Pancho Villa Syndrome

You and your wife went to the mountains, and started living in the wilderness. But how did you do it? Like how did you prepare? What season was it when you first went in?

It was probably spring. We waited out the first winter. We were trying to scout. We got horses, you know, we got pack saddles, we’d go trade. We would ride some. But we didn’t totally leave civilization. We stayed mostly around the communes.

So it’s really remote, like big mountains right?

Up to 10,000 feet!

You were camping in a tent?

We had a tent, and we built shelters. It depended how long we were going to stay at one camp. We had the horses so we would ride, set up camp different places.

And you were able to survive by hunting and gathering? All these things you learned just by experience?

Well you do it, or die. Like in the beginning I was not a great hunter. But our lives depended on it. It wasn’t a hobby. I had to do it. So I had to get good at it. Until I got good enough, I had to just struggle along. I would go days sometimes I couldn’t get any game.

Because you wouldn’t give up and go get pizza or something.

And there’s no place to go! Either you get the food out there, or you don’t eat.

What were you hunting?

Deer and elk. Or we’d get small game like rabbit, squirrel, wild chicken, wild turkey. Like I’d be out hunting, and my wife would see small game and she would shoot it. She was a good shot.

That’s really wild.

It was a wild life. Especially after the Lower East Side. But I always used to think, it’s really not that different. There’s a parallel, I don’t know…

Somehow you deal with both environments in a similar way, I guess?

And you deal with it just as a living thing.

Also you had horses. How did you adjust to that, coming from the city?

First of all, I wasn’t born in the city. I was born in the country. Second of all, even in the city I was always around horses. I worked with horses. I worked at the bridle path in Central Park, I worked at all the horse stables. One time someone from King Ranch saw me and wanted to train me as a jockey!

You could have had a whole different life! You think you could have been a jockey?

I was like 14 years old, and my mother said no, you’re not going to Kentucky.

But that’s amazing how these different elements in your life are present in different moments.

That’s what made it possible to live as I did. I wasn’t just a city kid. I was born in the country, along the Potomac River. We had relatives on both sides, Virginia and Maryland. That was a whole world. There were reservations, that was Algonquian country. I used to stay there when I was a kid. Up until I was ten, when my mother remarried, I would go back and forth. 

And I always felt grateful that in the first ten years of my life, I had a lot of interaction with non-urban life. I wasn’t just a product of urban life. That really shaped me. Because I was able to experience both, I could understand both. I wasn’t stuck with one or the other. I could move between environments. To tell you the truth, I don’t think that I could have done what I did, if I was just a city kid. Could you imagine a city kid going to the wilderness to live? On horseback, hunting and gathering? It’s almost unimaginable.

How about your wife? How did she do?

Well she did it, but it was hard for her. To be without food, or cold, or soaking wet, for weeks. I would come across her at times and she’d be crying. Life would be so hard sometimes. And no matter how hard, she took it like, that’s life. She was strong enough. But it was really hard on her.

What about the others who went from the city, how did they handle the shift?

Well nobody went totally into the wilderness in the way that we did. A few people tried, they followed our example and did it. But for most people there was some transition. Like there were the communes, they were part city, part country. And people from the city could fit in. And then some of them became more country. So there was this transition, or mixture.

There were a lot of communes, I guess? Because it’s not only from New York but like from San Francisco and different cities, all these people were moving out to the country and making communes, right?

That was the Back to the Land movement. A lot of them went to New Mexico and Colorado, and to California. A lot also went to Vermont. And the communes were mostly New Age, counterculture, what people call hippie. But there were some that we were closer to, that we fit in with.

Most New Age communes, you wouldn’t fit in with?

No. We had a rough edge, you know, the Lower East Side was rough. So we always had this edge. We weren’t hippies. And you could feel it. We looked a little like hippies, but you could feel that there was a difference. And some people were apprehensive of us.

They were suspicious, like who are these intense people from the city?

Not suspicious, but some people were uncomfortable, or they didn’t understand us. Or they disagreed with our belief in self-defense, which meant violence. And they disliked us for that.

I guess someone coming from a New Age commune in New Mexico would have a hard time imagining Lower East Side life.

Exactly. And not only were we from the Lower East Side, we were on the warrior side of it. But there were also some communes with people a little bit like that.

