Mickey Bykov met Tom Evans the Badfinger musician in a London pub a while back. A few days later Evans hung himself. Years ago someone pointed him out to me in a NY bar. A thin-nosed, darkhaired guy with a straggly mustache, he looked like his music sounded: not much danger of straying beyond the faddish. But suicide’s no predictable hook in a bad song. Even second-rate musicians have breakthrough moments when they hear the notes looking for sounds that haven’t been invented yet and after that, at least briefly, whatever one thought previously about harmony flies out the window. Anyway, he’s dead and, aesthetic judgments aside, deserves to be mourned. After all, being a so-so musician’s better than being a CIA consigliere sipping coffee with death squad goombahs while peasants are forced at gunpoint to tell quaint tourist-pleasing stories about life in the countryside near the banks of Guatemala’s Motagua River or El Salvador’s Rio Lempa. 
        
        As I write this, an old newspaper clipping lies on my desk. The article is about love gone awry. A photo accompanies the article. 
        
        In the picture, a little boy wears a tin star that says "Sheriff". The boy stands on a street in a little town somewhere out west. The woman next to him, escorted by 2 men in wide‑brimmed hats, wears a paisley kerchief. The rings under her eyes are like shadows under distant watertowers. Her face is partially turned away, apparently in an effort to avoid the cameraman who has just snapped this photo of her and her son as she's dragged toward the police station. The boy in the sheriff's outfit looks up confusedly at his mother. His one eye is shut tight against the sun; his other eye is open wide like a recently dug up clam pried apart by a hungry fisherman in an ocean cove a half continent away. The child, whose bewildered look gives the impression that he's having difficulty distinguishing fact from fiction, seems to be saying, "I didn't mean to arrest you, mom." According to the newspaper article, it isn't yet known if the son observed his mother kill her husband or if he's old enough to understand how, even now, all mommy wants is to sip a beer behind the Conoco garage at night while her lover strokes her hair, talks in whispers and makes her body tingle like it hasn't done in years. 
        
        I look at the picture, I read the article, yet I still don't know exactly why the woman killed her husband or what happened to her son after she was arrested. All I know for certain is that something went haywire in somebody's life. Whatever this "something that went haywire" is, it hints at the secret passions and dreads that fuel people's efforts to "break free" and to find meaning and satisfaction in their lives. Sensationalistic newspaper stories about ill‑fated love‑triangles that end in murder aren't merely soap‑opera‑like entertainments to be condescended to by the left. They are glimpses into the murky, difficult‑to‑fathom human heart. It is here that the revolutionary must set up camp. It is here that the revolution begins. 

        In the world below what one social critic called the "superb historical analyses and economic treatises" written by left authors, people act out their fates and seek a soothing for their longings. The obscurer zones in individual consciousness, those shadowy mental recesses in which lurk frustrations and joys and nightmares and utopian fantasies, aren't a territory to be shunned by the revolutionary because of their "hopelessly subjective" character; rather, they are precisely the area the revolutionary must explore ‑‑ they are the area where human contact begins. If such human contact isn't established, the political vision that flows from any relationship that does occur will be crippled beyond repair. "The masses" don't exist merely as a potential verification of the truth of activists' revolutionary theories; "the masses" exist in order to survive and be happy. Comprehending all facets of this truth is the pre‑condition for being non‑elitist: one who, in the process of sharing information with people or helping to mobilize them into a political force, doesn’t just organize or “lead” them but is in fact also -- and willingly -- being organized by them. 

        The psychological process of working with people as opposed to merely "directing" them or "speaking in their name" is described well by Meridel Le Sueur, the writer. In a 1978 note on her novel The Girl, a book originally written in 1939, Le Sueur described how she came to write the novel. Many of the book's episodes were based on real‑life incidents that had been related to her by women she'd known during the Depression. According to the author ‑‑ 

                                 As part of our desperate struggle to be alive and human we pooled our memories, experiences and in the

                         writer, to mirror back the beauty of the people, to urge  and nourish their vital expression and their social vision. 

        Although Le Sueur is a novelist writing about the process of creation, her words possess a significance that goes beyond art. Her belief that it's the writer's task to urge into visible existence something that is already there in people ‑‑ i.e., a credible view and analysis of the world ‑‑ is an assault on the notion that working people are a mass of inert potential that must be educated by an elite cadre of revolutionary theorists before they, the people, can realize their historical mission of transforming the world. The idea that there is an already existing "beauty" in people that it's the artist's or organizer's job "to mirror back" to them is an anti‑authoritarian premise that assumes the need for an equal relationship between writer and subject and organizer and the one to be organized. One does not teach the exploited, one establishes a two‑way dialogue with them. Le Sueur's vision of working‑class women as possessing "the real and only seed" of creation and of being the population's nourishment source ("we were . . . the granary of the people") is a prophetic celebration of the dignity, historical significance, survival power and creative force of those who are too frequently viewed as nothing more than the anonymous, waiting‑to‑be‑saved‑by‑someone‑else peons who inhabit society's lowest economic tiers. For Le Sueur, such people aren't to be condescended to, they are to be honored and viewed as their own liberators. Without apology or fear of being labeled naive, Le Sueur sets up camp among such people in society's nowhere zones and allows herself to be fueled there by sagas and poetry that represent a new and potentially history‑altering culture in the process of formation. This is revolutionary. Writers and activists have much to learn from such an approach to "the people".