BY BILL TALEN (REVEREND BILLY) | We’re in a strange place, a garden inside Trump Tower. We are facing blank pages with our pens. There are 15 of us, including Savitri D and myself, and singers from the Stop Shopping Choir. We wait for the timekeeper to say, “Write.” We will write nonstop for 45 minutes.
The Trump Company is required to let us sit here under this 700-foot-high slab of gold-tinted glass. Years ago, Trump agreed with the city to keep this garden open to the public in exchange for 24 extra floors. This is Donald Trump’s business headquarters and sometime home, with body-armor-clad men at the door with submachine guns.
Being inside Trumplandia can be unnerving. For the New Yorkers who join us in the tower garden, Trump has been the city’s unsavory clown for decades. We encountered the gold lettering of his name everywhere and we envisioned posturings with hair in the distance. When we take the five flights of gold-plated escalators up to the garden, we suffer a full-body immersion. The gold mirrors make a dim, almost soupy light. God, it’s ugly.
“Write!”
We all start scrawling. What we write might be called secrets, first thoughts, recovered memories, streams of consciousness. I say “secrets” because we don’t share our writing with one another. Not yet, anyway. Now in our fifth week, we haven’t read our work out loud or handed off the journals.
We’re focused on pre-screen writing, as in pre-computers. We use the older technology of longhand and paper. We’re spending time on the other side of pixels, streaming, virtual reality.
This homemade culture of our little band of citizens — at the site of worldwide piracy and hokum and treason — assumes that something has gone radically wrong in our basic social communicating. But it is inside the sentences that you and I speak all day long, let’s admit it.
To borrow from science fiction, there a space-time rip in our language? The Trump tweets, Russian hacks and Koch trolls seem more like symptoms than causes.
Our failure is more devastating than Donald Trump. As a nation, and as a species, we don’t know how to communicate with ourselves. Our town crier function is silenced. The attack-noise of products and law enforcement and fear make our public media conceal more than reveal.
Otherwise, we would have written or spoken something in public about the racism, compelling enough to out the hate. Why haven’t we shown that families must be protected? How can our defense of life itself be demoted to “issues” and “policy” and “write your congressperson?” This 700-foot wall — the tower is the wall, after all — is crawling with Devils!
We don’t need to be great writers. We need to say something. Where is the art of effective protest, the howl, the arts as a starting-over point, or call it just plain I-don’t-buy-it independence? Freedom of expression has become as irrelevant as White House press conferences.
This is why we are turning inward for a while. Margaret Mead said that revolutions start with a few people talking at a table.
We’re in the thoughtful inhale before the talk. The stakes are so high and the hour is so late. We’ll spend some time tilling the soil of silence.
There are little weeds in the cracks of the pink-granite floor of this so-called garden. There is moss and mold along the walls. We talk to the weeds at the end of our 45 minutes. We ask the weeds to remember us as they hopefully quickly dismantle this modernist slab. Can we be super-weeds in your forest?
Culture starts from inside, quietly under the surface, like a seed in the soil. The first breath of a thought, before the socializing starts, is the protest that will grow to bury this tower-that-is-the-wall.
We sit together at tables in the garden, with the police and the tourists eyeing us from the edges of the gold decor.
If you would like to sign up to join the Church of Stop Shopping at its write-ins, go to https://www.volunteersignup.org/DYBHE. Our upcoming International Brown Bag Lunch will feature people from every culture. The garden can accommodate about 150 people.
Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir will hold an International Brown Bag Lunch at Trump Tower on Tues., July 25, at noon, and will also perform at the Prospect Park band shell on Thurs., July 27, at 7:30 p.m., as a part of Celebrate Brooklyn.