You mean militant? Like more politicized, rather than just New Age.

Yeah, or mixed.

So after you left New York you still had contact with some people?

Mostly I was incommunicado. A lot of people thought I was dead, and I encouraged that. But some people from my family came and stayed a while. At some point most people scattered. So it was transitional somewhat.

You were in New Mexico? Or where were you, exactly?

It’s a mountainous region that expands across northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. It has nothing to do with the state, the state is just a line. It’s one region. And that’s where we stayed. And so we would cross, like say we were in New Mexico and the Forest Service tried to

find us, so we’d cross the border into Colorado. And vice versa, when Colorado got too hot, we’d cross back into New Mexico. I would send postcards to the Forest Service headquarters, like you can stop looking, I’m in another state! They could tell it was true by the postmark.

That’s convenient, two different states.

And that was still border country then. It used to be part of Mexico. There were actually people who lived along this border that didn’t really speak English. I mean it was remote, it was like a hidden area. And authority had no hold. There was no law, everybody was armed.

So it was relatively autonomous? It makes sense that you were drawn there.

Totally. There was no police. The law was enforced by people themselves. If you rustled a cow, they didn’t call the police, they’d just shoot you! There was no local police, and the state police never went there. This whole area was self-governing.  Like the people we joined in New Mexico in their uprising. They sensed that they were being encroached upon by an artificial law — and they rebelled.

There was an uprising? And you joined it?

Correct. They had been occupied by the National Guard. And they had written to us that they needed more people like us. You know, people with guns. So we went. There were about ten of us that went.

All of you ready to fight with guns? That’s a big deal.

And we had been at that point of relocating anyway. We weren’t sure how, or where, or what. Then we got this letter.

But that’s a big move in terms of confrontation. Like against the National Guard, in this remote little area, that’s pretty intense.

Yeah, the state police had roadblocks around this area, so you couldn’t go in or out if you were known. And some of my comrades got spotted at the roadblocks. They had arms, and they were arrested.

What was happening before, would you give us the context of the uprising?

Way back, in this border region, the Spanish government gave communities what they called a land grant. It gave them the right to use the land communally, to graze their animals. So that everybody has their little plot where they live and grow food, and then they have some thousands of acres to graze their herds. It’s an ideal. Grazing tribes around the world do that. There’s no land grant, it’s just the fact of life. It’s based on use, not ownership.

So there’s an immediate conflict with the American legal system. Wealthy Americans used the law to possess land, to say this is mine, you can’t graze on my land. And they got the sheriff’s department to enforce it. Over the years, they kept encroaching. The conflict intensified, and there was a rebellion. They raided the courthouse, there was a shootout. Then the National Guard occupied. And that was when they wrote to us.

Were you surprised to get this kind of request?

No. It was a logical request.

But did you know each other before? Or they knew of you somehow?

There was one person that knew of us. Really she knew me. There was a woman who was in SNCC, she had been involved in the South with the freedom rides. She was a militant. And she was part Mexican, so she got involved in the Mexican-American struggle. She joined the uprising, and she was living there amongst them. So she was the one that wrote to us. The others didn’t know us.

Was it difficult to communicate? Or you had people that could translate?

No, they all spoke English. They were not deep in that part of the population that didn’t speak English. They had a town, a little town way up in the mountains. Whereas it was the more rural people, the rural rancheros, that didn’t interact with English speakers.

You really got to know the land, and the people and these histories. It must be beautiful there.

Yeah, it’s beautiful country.

Had you been there before to that part of the country?

Not really. We went there once to take part in the great bus race. You know Ken Kesey’s bus, called Further? And then the Hog Farm had a bus, the Road Hog. And then we had a bus. So we had a race. I used to argue with Ken Kesey that we won, but actually I have no idea. I was so stoned I didn’t even know what was going on, you know, I couldn’t tell you who won for real. But I used to always tease him, hey we won that race!

Those were very different conditions, your first and second time to New Mexico. Wow.

You know sometimes, when I hear myself, I almost can’t believe it. Like when I talk about the things we did, how different they were, how extreme on so many different levels, from the counterculture, to the militancy, to the art — I’m almost like wow, did we do all that? It almost sounds like a fantasy.

To me too, it sounds like a dream. I’m still amazed by this story of the uprising. As it turned out, when you left the city it wasn’t a retreat from armed struggle. It was an escalation!

