The revolution within
Election week in New York
1.
I arrived in New York the day before Halloween. I left the day after the election. It was warm the whole week. Everywhere I went—sun, fall, foliage. The trees were shedding so much I began to think of leaves as the main characters in this story. London Planetree leaves, thick and leathery like working hands; Honeylocust leaflets, slender like fluttering fingers. On every street the leaves crisped and curled. They aged silently and departed suddenly. They floated to earth, swirling, swirling, tracing rococo curls and yellow-red pirouettes, patching the pavement in a quilt of endings, and if you can see it, beginnings.
2.
G.W.F. Hegel was in his first year of Protestant Seminary when he heard the news from France. It was 1789 and foment was erupting in the streets of Paris. On the morning of July 14, a great crowd marched with muskets and swords on the Bastille, a vast prison fortress symbolizing the tyranny of the monarchs. By the end of the summer, a new French assembly was declaring man’s inviolable rights to equality, liberty, and property. The future had fired its opening salvo.
From his studies at the University of Tübingen, in southern Germany, Hegel soon encountered classmates—Friedrich Hölderlin and Friedrich Schelling—who shared his excitement and yearning. The trio became inseparable. They lived together and dined together. They attended political meetings, kept up with all the journals, scoured translations of the most urgent tracts from overseas. One night in the summer of 1793, the three friends took to an empty field and planted a tall maypole into the ground. They christened their monument the Tree of Light and the legend was born that Hegel and his comrades circled it celebrating until late into the night, dancing and drinking, singing the words to La Carmognole and La Marseillaise, rising to meet the convulsions of the world.
3.
I remember election night in 2016 as a film reel, a series of closeups drenched in technicolor. At a bar on the Lower East Side, the group of us were sitting at a booth when alerts buzzed our phones at the exact same time, the instant the needle swung, and the noise in the bar suddenly spiked and we hurled through another round of pitchers because our throats were suddenly dry. Near midnight, a cab driver turned to face me and I saw that his mouth was slack and his eyes were bulging like grapes. “This is crazy,” he said. He was from Pakistan and he was planning to bring his family to America. “This is so crazy.” At an apartment party in the early morning hours, someone spilled wine onto a sand-colored sofa and nobody moved. The stain blossomed red on the armrest. Eventually I was more tired than anything else. How I got home is the one missing frame. The next morning the air draped thick and heavy. I could not get out of bed.
4.
The Detroit-rooted activist Grace Lee Boggs was born female and Chinese in the America of 1915—a time in the country when women were barred from the vote and Chinese were barred from entry. “I felt from the very beginning,” she said, “there would be changes that needed to take place.”
Grace first encountered Hegel as a graduate student in philosophy. She was struck. She began to read his work “as if I was listening to music.” In the years following the fall of Bastille, Hegel watched the French Revolution lapse into violence with the guillotines closing upon thousands and terror gripping the streets. Confronting the shredded ideals he once celebrated, he fell into a deep reckoning. In his later works, he began to outline a view of the human spirit that was not fixed but constantly evolving, overcoming contradictions in a continual struggle toward greater truth and justice.
Reading Hegel, Grace came to see the limitations of the philosophy taught by her former professors. Their conception of truth was static and sterile, bound to old ideas whose time had already passed. Instead, she realized, truth existed within a flow, changing as times changed and conditions changed. Without ongoing revision, yesterday’s liberation became today’s cage.
5.
On the subway, I watched the same city-sponsored announcement flash on all the screens. “Every vote matters,” they said, first in English, then in Spanish. Then they played again in a loop.
Hats for him, buttons for her. People were dressed for the spectacle. Every four years, electoral politics became the designer brand in vogue.
Near Bryant Park I waited for the light to change as a roll of commercials unspooled from the side of a bus stop. Chanel bracelets and Prada handbags; Angelina Jolie’s sultry lips in Tom Ford’s runway rouge; the Omega Speedster Co-Axial Master Chronometer glinting against the horizon’s first light.
A ballot, a product, a sale—the change we’re promised is always on the other side of a transaction.
Behind the bus stop an older man sat silently on some steps. He wore a heavy coat and his head was down. A cardboard sign leaned against his knees. It read, “I might as well be invisible.”
6.
