From The WeddingWithin the War, Michael Rossman, Doubleday, N.Y., 1971
In other writings, I say what I think the FSM signified for us collectively. For me
personally it was a heavy turning, a re-beginning. It signaled the end of my life within
the old institutions, and the start of my work to help make the seed of some ways adequate
and new. We lived a transcendent community into action for a few weeks, and in that light
and intensity I just melted inside. I don't know how else to describe it. I had been so
long split apart, so slowly and awkwardly trying to come together -- drugs, mathematics,
vocation, love, therapy, time. And suddenly ...whap! an historical thunderbolt.
I stood there afterwards, stunned by a flash of some new reality, transient but firm
enough to be really grasped. Undeniable. It took years for me to start to sort out what
had come to fusion inside, years to figure out what kind of a man my stuff might become,
in a place of shared longings. For the moment of FSM itself, only this much was clear: I
was involved to my deepest levels in saying NO to what I had known and was raised to
become; and YES to an image half-grasped but at last enough shared that it might become
real.
But that is a story for another book. Here is only a fragment, a precise slice out of
time, the exact beginning of the FSM. It is as close as I've come to capturing in flight a
moment beyond my private life. The morning after we ended our two-day besiegement of the
cop car, while people were busy meeting to formally declare the Free Speech Movement and
condense its initial structures, I sat down alone with a tape recorder. Torn open,
everything boiling in me, I had to get it out some way. It was the instant before we had
even grasped the fact of our community, save in action. And the way I know it was a
beginning is that it was like dying and being reborn, I felt despair and hope flicker in
wild oscillation.
Continue to rest of excerpt: From The
WeddingWithin the War, Michael Rossman
Copyright © 1971, 1998 by Michael Rossman. This work may not be reproduced in any
medium which is sold, subject to access fee, or supported by advertising or institutional
subsidy, without explicit prior consent by the author.