And that was also a transitional moment. I was ready to die in the struggle. But at the same time, I had this sense that there was something missing. Something was needed, beyond art and politics. I was seeking something other than what was available to me in the city. I could never quite formulate it. Not even what the question would be. I just sensed there was something missing. So when I felt that it was time to leave New York, or when I more or less had to leave, it was not only the impetus to leave, but I thought, this is my chance to see what this other thing is. I didn’t have a clear idea of what it was. But I knew that it was necessary.

[...] You lived in the wilderness for five years. What was it like? What was the daily routine? Like in the morning you woke up, then what did you eat for breakfast?

Our main diet was dry meat. My wife would prepare it different ways, breakfast, lunch and dinner. But that was the main ingredient. Then sometimes we would have some grain, there was a wild grain you could harvest. On occasion we would trade with country stores that were up high, and we’d get oatmeal or something and mix it with meat. And we’d get small game like squirrel or rabbit. So it would vary, depending on what we had. Like my wife would find certain vegetables and that would be the dinner, she’d make soups or other things. Lunch we basically just had meat ground up in a tortilla, my wife would make tortillas. She did all the cooking. She was really good at it.

You would butcher the animals yourself?

My wife did all of that. I would hunt and she would butcher it, then cut it into strips and dry it.

She did all the butchering? That’s hard core.

See I was out hunting all day, and she was at camp. So she did the butchering and cooking, she got firewood, she would go and forage. We had a balance. I’d be out hunting ten hours a day, and she used that time in camp.

You went hunting on horseback, or on foot?

Mainly on foot. You would use the horse maybe to go a certain distance. But the horse scares off the animals.

What did you forage? I guess you ate a lot of mushrooms.

Totally, mushrooms were a main part of our diet. For instance a puffball: it’s the size of a basketball. If you cut it up it’s four or five meals! There are tons of wild vegetables. You just have to know what they are. 

One time, my wife found some mushrooms. She cooked them and we had them for breakfast. But something didn’t feel right. I told her you know, that mushroom was really greasy. Well she’d put no grease in it, she just cooked it in a frying pan. She said why don’t you look it up? We had some pamphlets about different plant species that we carried with us. So she said why don’t you check, see if you could find that mushroom. I looked, and I found it. I said here it is, I found it. She said well, read it to me. Alright, I said. 

This mushroom is extremely deadly.

I looked at my wife and she was waiting like, what else does it say? Then I read:

The toxins in this mushroom can cause you to break into uncontrollable laughter.

As I was reading this, I started laughing. I couldn’t stop. Then my wife broke out laughing. I said oh shit, we’re in trouble. We passed out. We went unconscious for at least a day, maybe two days. We were out.

Then when you woke up that must have been pretty intense, realizing that you’d almost died.

Yeah, if I were normal. But I just got up and said, I better go hunting! We need something to eat!

It really is hard to imagine that life. Like for someone who’s never spent more than a day or two outside — let alone what you all did.

Twenty four hours a day. For five years!

The world would change! You would become a different person.

I did. I came out after five years no longer the same person. I was not a Lower East Side person anymore. I changed.

So these years were really important for you, for your transformation.

Crucial. Who I am, would not be without that experience. I went into the wilderness with nothing. No money, no credit cards, no identity. I gave it all up. I wanted to see what I really needed. What do we need to live? And that’s what led me eventually towards animism.

Also you gradually got close to Native American community.

Correct. And I got involved with this animistic, ceremonial world.

I imagine the experience of being in the wilderness was important to get to know those people.

I’m sure it played a part. It wasn’t the only part. But it was important, there’s no question. Like when we came out of the wilderness, the first place we came out there was a reservation. We were on horseback, and they said well you could camp on our land by our house. So we pitched our tent by their house. It was like they felt immediate kinship to us. I’m sure the way we were living helped.

What about the others that went out west with you from the city? You talked about the idea of building alternative worlds, but that’s a little different from your vision of trying to find out what is really needed.

That goes back to what I call the Pancho Villa syndrome. I wanted to see what was necessary to live. And how to live in the world, so to speak. Some of the others felt like the revolution had failed, and they no longer cared about changing the world. So they became bandits. It happens everywhere in the world where revolution doesn’t succeed. A lot of revolutionaries turn to banditry. Because the ingredients are there: they’re armed and they’re ready to die.

