albert Parson’s last words before he was hung as a conspirator for the Haymarket bombing: “Let the Voice of the People be Heard.” And through her it is.

Contemporary Authors tells us that Meridel’s father, Arthur Le Sueur, founded the Industrial Workers of the World, a line and a lie repeated in several entries in that reference work that now stands as truth in all the libraries in the country. Her father and mother, along with Eugene Debs, Helen Keller, and a few other progressives were founding members of the People’s College in 1914. Perhaps this is what the scholars are referring to. Arthur Le Sueur had nothing to do with the founding of the IWW (1905), though he continually fought with Big Bill Haywood and other IWW leaders over tactics and policy. Do scholars know anything? Can they be trusted? One of the many lessons Meridel has taught us: it’s not just “Don’t let the bastards beat you down”; it is also “Don’t let the bastards re-tell our history.”

...a print version of Funk & Wagnall called Microsoft chief Bill Gates a “tough competitor.” But an electronic Microsoft version describes him as “known for his...contributions to charity.” —Wall Street Journal, Nov. 14, 1997

In Meridel’s novel, The Girl, Clara, prostitute, friend, dreamer, receives electric shock treatments instead of food, shelter, nourishment. As Clara dies:

Memory is all we got. I cried, we got to remember. We got to remember everything. It is the glory, Amelia said, the glory. We got to remember to be able to fight. Got to write down the names. Make a list. Nobody can be forgotten. They know if we don’t remember we can’t point them out. They got their guilt wiped out. The last thing they take is memory.

And it is. It is not just the electric media, its control, ubiquity, power. The burden upon us, writers, is now even greater. Memory is the first thing they take. It’s not just Clara, the women of the Depression, it’s the world, the electric media shock treatment that destroys memory, replaces it, over-writes it, with trash, information only. In every library sits the Library of Congress Subject Headings, and they are different than they were: the Ludlow Massacre, Colo. 1913-1914 has been changed to Coal Strike, Colo. 1913-1914. A massacre perpetrated by the private army of the Rockefeller family cooperating with the National Guard of Colorado has been changed to “a strike.” The only thing that hasn’t changed is the universal constant of government: blame the victim.

The Ludlow Massacre was, as she said of it, her defining moment. As a young teenager, she went to the Colorado mine fields and recorded the stories. And from those voices evolved her last published novel, The Dread Road. And from all of her stories, the hundreds and thousands of recordings and from her memories came the works of hers that may never be published but which constitute her greatest writings: her notebooks, her partially finished novels, her music-made writings, her unfinished symphonies.

Meridel said that “Someone has been shaking commas all over my notebooks.” Changing them. Changing her legacy. Changing her to fit an acceptable mold. She criticized Robert Coles for changing the Appalachian speech of his “subjects.” We need to know how people talk, and we need to know how Meridel writes. Hers was an organic form, based on, rooted in, faith in the land and the people who love it. And she has taught us the most important lesson we can learn about community. It’s a lesson that her feminist, Marxist, Communist, realist, midwest folklorist admirers have never learned: there is a solidarity based on something other than victimization. And she is a writer, greater, more of a stylist, than any of the most honored of the novelists who were her contemporaries when she developed her writing style (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Lawrence). She is a writer who has left us more to learn from than any other. And she repeats herself in us, where strength is cached.