Creative Minds are "unique" (apropos of, among others, Pete Seeger)

I've been more than a little intrigued by some -- some -- of the retrospectives of Pete Seeger that feel obliged to "deal"  critically in the negative sense with his "Communist phase."  I can certainly understand and sympathize with that period of his.  Most people nowadays have no personal conception of what it meant to be a sensitive young adult in the throes of the Great Depression and the rise of fascism and Nazism,  I think the sometimes tangled focus on Pete Seeger's Communism, which occasionally carries a hint of red-baiting, misses the fact that Seeger was an extremely creative person from a very creative family -- a guy whose basic drum-beat was his signal reservoir of creativity and whose values were expressed in fine music and a myriad of social justice pursuits.  He was alway a free spirit.

Truly creative people are unique.  They're born creative -- something that can't be learned in any context.  It emerges, usually at a very early age, and continues through one's life span.  It comes up from one's subconscious, maybe from that alone, or perhaps in part at least from tapping into some external "stream of consciousness".

That creativity is far more basic than, say, political or other  affiliations -- which are sometimes enduring, often transitory, reflections of the forces "way down in."  I might add that, in my observation, creative folks are not ideologues.  If they fall into that, as a few do, their art in whatever genre suffers badly.

Creativity has to be free.

One thinks of Diego Rivera, one of the great artists of Mexico.  He befriended Trotsky.  He incorporated Lenin into a couple of his great murals.  But he always remained and was primarily seen as an extraordinarily gifted Mexican Indian painter who conveyed the strong and eternal thrust of "the people."

Years ago, I was working on a very substantial essay involving Ralph Chaplin, the powerfully creative and excellent IWW poet and artist and songster --  whose long career came to be characterized by a number of "phases" -- some of which earned him attacks from a variety of perspectives.  I researched Chaplin's life pretty thoroughly, noting a consistently libertarian socially conscious stream which, reflected in fine poetry especially, carried him ultimately to the edges of the Catholic Worker movement and also to a signal focus on Native rights.  I presented my essay at the Pacific Northwest Labor History Association's annual gathering (and it was subsequently published as the lead piece in the Pacific Historian.)  At the conclusion of my presentation, several unionists, none right-wingers by any stretch, complimented me on my "rehabilitation" of Chaplin and one gave me a copy of his own good book on certain phases of Canadian unionism.

Early on in my writing on Ralph Chaplin, I consulted with one of the last of the old-time IWW activists:  my old friend, Fred Thompson, who'd been an organizer, was still a writer, and who was considered the top authority on IWW history.  I asked him about Chaplin, who Fred had known well.

"Ralph was a very, very complex person," Fred said.  And then, with a smile in his voice, "You have to make allowances for poets."

Fred said it well.

Best, H

HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq / 
St. Francis Abenaki / St. Regis Mohawk 
Member, National Writers Union AFL-CIO

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