Also they believe in counter-power. They’re against the ruling order.

So they remained anti-establishment, and anti-centralization. But they became self-absorbed. They were no longer fighting a revolution. Now it was just for benefit, and to survive.

They became bandits meaning like, armed robbery and such?

Yeah, they got fixated with that… I’ll show you an example. There was a railroad that still ran through the mountains, like a narrow gauge. Tourists would take it. Well, they got to a point where they were gonna stop the train and rob it! You know like in movies where the bandits come out on horseback and hold up the train. They had this fantasy that they were gonna do that.

Wait, seriously? Like the image from the Wild West!

Yeah. They were gonna do it! They got together in the mountains and they were gonna ride down and rob the train. But we found out about it and we went to them, we caught them at night when they were in bed. We put guns to their heads and said if you do it, we’re gonna come back and kill you.

You wanted to stop them?

Because that would destroy our way of life. Nobody could live in the mountains after that! They would be occupied by federal forces. And they would find everybody that was living on horseback.

And yet they wanted to act out this image from the Wild West.

Yeah well, they were romantics. The imagery is exciting, like WOW, all of a sudden these guys come down on horseback and rob the train! And you can’t blame them for the thought, it is an exciting thought. But the reality was like, wait a minute. We’re not doing that.

They were only involved in the imagery, and their self-aggrandizement. They got fixated on their own mythology. They weren’t thinking about what would happen to the rest of us in the mountains.

They were trying to do guerrilla warfare?

No, they were trying to do guerrilla crime. The revolution was over, in their minds. They were doing it as criminals. You know, it’s exciting! You can’t explain it to anybody… To be armed and ready to die and just do whatever you want. It’s like a drug.

And you all had such powerful experiences, right? I mean you did have that power, in the Lower East Side.

It was for a purpose though.

For revolution.

And to help people that needed help. But they were doing it to help themselves.

So the family that went with you from New York, they became like a bandit gang out west?

Or different groups would form, with new recruits.

When you say new recruits, that’s not necessarily political people I guess?

No. They were mercenaries. They were already bandits. And they figured they’d get together and become bandit gangs.

Can I ask, in the city you also carried guns: that was more for protection, like against the police?

The police, or whatever.

Because you told us also that you did security for the Black Panthers. You were sort of armed guards, helping other radicals with your guns?

On that one occasion. Generally speaking, it was for self-defense. There were also predators, you know, the city was tough. The Lower East Side was an extreme ghetto. And there were people preying on these young runaways, and out to exploit them or steal from them or attack them — I mean it was tough.

I wonder if your idea of self-defense is part of your idea of freedom? Or like autonomy, today a lot of people use that word. In your time, in the 60s, maybe self-defense was very important for autonomy.

Well if you can’t defend yourself, then you’re a victim. If people can’t protect themselves, how can they be free? I mean, do you know how many young people were assaulted, sexually, on these streets? We used to walk around and protect them. We had patrols at night looking out for them, sending them to our crash pads.

So that’s the thing, when you say self-defense it’s not just you all.

No, self-defense meaning defense of people. As in, we need to do it for ourselves. To protect our own people. We don’t need police.

It was really a symbiotic relationship with those kids.

You have no idea how wild it was. There was nothing like it. One time, some people with malicious intent had kidnapped some young people and had them in an apartment, and some people came running and told us, they got these kids in this room. We went and we broke the door down, we were armed, and we freed the kids.

Wasn’t it scary? To fight against people like that?

Listen, it’s no more scary to fight against some predator than it is to fight against the US government. They’ll both kill you. We didn’t differentiate. If they were the enemy of what we were trying to do, it didn’t matter if it was governmental or criminal.

Even amongst ourselves, like when those guys were gonna rob the train. We went to them and threatened them, we said if you do it, we’re gonna kill you. We’ll go to war. So we were acting like our own defense. You know, we’re not law enforcement, but to us this was gonna bring so much heat on the mountains, it would interfere with our living there. It would be the end of the culture that we were trying to build.

And you had to use force, you couldn’t just say hey stop doing this. You had to threaten them.

That’s what You couldn’t just say well we’re against it. I mean we didn’t have a meeting and take a vote. That’s what people can’t understand. It’s not that we had the right; we made the right. Put guns to their heads and say next time, we’ll kill you. 

