‘summer of love’ redivivus
Although I spent a couple of weeks in the East Village in the summer of ’67, I actually wasn’t a hippie. For starters, at 21, I was too old. Then, too, I hadn’t taken full bore psychedelics. That would come two years later. I’d played with morning glory seeds with some friends and had appropriately weird reactions. Eventually we heard stories about poisons. Some said the seeds were sprayed. Others said (later) that the poison was indigenous in the seed. In any case, I hadn’t done acid or mesc. The two or three years of age difference may have been part of the difference in attitude. I was till hesitating. And finally, I had short hair. I had had long hair on and off, as well as face hair. But going to a school in the south, I bounced back and forth. At this point, the hair was short, slightly over regulation military. In fact, a question I was commonly asked – whether I’d just gotten out of the army.
I was staying at a crash pad run by the friend of a friend, a 24 year old CO doing his alternate service as a hospital orderly. His place was just off Tompkins Square Park. He wasn’t quite a beatnik and I wasn’t quite a hippie, so we had a certain rapport. I also had a friend in summer school on Staten Island, so I was back and forth between the islands, getting high on riding the Staten Island ferry stoned. But I never really felt comfortable blowing weed on the street or in the park. I also got off on hanging out at the ethnic bar at one corner of the park, cracking the little boiled crabs they left out in baskets, drinking beer and watching the action over in the park through a long set of windows that faced that way. The owners may have been Polish or Slovak.
I was a tourist. I was a fellow traveler. I was not a day tripper, however. I didn’t come in from Short Hills in the Thunderbird to score acid and trip out. A couple years later, after I’d done my brief stint as a journalist, I came back in the journalistic mindset. When I saw the burned out buildings I assumed that there must have been unreported riots. Only after a decade, after I’d lived in Boston, did I recognize the landlord’s solution: if the property is trashed, hire an arsonist for the insurance money. And in retrospect I had the sense that I’d been a journalist when I was there the first time – not the old style hit-and-run journalist, but a participant journalist, the new style. By the time I came back, I was living in a steel town and drinking in an ethnic bar, filled with the local wannabe hippies.
Everything about the ’60’s is anecdotal. But ‘my thing’ revolves around the search. Everyone I knew – that is, everyone that I knew that I cared about – was looking for something. So it’s a preselected sample. But the essence was the missing piece. Now the purveyors of cheap panaceas feed on that – which is simply to say, at this point, the purveyor side of consumerism. But I’m talking here, in terms of the derivatives, of miracle cure-alls, green this or that, miracle diets, miracle exercise regimens or meditation practices and so forth. But at that time there was this strong sense that if we could just find the key, there was some secret, and the key would unlock it and change the world – or my world, at least. Around 1969, I spent a lot of time in and around New York, living briefly uptown near Columbia. And I would go over and hang out with my student friend with a dorm room over the quad. We’d blow some dope, turn the speakers out the window, crank up Creedence on the vinyl – he was avid on Creedence – and go out on the quad to listen. The radical remnant generally had a building under siege, but the primary evidence of their former glory was an outsize PA system, which the two dozen Marxists would hump from building to building as the administration would get its cease and desist orders with bench warrants. Then my friend had a friend who was a flautist, and he would come over and do his sweet hippie improv. So while Creedence was singing about its peculiar nostalgic romanticism on the dawning verges of heavy rock, and the Marxists were ranting about imperialist pigs and investments in South Africa, the flautist would weave that gentle pastoral wind-sound around the clear sunlight glittering off the buildings and tree leaves. But even then I was saying, ‘The problem is here. The problem is not South Africa.’ I already knew something was wrong at the core of the educational process.
Something was missing.
The real history of the radical nature of the ’60’s was not the ‘summer of love’ but what preceded it.
People want to talk about the ‘greatest generation’, that is, the generation that came of age at World War II. But that generation did what it was supposed to do. I suspect if another American generation were to live through a depression and come of age at a world war, it would show the same stolidity. But that ignores what happened afterward. No one mentions the fact that members of that generation came home saying, ‘I’ve done my bit. Now it’s for me.’ And they had the GI Bill. Underneath the tacit cultural repression brought about by circumstances, the cultural revolution of ‘the modern’ was continuing. And to say that some effete intellectual elite imposed it on unsuspecting provincials is just crap. The ‘greatest generation’ bought it willingly and bought it wholesale. But they didn’t live it. They wanted their piece of the pie, and the pie was corporate income. So they preached an ideal to their children that had nothing whatsoever to do with how they were actually living.
Our problem is that we believed what they said, and largely ignored what they did, at least at the outset. But, at a certain point, it started to dawn on them that we were not going to follow them blindly into the same hypocrisy. They did what they did because they thought they had no choice. But what they preached to us was choice. And they had made the choices that left us no alternative save the radical culture being shaped by the latter-day ‘modernism’. They had moved away from their ancestral homes and friends, to educate themselves and follow the dollar. They moved into the cultureless wastelands of the subdivisions. And they preached freedom and left Life magazine on the coffee table and tuned into Ed Sullivan on the TV. The only real values we could see were the new talents, and the new talents that spoke to us were largely counterculture.
So our parents set us up. And when they suddenly changed their tunes, it was already too late. When are we going to start to get honest about this?
For me, I can point to a specific pivot. When Dylan sang, ‘Advertising signs they con / you into thinking you’re the one / that can do what’s never been done / that can win what’s never been won /meantime life outside goes on / all around you’, it was all over for me. Of course, there were the moments when I discovered that all my friends smoked dope; or the moment when somebody clapped the headphones on my head the first time I heard Sgt. Pepper, and so on and so forth.It doesn’t really matter. Everyone has his or her own story.
But the problem was actually older than intergenerational difference.
