| Notes |
"any articles by metevsksy or zapata may be considered D I G G E R PAPERS. for now." |
| Abstract |
This letter is both a declaration and a performance: it identifies the writings of “Metevsky” and “Zapata” as Digger papers, then defines the Diggers not as a political sect or ideological faction but as people who “live their protest” through free action in the street. It catalogs their public practices—free food, free shows, free drugs, arrests, refusal of respectable behavior—and sharply rejects the frameworks through which others try to explain them, whether Old Left, New Left, SDS, or conspiracy politics. The Diggers are presented as indifferent to doctrine and organization, committed instead to immediacy, risk, and a lived revolution grounded in giving things away, refusing commodification, and collapsing the distance between idea and act.
At the same time, the piece is mythmaking in a distinctly Digger register: funny, confrontational, improvisational, and ecstatic. It mocks money, protest pieties, and conventional radicalism while celebrating a wild collective energy that is closer to beat prophecy than programmatic politics. The announcement of the “FREE FRAME OF REFERENCE GARAGE” gives this vision a concrete social form, a place where free goods and free relations might actually be practiced. In its closing passage, borrowing and transforming Kerouac’s language, the letter casts the Diggers as burning figures of desire and refusal, driven not by certainty but by possibility: that “maybe two fingers can touch,” “maybe streets won’t run into neighborhoods any more,” and “maybe there is something” beyond repression, deadness, and the false choices of the existing order. |
| Full Text |
Catalog No.: DP-19661200]
Inner Space
[Letter from the Diggers to Innerspace Magazine, December 1966.]
inner space:
any articles by metevsksy or zapata may be considered D I G G E R PAPERS. for now.
the diggers have been giving out, providing each other with free FREE FOOD since the first week of October. and have never missed a day.
diggers have gone to jail for giving FREE SHOWS on the street.
diggers have gone to jail for suspicion of stealing slabs of meat, sacks of potatoes, etc.
diggers have gone to jail for giving out free acid, grass, dope.
diggers have gone to jail simply because someone wanted them there.
but diggers have never gone to jail peace-fully-ably.
everyone tries to find out who sponsors the digger FREE FOOD. the CP thinks it's the SP, the SP thinks it's the CP, SDS thinks it's PLP … they all know it's a conspiracy.
well the diggers despise conspiracy … the old left … the new left … they're indifferent to their tactics and don't even bother talking to them … (SDS NATIONAL COMMITTEE invited D I G G E R S to their national conference: "no thank you, but thanks just the same. you see. it's getting late. and well. the turnips. for chrissake the turnips!"
d i g g e r s are street people: they just don't give a fuck! they live their protest. they have nothing and nothing to lose. they do their thing for free. and you can ask why? and how revolution? and if you did this then maybe … but the diggers don't. no, they really don't. and it's hard for me to understand, but it's true. they're tough. they put down the psychedelic fashion (revolution is killing people and taking their property away. if not literally, then figuratively. but never asking them to buy …), protestors (who keep their leftovers in DOW chemical baggies) guilt-ridden gift-bearers (a favorite: a guy will come up to a d I g g e r and say I think what you're doing is beautiful and sort of palm a ten or twenty across and then have his stomach turned when the throng is brought together to thank the gentle-man and burn his offering to saint george metevsky who really hated all those buildings he nicked with bombs for twenty-three years. all anarchists have a strange fear of buildings … the diggers, if they are anarchists, don't … they've got a FREE FRAME OF REFERENCE GARAGE at 1762 Page St. (the address is not a mailing one for who knows when blue coat will produce his chocolate gun and duel them out … back to the granite.) where free clothes, food, total, all, pans/pots … will be available from Dec. 3.
provos …. no, the d i g g e r s are not that. they're total drug oriented mad ones, who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything of the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like a fabulous yellow roman candle exploding like spiders across the sky, and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and "Awww!" people who have ridden the crest of kerouac's bum's romance and slammed to earth wailing love! and lady, they're wailing for maybes. maybe two fingers can touch. maybe streets won't run into neighborhoods any more. maybe there is something beside acid indigestion and copsuckers and the gladly dead. just maybe.
WHO AM I?: just a guy who overheard a guy named allan talking to a guy they call Mr. D i g g e r about a letter you wrote and thought it would be nice to, seeing he wouldn't …
[In vertical typography:]
the black mask is only as conscious as izzy stone. silly coherents |
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