Wow, it really was the Wild West. I can’t believe this whole bandit world.

Almost nobody knows what that world was like.

It’s a world I’ve never imagined before. So it was you all from the city, and then some people local to the area, just came together and started living this bandit kind of life?

And from different places, like from the West Coast, people gravitated to the mountains. And they heard about it, wow these guys are living on horseback! And it just spread. At some point there were a couple hundred of us!

Really? The authorities didn’t stop you?

They would if they could find you. That’s why we tried to stop people from doing outrageous things that would bring heat on the mountains. But you know, this was 50 years ago, everything was different. Like there was no GPS, they couldn’t scan the land. So not only could they not find you, but they couldn’t even tell you were there. That’s not the case today.

Everyone was living in the wilderness, like hunting and camping?

Yeah or some had little cabins, or ranch houses, or they would stay in abandoned houses. Most were transient. It was just a general group of renegades living in the mountains. We didn’t all stay together. There were different bands of people. But we would assemble occasionally. 

Like one time, some of them had a shootout with the state police. And one guy got shot, he was wounded, so he couldn’t get away. He collapsed and the state troopers found him. They took him and put him in a prison hospital. And he escaped, eventually he got back into the mountains. Then not long after that, he got into some conflict, and he got killed. That happened sometimes, you know, people would fight amongst themselves. So people were often getting killed. 

Anyway, this guy had made it clear that he wanted to be cremated. So word got out to all the mountain people. We picked a spot and stacked logs to make a pyre, and put his body on top and then lit it. Well, I guess the Forest Service saw the fire. Suddenly this truck pulls up, and this guy jumps out and starts yelling, put it out! Put out that fire! I look at him and say, you put it out. Then he looks around and sees there’s like two hundred of us, everybody’s looking at him. And we’re armed, we’re like wild, mountain people. You could see this was not a normal crowd. The guy was like, uh-oh. He jumped back in the truck and they left!

That’s amazing. And totally impossible today.

Totally. There were no cell phones then, and we were way in the mountains. They had to go down themselves to get reinforcement. By the time they got back everybody was gone.

The technology was different, and the land itself was part of it. The mountains allowed for it, in a way.

And throughout this whole region, authority didn’t exist. It was so remote. I mean I came across people that didn’t really speak English, like the Mexican population, or mixed Mexican and Native American. There were Apaches around there, a lot of them didn’t move when the government moved the Apaches. A lot of them went and hid. Some were married to Mexicans and refused to move. So there were already people living out there that were like a mountain people. They’d been out there living normal lives. Then this new group would just fit in. They could get lost, so to speak.

They blended together.

Well, they blended together, and they also helped each other in a sense.

Did any of the people who were already out there get wrapped up in it?

Some did. But most didn’t.

The situation today must be so different. For either kind of group of people, it must be much more difficult now to sustain that kind of autonomy.

Oh, it’s impossible now. This is 50 years ago we’re talking about! Now most want to be American.

You heard of Billy the Kid? His great-grandson lived out there, and he didn’t even speak English hardly. He was mostly Mexican. His last name was Bonney, which was a Scottish name that Billy the Kid used. I knew him, I used to go visit him. He lived in San Geronimo, New Mexico. I used to ride out there on horseback and stop and visit him.

Wait, really? This time you must be kidding!

See that’s what I mean: this is a dying world we’re talking about. Something else replaces it, I’m not saying it’s over. But what that was that we’re talking about is not ever going to happen again.

So to build autonomy we have to discover something in the present.

That’s the job of the people who are in the present. I’m already past it. I mean, not totally. I have a foot still in it, but…

I think you’ve got more than a foot! But it’s interesting, this bandit phenomenon. There’s some paradox. To have this power and freedom, but then it self-destructs. It implodes, the group can’t cohere.

That’s the Pancho Villa syndrome. A lot of revolutionaries become bandits. Pancho Villa is a classic case, that’s why I call it Pancho Villa syndrome. But it happened all over the world. Like Mahkno in the Ukraine, they became bandits. It happened in Spain, it happened in Brazil — it was heavy in Brazil. It happened everywhere.

What about you? Weren’t you drawn down the Pancho Villa path?

