Bohemian @ MindSay

It seemed we were the pioneers of the future, living in communes, eating organic food, going back to the land to live as independently as possible. Was it our imagination or were we having more fun than any of the other people we saw around us? The hippie movement was more than just a simple retreat from the modern world -- it also changed society in many ways, small and large. People who had been determinedly climbing the corporate ladder suddenly quit their jobs, grew long hair and sought other ways to fulfill their dreams. Every aspect of life was questioned. Women nor longer automatically went to hospitals to have their babies. Home births became the norm among hippies, with Midwives attending the births accompanied by doctors who embraced the philosophy of letting nature do its work unassisted whenever possible. (One reason home births were popular was that hippies didn't want the government to get information from hospitals about their babies, so later they might be drafted, or forced to go to a non-alternative school.)

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With the baby boomers in their late teens and early twenties – peak years of physical beauty – the hippie era became one of unabashed sexuality. The advent of the birth control pill, and other widely available birth control devices, freed young people from their fear of pregnancy, adding fuel to the fire of the sexual revolution. Although it’s hard to believe now, sexually transmitted diseases were not then a big problem: the plague of AIDS had yet to emerge, and herpes remained rare. The diseases of the time, syphilis and gonorrhea, were easily treated with antibiotics. Many of us suffered the vexations of crabs or scabies, of course, but these could be remedied with over-the-counter medications, followed by the cleansing ritual of boiling our clothes. All in all, this seemed a small enough price to pay for participating in the sexual revolution, probably the greatest times for sex the world has ever known.

People had many responses to this sexual revolution. Some remained monogamous to a steady boyfriend or girlfriend, and eventually married. Many of these unions are still together. Others, more sexually adventuresome, enjoyed both male and female partners, and attended orgies and wild parties. Some hippies took this new sexual freedom to impressive heights: I remember one female roommate who was “saving me for number one hundred”. This unique combination of youth, the sexual revolution, and a lack of serious consequences helped fire the passions of hippies.

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We liked to go camping in the national parks, and many kids met up in Yosemite around a campfire; perhaps their first summer away from home. The vehicles cars of choice for these trips were converted school buses, Volkswagen vans and “bugs”, or classic American junkers, proudly painted in wild colors. We tore out the seats and put in blankets, foam pads and Indian fabrics.

Drugs were another defining part of being a hippie. First we tried marijuana while we were in school, and it seemed a very wicked and illegal act. For me, there were minute amounts available. I remember taking the tiny end of a joint, and lighting it (while my head was inside a paper bag) to try to get high. Being stoned was a learned experience. For the neophyte, the effects of marijuana are very subtle, and many people could barely feel it. It is a drug that raises one’s awareness but smoking too much can lead to a stupor or sleep.

LSD was the drug that really changed things. Just writing the initials on this typewriter seems dangerous. It is a very powerful drug. Mere micrograms -- an infinitesimal amount -- were enough to send a healthy person on an amazing, wild, and occasionally terrifying trip. Depending on the dose, the effects of LSD can last from eight to twelve hours. I believe that it breaks down the normal ability of the brain to keep non-survival perceptions and thoughts from overwhelming normal consciousness. To survive, animals must be totally aware of their environment; must be on the lookout for predators, must be alert for danger. Human’s large brains need to be controlled, so there are built-in defenses against tripping out. One can’t live in a constant state of profound revelations, while experiencing amazing patterns and combinations of color, sound, and smells, when the main task is to survive. But in the post-industrial world, where much former work is now mechanized or computerized, and most wild predatory animals sadly confined to zoos, many hippies attempted to live stoned on acid (LSD) a great deal of the time. This stoned world meant the end of normal living in society. One could smoke the occasional joint and still go to school or hold down a job, but the all encompassing effect of LSD was to live in a more spiritual, more loving world, without the trappings of conforming to a workday world. It seemed like a vast opening up, where the younger generation, with the wildness of youth, could totally re-invent the world and leave regular society ‘behind’.

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Not everyone who took acid could handle its power. People who were on the edge of mental illness could get worse, and the nightmares that everyone gets might become all too real – a terrifying experience. We were intrepid explorers, with the brazen courage of youth. Once, while tripping on acid, I was riding in a car on the way to Big Sur. I noticed that the breaking waves, seen from Highway One, had incredible rainbows. I remember trying to eat a turkey leg, left over from a Thanksgiving Dinner. Suddenly I became aware that it was an actual creature’s legs, and instead of looking like meat, it was a turkey’s walking equipment. I remember thinking, if I am eating his leg, shouldn’t I try and use his energy, indeed his life, for some higher purpose? So I resolved to shoot some really good pictures of Big Sur.

I needed a drink to get the taste of this poor bird out of my mouth, so we stopped at a gas station on the intersection of Highway One and 101 near Castroville. I managed, somehow, to get lost at the coke machine while my travel companions forgot all about me and went off to get some artichoke hearts. Every direction I looked was a freeway, and after a while I gave up trying to deal with it. I just sat down on a curb, figuring that I’d be arrested. In the midst of this confusion, my friends pulled up to retrieve me and off we went!

I took some beautiful images of Point Lobos, a park near Carmel, only to leave my Hasselblad (one of the world’s most expensive cameras) on a rock at Point Lobos. Hours later, by some miracle, we found it, still there. I remember rubbing against some poison oak with my belly for the fun of it. By yet another miracle, I escaped the itch.

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It was a wild and crazy time, with no going back. People who didn’t become hippies seemed resentful, jealous or horrified by our lovemaking and drugs. Later, some became revisionists, using the media to portray us as losers, drug-dealing pushers. Uptight and angry history is now rewritten so our giant experiment in communal living, free love, and dropping out, is seen as criminal activity. Writing truthfully about this time is dangerous because it scared the hell out of many people. When I see teenagers encumbered with shopping bags, going to malls for designer clothing, I think that these kids are perfect corporate robots, who live only to shop.

