A Life in Rebellion

I first learned of Ben Morea from a zine. Authored anonymously and titled simply Black Mask and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker: The Story of a Small, Underground 1960s Revolutionary Group in New York City, this obscure artifact was circulated through anarchist scenes around the country when I was a teenager. At the time, in the early 2000’s, this 8-page zine was the only existent record of the group’s activities. In breathless prose, it told the story of a “tightly-knit guerrilla unit” whose essential quality was its militant yet creative oppositionality to almost everything: capitalism, authoritarianism, the Vietnam War, government and police, consumer culture, emotional and sexual repression, white supremacy, imperialism and indeed Western civilization, generally speaking. Deploying every tool at their disposal from psychedelics and street theater to organized crime and guns, their war against the existent mounted along with the mass revolutionary impetus of the late 1960s. The three years from the beginning of Black Mask in 1966 to the end of Up Against the Wall in 1969 were a perpetual festival of riotous activity: they shut down the Museum of Modern Art, cut the fences at Woodstock, broke into the Pentagon, helped to occupy Columbia University, and forced the Fillmore East to give them weekly use of the theater for free — to name just a few of their more audacious actions. Meanwhile their everyday struggle was two-fold: (1) to communalize life among the diverse underclass of the Lower East Side vis-a-vis crash pads, free stores, community defense street patrols, and dinners feeding hundreds of people multiple nights a week, all while (2) taking every possible opportunity to fight with the police. Then in 1969, they suddenly disappeared, presumably forced underground by the growing heat from both the local police and federal agencies. Or perhaps, as cryptically hinted in the final paragraph of the zine, they left the city for disparate locales around the country to explore new forms of revolutionary organization, dissolving their core group into “an occult network of resistance” beyond the scrutiny of the State, media, and indeed, the records of history.

Today, dozens of historical accounts and scholarship in multiple fields attest to the influence of Black Mask and Up Against the Wall and their radical interventions in the art, culture and politics of the 1960s. But for my friends and I in our teenage years, the only reference was this mysterious zine, and its subject was not a part of history, but rather a living legend, exciting our imagination and compelling us with their story. In the pure radicalism of our youth, it seemed to express the limit of what was possible for a small group of revolutionaries to achieve — in the words of the zine — “to join together to combat the whole of reality.”

At the time that I first saw the name “Ben Morea” in print, it never crossed my mind that he was a real person, still living his life — much less that we would eventually meet and work together to bring his life story into writing. I knew nothing of the turns his life took after 1969, when his notorious group disbanded and he himself apocryphally disappeared. Nor could I have realized that this moment marked the beginning of a whole new story, involving an extraordinary transformation even beyond the purview of what I had imagined as “revolutionary.”

In 1969, Ben and several of his comrades left New York City for the wild country of northern New Mexico, to join forces with the Chicano insurgents of La Alianza Federal de Mercedes — but that’s another story. For Ben, this was the last stand before going totally “off the radar,” disappearing into the wilderness of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains where he lived for five years with his wife and two horses, surviving off the land by hunting and foraging. As Ben says, it was this way of living which ultimately saved his life, not only from detection and assassination by the State, but also in the positive sense that it allowed him to reorient as a revolutionary. At that moment he was at a dangerous crossroads: he was armed and ready to die, but the revolution on which he’d staked his life was no longer possible. To continue the same militant struggle would be suicidal; he had to find a way to continue to fight, yet in another dimension. And what grounded him and kept him from a more self-destructive course was his life in the wilderness, struggling to survive in relation with the elements while enduring extreme deprivation and exposure. It was an experience of life pared down to its essential meaning: what do you need to live?