I avoided it by searching out a deeper need. The spiritual need. And eventually that led to animism, and helped me to see how my efforts could still help to change the world for the better. I found a way to continue the struggle on another level. A lot of the others forgot about all of that. You know the revolution didn’t happen, so let’s just…

When they sensed that the revolution failed, it’s like they were depressed, they became nihilistic?

Well, no. But they came to a place where they realized that what they had been doing was no longer plausible. It’s hard to put it in words. You’d have to experience it. But if you’re a revolutionary, and you are armed and you are ready to die, what do you do when there’s no revolution? Become a dentist? I mean what do you do? So you remain armed, you remain ready to die. But you have to survive.

A lot of them didn’t survive it. A lot of them got killed. They got killed in fights with state police, they killed each other in arguments. At least ten of them died in that struggle. More than in the street struggle.

It must have been hard for you being one of the ones to make it out. You must have been so worried.

Yeah, well, it was hard. My kid brother got killed. He became a bandit, and he got killed by other bandits. He got shot.

None of the others went with you?

I often thought about it, at the time. About my kid brother especially. I could see that he was headed for destruction. And I talked to him, I told him about the other path that I was on. I tried to see if I could get him to go with me. But I couldn’t get it through to him, at first. It didn’t happen fast enough I guess.

I wonder what the difference was between you and the others. Maybe if they had shared your sense of searching…

I would be reluctant to say. You can’t tell. But no one from that world entered the world I was entering.

Ben, as much as we’re inspired by our conversations, to be honest it’s hard to think about what we can do today, in the current state of the world. Every week there’s some new horrible news, and increasingly it seems that nothing is possible. And the more we read the more we’re incapacitated, caught in a vicious cycle of the over-informed. So then there’s nothing to do, you know?

Yeah, you feel overwhelmed. But you can’t allow that. You have to just do what you can do, and feel out where you fit. What’s possible.

Like in the 60s, we were heavy into the struggle against the Vietnam War. To think about America, the most powerful nation at the time, that we could in any way affect what they were doing — that could’ve overwhelmed us. We could’ve said oh well, what can we do. But we just said no, we’re gonna change it. That’s the end of that. And we fought them like they were vulnerable. We didn’t feel frightened. We felt like we’re gonna do it, or we’ll die. But we’re gonna try. And it takes that kind of risk… it’s almost suicidal.

You fought the state like it was vulnerable, like it was susceptible to attack?

Yes. Not because we thought that we would be victorious. But because we felt like we have to do something. Whether or not we’re successful. 

We were ready to confront the powers that be. But at the same time, I began to sense that the political struggle, by itself, was not enough. We had believed that it was, but I could see that it wasn’t. The struggle was even greater than we’d realized. 

And that’s the challenge today. We reached a point where people are really ready — if there’s a fuller understanding — I believe there’s a chance to bring people together. But politics alone is not enough. There has to be another dimension. And that’s where, to me, the spiritual element is crucial. I don’t know about the 1800s, or the 1920s, or even the 1960s. But right now I can say that, if there’s not some spiritual consciousness to the struggle, it’s not going to happen.

You told us how you came to animism when you went out west. But how about when you were still in New York, did you have an idea of spirituality then?

Well, it was in my mind. I used to think all the time about the history of spiritual warriors, like the Bhagavad Gita, or like samurai. I felt that there was something… but I didn’t understand it. And I started using Native designs because I sensed that Native people understood this other dimension. I wasn’t clear about their spirituality, or how to define it. I didn’t know how to talk about it. But I thought about it all the time. 

Then when I had to leave New York, I said to myself, now is my chance. I wanted to find out what it was that I’d been thinking about, but couldn’t understand.

There’s something already unique about your thoughts, that you were connecting militancy to this traditional warriorship. You sensed some kind of cultural importance within the warrior tradition. Something beyond soldiers shooting guns.

Oh, way beyond!

You wanted to be more like a warrior, rather than just a killing machine.

I didn’t want to be a soldier. There’s a big difference. And I understood that Native people were warriors. They weren’t soldiers. The technology that the soldiers had was so powerful, it eventually vanquished Native resistance. But the warrior had this tremendous energy. And you start to understand it was just that they couldn’t match the fire power, that they weren’t victorious.

