Sleeping Beauties

Laini and I emerged from the Fulton Street subway and turned in slow circles, not sure which way was south with the sun directly overhead. A mailman stopped his cart to ask us where we were headed. “Occupy,” we admitted. He gave us directions to the park and we were off. “If you get a chance,” he called after us, “tell my daughter to come home.”

It was smaller than I’d pictured. I’ve heard others say the same. It’s expanded in our minds through its replication in the media, the kaleidoscopic documentation of each event and the seeds it’s scattered across the globe.

The core group – the sleepers – was an even smaller bunch. You could easily see how much space each one occupied. Their footprints of concave bedding, nested with a small pile of belongings were clumped around the park. They set the example that people could live with little. This was mid-October and the sun was out boosting moral. Although, temperatures have certainly dropped since then and the nights must be brutal.

Tents are outlawed in Zuccotti Park, so I wandered through a blue-tarped terrain that was composed of any shelter or support that couldn’t be labeled as such. I was reminded of the time I spent volunteering in the Ninth Ward after Hurricane Katrina. Ours was a tent village in a parking lot with its own self-sufficient infrastructure including facilities in a gutted school building. Outside of these one-block worlds, the environment is entirely different – wasteland or bustling financial center. Inside Zuccotti, the mood was festive, like a music festival campground. Each of the protesters seemed to adopt a role to keep the community organism sustained. A women collected trash. Bins of books were up for borrow. Ben and Jerry themselves set up an ice-cream stand and dished out highly-photographed offerings. The occupiers spent their days working, but in a non-Capitalist sense. They would organize events, participate in protests around the city, repeat and amplify speeches, and even perform puppet shows on the subway. Just being present was productive.

Jerry.

The puppeteer was Kalan, a friend from Oberlin who had often ruffled the feathers of our school, which considered itself unable to be phased by liberal antics, with his performance art. He told me he had been sleeping at Occupy with a few breaks since September 10^th. When I asked him how he was doing, he lifted his head slowly and looked at me with big, glassy eyes. “I’m very tired,” he said.

Chilling with Kalan.

As I weaved in and out of bodies and boxes and bold-lettered signs, I was struck by the intimacy of the space. Without being able to cover themselves fully, the protesters were in a vulnerable position -- belly up in the middle of a city known for chewing up its pilgrims and spitting them out. There was no private space and the site was a magnet for public viewing. Nights they had to fight off cold and city noise for sleep, so many caught mid-day naps when they could. Curled up in the sun, they were the ultimate peaceful protesters. Powerful in the satyagraha (Ghandi’s philosophy of non-violent resistance) sense.

Walking around to read the slogans and pick up the pamphlets meant that you were also stepping gingerly over the arm of a sleeping teenage girl or brushing up against two boys curled up in each other’s arms. The sleeping beauties imbued the space with a seductive charm. Some slept underneath their posters, asking to be documented. Unfortunately, the intriguing layout lured media leeches as well as supporters. Kalan and his friend told me that they had recently been photographed by a British tabloid that claimed the closeness of their bodies was evidence of public sex and drug use on Wall Street. I managed to find the article and the photograph online. But reading the slanderous accusations didn’t sully the beauty of the image. Despite themselves, they had circulated a photo that radiated the pleasure of togetherness and the peace of simple living.

Headline reads: "Sex and drugs on tap, who says it's not a political partaaay?"