The Furious Spinner

I read an old The Furious Spinners today, back when it was published on recycled dead trees four times a year. In the issue I picked up, I wrote about an article written by Susan Griffin called "To love the marigold: the politics of imagination" in the Spring 1996 issue of Whole Earth Review. She told the story of Robert Desnos and what happened to him and others on the way to the Nazi gas chambers. As the guards and prisoners waited in the truck to be taken inside, everyone seemed quietly resigned to what was going to happen. Nothing could change the horrible inevitability of it all. Suddenly Desnos grabbed a man's hand and read his palm. He told the man he would have a long life and several children. Excitedly, he told fortune after fortune of long life and joy. Everything changed in those moments. Hope washed through the group, and the guards turned the truck away from the gas chambers and returned the men to the concentration camp! I laughed and cried as I read this story—weeping when I learned Desnos did not survive the camps.

Griffin wrote that we need imagination to change the world—the kind of inspiring imagination Robert Desnos had. What a hopeful idea. It seems as though we are currently under the spell of some pretty bad people and so much of our efforts to change the tide of war and ecological destruction have been futile. But Griffin says, "No one can stop us from imagining another kind of future, one which departs from the terrible cataclysm of violent conflict." And we can begin this process by imagining "the worlds we would like to inhabit, the long lives we will share, and the many futures in our hands."

Susan Griffin writes powerful, unremitting, boisterous, bleeding, bravura poetry, and pretty cool books, besides. 0 comments

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