I got close to it in school, because the Romantics had rung mybell long before I got to college. And I had that innate and intuitive response to the language, so I already recognized what a radical shift had taken place. I read the bowdlerized Life of Samuel Johnson and it bored me to tears. And I looked at Johnson’s own writings and felt like someone had my brains in a sausage grinder. Ditto Pope and Dryden. Addison and Steele could tell a joke. But they all struck me as forced – contrived. Keats was my touchstone. Somehow he reduced language to bedrock, the pure sound. No hypocrisy. No arbitrary self-consciousness, but an immediate self-awareness in language. He doesn’t even need to lift the mirror – the language is his mirror. And I had studied painting. And it was obvious that both the Impressionists and post-Impressionists held the key to that same kind of immediacy, only visually. So I stalked the halls of my college and my department – supposedly at that time one of the better literature departments in the country – asking ‘What is the modern?’ – because I knew that it had to start at that transition between the 18th and 19th centuries. I have to acknowledge that I didn’t get any of that horseshit deflection which is apparently the true masterpiece of contemporary scholasticism. But what I got was silence or mumbling. No one, it seems, could answer my question.
How many hundreds of billions of dollars are we spending every year on ‘higher’ education. And, at that level, every teaching practitioner is also theoretically a researcher. And here is a basic question about history that not only affects us but is absolutely determinative in terms of culture. And still, today, no one has ananswer. But when I say, ‘not only can culture die, it has,’ people think I’m crazy. When foreigners say they don’t want our ‘culture’, they mean hamburgers and soda, television and Disneyland – the world as a surreal zoo and super-sized amusement park. And this is literally it. This is what we have to offer.
The hippies were a reaction to what was happening around them – the death of the culture. They did the best they could, given their bad education. But their bad education is the bad education that is being purveyed across the board in this society. And it is being purveyed because nobody can answer the question : What is the modern? At least, not until now. They did the best they could. If their stuff looks derivative, that’s because nobody could offer them the cultural ground for the new, the real cultural sustenance that feeds creativity.
But, if you’re serious, check it out. There’s an answer around here somewhere. Maybe one or two old hippies, doddering around in the intellectual background, made it down to the boat. And maybe they caught a little of the real wind in their sails. Who knows?
Beautiful!!!....maybe more later...
Reply to this
i was also 21 in 1967. i graduated from art school in june. part of the summer of love was spent in chicago where i was involved in an intense and doomed inter-racial relationship. the rest of the summer, living back at home in the burbs of schenectady ny, a virtual prisoner...and an outcast in my parents home. my memories of the time converge with jeremy's. however, my heart and my body burned with anguish and pain. perhaps samuel barber's adagio for strings stil best expresses that time for me.
Reply to this
Obviously, I wrote this primarily to express my feelings at the media flux around the 40th, and to respond to it. Like school reunions, the 40th is a peculiar kind of penultimate, because of the aging cycle of the participants.
But I also wrote it because, while I'm not a particularly avid follower of the history, I have yet to see anything that really expresses my experience, both in terms of my sense of the collective process as well as my unique experience as an individual.
Perhaps someone or some of us should do the equivalent of an oral history, focusing on the two vectors, the collective and the individual. Of course, we stand on the cusp of the change into the digital, having had to teach ourselves as adults while our later children began with computers. But it seems like the internet might be the ideal format for this kind of project. If I were more digitally literate, I might try to set it up.
I think one of the facets commonly elided in the discussions of the 60's, both by insiders and outsiders, is the failure to register how much our anxieties drove us. Contrary to the posture of the 'be-ins'and much of the public presentation, I think most of us - at least most of those I knew - were ultimately dealing with some 'anguish and pain', whether it had a source tangible to us or not.
Through the 'summer of love' and its leadup, we tasted a number of possibilities that seemed to lead out from that pain; and I think that was what the 'summer' was all about - a celebration of those possibilities. Some were cul-de-sacs, but some were real. Some were seeds that required extensive cultivation.
Reply to this
In France, too, there was much media hype about "the summer of love" (sic with zee accent)and I remembered asking Jeremy about all that nearly 20 or so years ago, at that time wondering why my generation couldn't have that (I was but a couple centimetres long in 1967) and he told me that they were the first to do what they did: "taste the possibilities". And that the musicians of that time really expressed what was going on. ("people are strange" by the Doors, for example.)
I wholly agree about the Dylan quote: living overseas has given me that perspective and has allowed me to better resist the whole consumerism wave that has arrived here in Europe too.
I still wish things could be a bit clearer, all I have is the music. And if today's French president (a rather conservative and not very fun person) accuses the "May 1968" generation of "ruining French education" I wonder if another generation could still be capable of changing so many things across the Western World. The Marxists here still dream it.
Reply to this
Well here it is. This was actually my point in the piece. The education system broke down because the philosophy broke down. Allan Bloom in his Closing of the American Mind does an even better job than Sarkozy (sp?) in presenting the absurd contradiction. He shows how 300 years of philosophy leads up to the death of reason, and then when the death of reason finally hits the streets (the schools), he points the finger at us and says it was our fault, even though his generation was the midwife to the debacle.
The one thing the 'murikans generally don't speak of is the fact that the French students brought down a government (if a year later) and that the Red Guards were at their height in China. Something was worldwide, even if we're not altogether comfortable with all of the bedfellows.
The death of philosophy is the collapse of the culture. But the collapse of the culture (and the acceptance of the collapse of the culture) makes it difficult to get a hearing.
We have all these wonderful and fanciful modes for espousing the sophistication of the meaningless, nowadays, that a simple statement tends to get dismissed as uncool.
My own reading is that the summer of love was in part an intuitive and perhaps even a prophetic response to this situation.
So something is possible. But it would have to start somewhere.
Reply to this