Did you ever hear of Dog Soldiers? That was a warrior society. They were Cheyenne, but they formed a separate society. They had stakes that they carried with them, and when they were overpowered, they would stake themselves to the ground. And they couldn’t move from that spot.

It’s like you were saying, there’s a connection between the power to fight, and the willingness to lose your life.

And that was their way of life. They were so committed to that way of life, they would sacrifice their individual life for the tribe. And that was a source of tremendous power.

For you, maybe the warrior was essentially the same as the revolutionary?

No. They may coexist. But it’s not an absolute.

But in some sense they seem similar. They’re both ready to fight and die for something bigger than themselves.

Right, in some ways they may be very similar. But in other ways they could be totally different.  For example, some revolutionaries are soldiers. Well, soldiers, when they’re given an order, they’re obligated to follow that order. But in Native cultures, you’re not given orders. And if there’s conflict, like say there’s disagreement within a band or tribe: rather than fight against each other, one group might leave. For instance there was one tribe in Wyoming called Shoshone. At some point one group left, they went south. They moved into the southern plains, and they became known as Comanches. They were actually the same tribe! But they didn’t wage war against each other. That’s important to understand.

Yeah, that’s a totally different paradigm. But it’s fascinating that you had this conception of the spiritual warrior back when you were in the city. Like you’re fighting cops and meanwhile you’re thinking all the time about the Bhagavad Gita and stuff, right?

All the time. But I never talked about it. I kept it to myself. I didn’t know how to talk about it because, in my mind, if you even mention the word spirituality, you’re gonna scare people away. Because they think of religion. Religion is so horrible, it destroyed spirituality.

Then eventually the word spirituality got co-opted by commercial movements. I mean it’s a multi-billion dollar market now, especially so-called Eastern spirituality. But some of that really started in the 60s.

And in the West there’s the idea that somehow spirituality means you don’t defend yourself. It’s absurd. Spirituality always had a defensive side. And that’s what drew me, like I saw that, in my eyes, Native cultures had a warrior element and a spiritual element. They had both. These were people that would go to war to defend themselves, and still not be afraid to pray. And I wanted to understand how that was possible. We had the warrior part, but the spiritual part was missing. Like we dealt with art and politics, we thought both were necessary. But I always felt the lack of some other form of understanding.

I had this gnawing feeling that the political struggle alone was not sufficient. I really did. You can see, if you look at the posters I was making, there’s a consciousness of another entity — I didn’t completely understand it — but I was already feeling it out. Before it actually came to be. I had that premonition.

Yeah, that’s premonition. Your visual work was a premonition.

Somehow I had this premonition that there was going to be more needed, because what we had was not enough. So I was laying out a path, so to speak. I didn’t think about it like that at the time. But you could see that I was laying out a path, that the struggle had to expand into another dimension, in another direction. I want to show you something...

Have you ever seen this book? It has a lot of the posters I made. See all these Native elements, like about the tree of life… Or this one, “know yourself, know your people.” A Marxist would never do this! This was before I left the city. But you can see already, it was no longer the traditional political struggle.

This was all before you went out west.

Correct. So it’s not like I went there and then all the sudden… This is what pushed me, partially. So that when it became a situation where I had to leave, I could see why, and where to go. I was already sensing this Indigenous, animistic, spiritual path.

You know, otherwise, if not for this kind of understanding, we are just controlled by consumerist society. Buy a house, buy a good car, have two children and send them to university — that’s the only happiness people can conceive in this society.

They want you to think happiness has to do with material possession, rather than life.

And without another sense of existential happiness, it’s like we’re lost already. Even if socialism comes, you know. Like more people have cars, that’s what socialism is about.

The problem is materialism. Use the metaphor of a coin. So there’s a materialist coin: one side is capitalism, the other side is socialism. It’s the same coin. It’s all based on this material world, rather than the interaction with real, natural phenomena. It’s all about the man-made. Like Marx was obsessed with the idea of the means of production. Who cares about the means of production? What’s essential is the means of living! How do you live?

So one thing I wanted to ask: when you went into the wilderness, you were living in nature, with limited material…

I had no unnecessary material. I gave up everything. I gave up comfort. Do you know, I stayed wet for weeks at a time.

And cold right?

And cold! And hungry. And worried.

But you chose to do that, right? Behind your decision to do it, you had a different vision of what’s important for your life.