In the early fifties, Grace moved from New York to Detroit. She was working as an organizer and writing for Correspondence, a revolutionary newsletter that had spun out from the Social Workers Party. She liked Detroit immediately. There were beautiful pine trees lining wide boulevards and the people she met seemed to know one another. She bought a red 1938 Plymouth for one hundred dollars. She planned to stay. Within a decade, the country was coming undone. Cultural and social crises stacked on top of one another; the narrative was unraveling at the seams. Understanding racial injustice as the contradiction of their era, Grace and her husband, Jimmy Boggs, became leaders in the Black Power movement. Throughout the turbulence, they never stopped writing and speaking, hosting study groups, interrogating assumptions, uncovering blind spots.
In 1967, Detroit exploded into chaos with local uprisings and police raids and whole neighborhoods bursting into flames. A Detroit News columnist alleged six figures responsible for stoking discontent, among them Grace and Jimmy Boggs. In the years following, the couple watched their beloved city slip further into crime, violence, and decay. In 1974, they published Revolution and Evolution in the 20th Century, a joint reckoning with the rebellion and its aftermath.
“A revolution is not just for the purpose of correcting past injustices,” they wrote. “A revolution involves a projection of man and woman into the future. It begins with projecting the notion of a more human human being.”
Through the rest of their years Grace and Jimmy would model the ongoing struggle to become more human human beings for they had learned from fire there could be no grand revolution in society without first the quiet evolutions in ourselves.
7.
I walked a lot in New York, as much as I could. I walked along the Hudson, taking diaphragm breaths during sunset. I walked through Flatiron, snapping photos of narrow alleys, and the Garment District, side-stepping trash bags piled in tall heaps. In Queens, I walked through a riverside park where a towering 300-pound Black man balanced on one foot, surrounded by Cantonese elders half his size in a tai-chi circle.
In downtown Brooklyn, coming out of the subway, I saw a woman leaning against the entrance. It was the day of the election. Dusk was turning into evening. The woman’s legs were stretched and her feet were bare. Cigarettes, she was asking, anyone got cigarettes and a light? I watched a young Black man stop in front of her and set down a large paper bag. “No,” he said, “but I’ve got food.”
8.
In 2011, the podcaster Krista Tippett visited Grace at her home on Detroit’s east side. By then Grace was in her mid-nineties. Her movements were slower, her hearing was fading, yet her thinking was sharp. She had never stopped probing the past and present for clues to a more human future.
Traversing the span of a century, her life could be read in two parts. In the first part, her intensities were directed at the systems of domination she saw scaffolding society like prison bars. During the civil rights movement, she had found the gospel of nonviolence preached by Martin Luther King, Jr. too soft and sentimental, and she aligned instead with the fist-raising demands of Malcolm X to incite change by any means necessary. The rebellions of the sixties marked a turning point. In her second act, Grace returned to King’s ideas with humility. Studying his writings closely, she was delighted to discover that Hegel, too, had been King’s favorite philosopher. In the decades that followed, she spoke often about King’s concept of “two-sided transformation.” It was not enough to transform our power structures; we had to transform ourselves. We must “think of revolution as evolution,” she told Tippett, “rather than as getting more power or control.”
In October, a week before the polls, Tippett wrote in her newsletter, “I’m orienting to the beyond of this election. For the day after this election, whoever wins, my country will be as fractured as the day before.” She wrote, “The task in working for long-term evolution—as this also works in the natural world—is to attend not to what has arrived but what is being stitched.”
9.
The morning after the 2024 election I woke on my friend’s futon. The sun shone on my face through a small window square. I thought I might sleep more but the blue-white sky was relentless. I got up to gather my things and spotted a web of silver silk, threading the handle of my backpack, glinting against the glare. A tiny spider, no bigger than a mustard seed, cradled at the edge, weaving what was into what could be. Out the window was autumn turning forward, the air light and sweet, the leaves dancing. 🎨
You're like a photographer with words Dan. So many snapshots here that are lingering in my imagination. Now I can't unsee the man who otherwise would have remained invisible.
“On every street the leaves crisped and curled. They aged silently and departed suddenly. They floated to earth, swirling, swirling, tracing rococo curls and yellow-red pirouettes, patching the pavement in a quilt of endings, and if you can see it, beginnings.”
This is just stunning writing. I love reading your work. Kudos on another great piece!