Occupy Wall Street has been “homeless” ever since we were evicted from Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan a few weeks ago, and many other Occupy sites have experienced the same fate. So while many of the original 1000+ global occupations remain in their original space, #OWS and others have become momentarily virtual, relying on social networking — Facebook, Twitter, email, texts — to rally Occupiers to regular rallies, marches, demonstrations, celebrations, and other events.

In the midst of this (hopefully temporary) “homelessness,” I find myself noticing again and again how music is associated with spiritually-identified activities at Occupy. That association is often indirect. Occupy has no hymnal other than viral media songs made for the movement, the music played at Occupations, and musicians who support the movement and, by implication, whose music can become a wellspring for those to have ears to hear it as “occupied.”

Songs made for the movement include Global Block Movement’s “Occupation Freedom”…

And Miley Cyrus let her song “Liberty Walk” get remixed and re-video’d in support of #OWS:

The music played at Occupations is usually by local musicians who play songs crafted for that moment, or invented in that moment, that are not meant for going media-viral, so are heard and then dissipate.

This would include lots of the drumming at #OWS…

and also this band of musicians I photographed a few weeks ago at Occupy San Francisco…

Many well-known musicians have come out to support Occupy sites. On Thursday night at an Occupy event at Lincoln Center, Lou Reed was the latest to throw his support behind the movement:

Jackson Browne did so a few days earlier at Zuccotti Park:

At Occupy Wall Street (and, I noticed, at Occupy San Francisco), the music almost always takes place in proximity to the designated “spiritual space” site, as if the accession to “the more,” to the claiming power at hand, takes two forms: religious and musical.

When #OWS held Zuccotti Park, the drummers were a few feet from the Sacred Space that I documented here many times. When I visited Occupy San Francisco a few weeks ago, I noticed that the musicians’ “bandstand” was again just a few feet from the tent that held the spiritual care/outreach ministry, called “Interfaith Sacred Space.” This interfaith ministry was coordinated by a man I met named Jai Veda, who described himself as a “humanist with neo-Hindu tendencies.” He and his team offered what I would call street spiritual exercises, including making available a “Sanctuary Space” — a modest tent — for meditation and discussion, helping mediate conflicts, convening an interfaith working group, bringing in Yoga teachers, and sponsoring meditations and impromptu art experiments, like chalk drawings on the pavement. Here are some pictures I took:

 

The scholar of ancient philosophy Ilsetraut Hadot has suggested that in antiquity we can perhaps find the origins of the close relationship between music and spiritual exercises in the ancient recognition of the musical qualities of incantatory speech.

Why does music so often follow that kind of trust in reality that is sometimes called faith, and why does that trust in reality so often follow that temporal silence and sound that we so often call music? Why are both so often found near the root of modern movements of resistance and protest? Occupy foregrounds what all modern social movements already suggest: Genuine resistance and protest can be understood as a kind of trust in reality, a sort of faith, mediated through music and religion.

Tommy Beaudoin, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

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