That was the reason for doing it. I used to say, I wanna go back to ground zero. To live with as little as possible, and see what is necessary.

I imagine you encountered a really rich world. Instead of the commodity object you were facing the living world, nature, universe. So it’s not just a reduction — it’s a new discovery of existence. You must have achieved some kind of incredible happiness, within this hardship. Isn’t that so?

I did. It was the happiest I’d ever been in my life, and maybe will ever be. To reach that point where you and this universe are connected. You’re completely unprotected. Vulnerable. You’re just like, here I am.

Maybe it’s the same vulnerability. Whether you’re facing the state, or the forces of the universe…

Yes!

And you experienced that, it was just you and your wife, alone in the wilderness.

Right. If you make a wrong move you’re dead! Nobody even knows you’re there.

Yeah, nobody cares.

No! But that’s the truth of reality! Nature doesn’t care. The cosmos can send a disaster that can kill millions of people. You don’t think the cosmos loses any sleep thinking oh I killed a million people today.

In a sense your concept of struggle expanded, by going into the wilderness. It expanded beyond the immediate political context. 

Yeah. And it changed the daily struggle. It made the daily struggle have a larger goal. To survive, to find another way, to build a new life.

One question I originally wanted to ask: among your comrades who left New York and went out west, was there anybody else who had this consciousness of the warrior?

Not exactly.

So do you think that the Pancho Villa syndrome comes from a lack of this awareness? Like sustaining the revolutionary impetus, but without some greater, spiritual perspective?

Yes. And a lot of those people, including myself, had been criminalized as youth. So after the militant struggle ended, it was easier to fall back into that.

To fall back into criminal groups, like gangs?

Yes.

Which can be revolutionary in this society, though.

Right. And after the revolution fails they go back. That was Pancho Villa. He was a bandit before the revolution, and after the revolution he returned to it.

Have you ever heard of Sri Aurobindo? He was a revolutionary in India. He was an armed revolutionary fighting against the British colonists. And eventually, he was imprisoned, and he became spiritual. He came out and he became like a guru, you know, he formed an ashram. He became a spiritual person. So it’s interesting, because at some point he had seen that the violent revolutionary no longer had a purpose. But he didn’t become a bandit. He went towards the spiritual understanding. And I always thought about him because, in a sense, that’s more parallel to me.

You experienced that yourself.

Right. I saw that the Pancho Villa path was a dead end. And I could see that this other path might lead somewhere, where you could still help people. So I went that way. My own brother went the Pancho Villa way. And he got shot.

Do you think that pushed you away from the Pancho Villa path?

No, I was already starting to go that way. And I tried to get him to go with me. Did I ever tell you the story about it? He was already hooked onto this Pancho Villa path. And I was moving this other way. And I always had this fantasy that maybe I could pull him with me. Pull him away from… I didn’t know if that was possible, I had my doubts. But I thought it was worth it to try. 

There used to be a cafe in New Mexico that, whenever I passed, I would stop to see if he was there. We used to hang out there, we would go there together. So we would look for each other there. And one time, my wife and I stopped to look for him, and he was there. So we sat together and drank coffee and visited. And I told him about this path I was pursuing. I said I really want to share it with you. I want to take you with me, to see what you think. You make up your own mind.

At first he said no. He said how can we give up who we were? We were somebody! He actually used that term, we were somebody. I told him yes, we’d have to give up who we were. But who we were is over. It’s done, you can’t be who you were anymore. But this path you’re going down is not… So we argued. He was younger than me. He said to me, you know brother, you’re older than me. And I argue with you, but you know I always try to listen to you. He said, I’ll go with you. I’ll look and see what I think. I said that’s all I want. You look for yourself. He said ok. 

This was about a Tuesday or a Wednesday. Maybe Tuesday. And that weekend I was going to a ceremony. I said this Saturday, I’m going to a ceremony. He said ok, I’ll go with you. I’m gonna find out. We shook hands, told each other how we were gonna meet, said ok and shook hands. We hugged. And I left.

That Thursday, he got killed. He got shot. He was gonna go with me Saturday. But he got killed on Thursday. So I never knew if he would join me on that path — I still don’t know.

Full Circle: A Life in Rebellion is available for pre-order through Detritus Books; a Japanese translation by Kawade Shobo is also expected to appear soon. 

Art: Ben Morea