At the same time, what also saved Ben’s life was that he was open to allowing his life to radically transform. When he left New York, he says that he was searching for something, that was missing from the struggle in the city. He didn’t know what it was, but he felt that it was necessary, and he was drawn to Native American cultures and understandings. Then when he went out west, he encountered another world, which he entered not as a hardened militant, but as a child, ready to learn. Regarding this, Ben is very guarded about what he shares, determined not to expose that world to public scrutiny and exploitation; suffice it to say that he was welcomed into a Native community and ceremonial tradition, which he has continued practicing until today. Over fifty years later, Ben is now an elder in this tradition, one of very few who can still remember the old people and their ways, passed down in turn from their elders since the beginnings of the ceremony. Originating during a critical phase of Native resistance, at the moment when many tribes in the southwestern and central regions of the present-day US were finally forced to give up their ancestral lands and ways of life and move onto reservations, the ceremony has been a lifeline for generations of Native peoples around the country — both as a vital communal spiritual practice, and as a mode for the continued survival of Native life and spirituality. After several years in close contact with Ben, observing his conduct in the role that he plays as part of this powerful living tradition, I learned that, in a poetic way, the revolutionary had become a steadfast traditionalist, committed to passing on what he had learned from his elders, precisely without change. 

It is not that Ben has lost the fervor to change the world. Today, at 84 years of age, he is still a total radical, not only in terms of his thinking, but in his whole way of living. It is not an exaggeration to say that Ben is as pure a revolutionary as anyone I’ve ever known — equally sincere as he is intense. I came to understand that, within him, the conjunction of revolutionary and traditional is no contradiction, but a matter of conflicting worlds: of which social reality is to be overturned, and which ways of life are to be fought for, to be upheld.

After disappearing into the wilderness, Ben remained in intentional obscurity for decades, working as a lumberjack while homesteading in the mountains of the Southern Rockies. As he says, many people from his former life assumed that he was dead, and he wanted to keep it that way. But eventually, he decided to reemerge. As he puts it, the situation in the world was only getting worse, and he wanted to share something from his experience to contribute to the struggle today. And so, sometime around 2006, he returned to New York City to speak publicly for the first time in nearly forty years. It is largely thanks to his return that more and more interest has gathered around Black Mask and Up Against the Wall; whereas, when I was a teenager, our only reference was a zine, now there are entire books written about them. Meanwhile, Ben has been meeting with people as much as he can, and he has become a beloved elder to a new generation of young people. When he holds events, they crowd into the room, eager to speak with him and hear his perspective on the potential for revolutionary struggle today. I recognize in them an intensity which is at once familiar, yet markedly different from that of myself and my friends at their age, just twenty years before. Having grown up under the premise of the end of the world, they speak with a gravity which corresponds to the insanity of this moment in human history. Ben doesn’t claim to have any answers; in fact he is insistent that he can’t tell anyone what they should do. But he full-heartedly shares their feeling. In my experience, these conversations are invariably somber, and yet at the same time, emboldening. They create a space to collectively bear the weight of the present reality — both the despair that the situation has never been worse, and the realization that the time to act is now, because there is no time to waste.

This book is the result of a long collective effort. It was a special collaboration between multiple generations. It came about organically; in the beginning, when we started meeting, we had no plan for publishing our conversations. But the more we sat and talked with Ben, the more we felt we had to learn, and we grew eager to find a way to share what we had learned from him with others. Together, we sought to create a medium for transmission, to draw insight and inspiration from Ben’s lifelong engagements as a revolutionary, and pass it on for the generations to come. And so what began as a visit to interview an old comrade turned into a four-year process to make this book.

Respecting Ben’s principled silence, we have edited the text to avoid identifying specific Native communities and traditions. Instead, the discussion is presented in general terms, revolving around what Ben calls “revolutionary animism.” According to Ben, animism is the understanding that all of creation is alive and interconnected, and that the human is a part of it — not above it or in control of it, but part of it. In this sense, he says, all Indigenous peoples were once animists, living ways of life founded on recognition of this connection. And the grave challenge for us today is to recover the essence of that awareness, or at least to move towards it, to begin to repair our relationship with life in the cosmos and on this planet. It is a problem which is not only urgently political and material, but metaphysical and spiritual, involving the whole of existence.

However removed the reader may be from the Indigenous ways which are everywhere today facing mass extinction, we believe that Ben’s story shows that there is still the choice to be made, or the question of how far you will go — to fight for life on Earth against the world-destroying forces of colonialist capitalist civilization, and to reestablish kinship with all living beings, to honor our role as part of creation.

This book aims to contribute to that struggle. It is shared with love, for the coming generations, in the spirit of total rebellion.

Full Circle: A Life in Rebellion is available now through Detritus Books.