Communal living suffered no such hang-ups.. Why work too much, when one could hang out with friends, saving money and sharing resources? Vegetarianism got a boost. Protein substitutes were developed by combining various grains, like beans and rice. People took turns cooking and folks were always welcome to “crash”, staying at each other’s houses. Hitchhiking was the normal way to get round, and long hair and tie-dyed clothing were a passport to instant acceptance at parties, on the road, or at concerts. These hippie skills are much needed, because the earth can’t support even today’s population if everyone has every material thing they lust after. The future, whether we like it or not is a choice between a hippie culture or a war culture.

Concerts! Wow, what a great time! Working as a rock and roll photographer, I went to many shows: free concerts in Golden Gate Park, Bill Graham productions at Winterland and the Fillmore West, plus the Family Dog on the Great Highway in San Francisco. The music was amazing, the air heavy with marijuana smoke and incense, and the dancers were spinning visions of beauty. Light shows projected mystical, colored patterns moving in time with the music, enhancing the effect of everything. Afterwards, many people went home with each other for more personal lovemaking. San Francisco bands were in the forefront of the world music scene. Groups such as The Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Jefferson Airplane, (my fave) cross-pollinated with British bands like the Stones and Beatles, and for the first time a large white audience embraced the great blues figures like B.B. King. Record companies suddenly began to recognize the vast buying power of the youth culture, as money flowed like great waterfalls of cash.

Hippie poster art was a visual interpretation of the psychedelic era. Hand lettered and hard-to-decipher, this amazing artwork helped foster a secret and inclusive experience of truly belonging to another culture increasingly apart from the mainstream. The growing schism between “normal” society and this suddenly rebellious youth movement was made all the worse by increasingly oppressive drug laws passed by a government desperate to stem the tide of the hippie revolution. The lethal escalation of the Vietnam War furthered the profound disconnect between the hippies and regular society. The result is pictured in the next chapter, Counterculture, a reaction to the Vietnam war, the McCarthyism of the fifties and early sixties, the conformist corporate culture, and the environmental destruction of California and the world by development, pollution and greed.

In the end, the hippie vision of a pure and simple life was no match for the forces of ambition, conservatism, and the almighty dollar. The world seemed clear to the hippies: either people were hip, and thus fully tuned in to reality itself, or they were pigs. This may seem a very blunt and simplistic assessment, but when we look at our leaders today and their endless oil wars, then think back to the motivations that led to the quagmire of Vietnam, perhaps the hippies, acting so instinctively and innocently, offered some answers that the world could use to be a more sharing and peaceful civilization.

By Richard Blair, Inverness, CA ©2006 My homepage Please send your comments? email me!

(Please note that Richard Blair is not the author/owner of this blog. This article was copied from one of his websites because it is, in my opinion, highly representative of my own feelings and experiences as part of the hippie generation. All credits and copyrights for the content of this article only, are owned by him.)

there's long been something confining about education.

the classrooms smell sickly like hospital rooms, with the same white cinder block walls and jaundiced yellow lighting, and the wheeze of projectors, or the stagnant compacency of the teachers and the taught, and the thickness in the air of people confined together where they don't want to be.  the teachers hand out fliers with blanks to fill in, and we fill in those blanks, knowing each one simply fills a minute, and the taught are disinterested in what is being said even if the teachers believe in it, and if the students are interested, the teachers are not.  and even in the case where both are interested, the awkward saddling of grades onto ideas forces obstacles in the path to insight.

i have long thought education was choking in many of those ways, like netting a wild bird.  but then i think, how else would you see the wild bird up close, and see the sheen of its vermilion feathers?

i am conflicted on the subject, although i mostly dislike the education system for its smothering quality, and its way of discouraging kids with its forced confinement and stale repetition, and its social stratifying pounded into our heads, based either on supposed intelligence, pure appearance, or what have you.  mostly, schools, in their most base quality, oppose impulse and intuition, which i think are keys to insight.  but then i think however, how can else can you learn to interpret the technicolored flashings on your retinas than some exposure to long-established thoughts, to provide foundation from which to fling your own thoughts?

what are schools?  places of learning, of deep thought, of nursing ideologies on the breast of a thinktank institution?  these are all grand euphemisms of the rudimentary purpose of a school or even the more grandiose notion of a university.

when it comes down to it, schools socialize young people into a productive post in society.  that is their fundamental purpose, and no higher ideal than that, no ideal of stirring great sparks to kindle the mind.  as well as i said, they introduce the frames of thought, as foundations, a base or starting point on which to build our own alabaster tower, or that is what we like to believe. in actuality, because we must use the very ancient stones from which they laid their foundation, whatever thought-house we build, mansion, cottage, cabin, or shanty, will contain a cornerstone of their thought.  our own stones will not go beyond their parameters.

this is really not a new idea in itself, but the utter bluntness of it struck me--that a school is really not a place of higher enlightenment, but instead, taken at face value, a factory churning out skilled laborers made specifically for demand.  and especially the ruse under which we all conduct ourselves--that we are out to achieve some higher purpose of learning, of intellectual achievement--i can see it transparentally in my educated friends discussing Nietzsche.  Here are more buzzwords: bourgeoise, juxtaposition, the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, economy.  and we have the nerve to call ourselves intellectuals, and worse: artists.

look at any artist and you will see that art is antithesis of productivity...for all art is useless and beautiful, and has done nothing to contribute to any sort of mass production to feed the constant uptake of society.  and so art, must, in part, be in opposition to the institutions who serve production.

it is odd because we all think of art as essentially creative; when we meet someone who draws or plays music we call them creative, but in fact creating and producing are not synonymous, though it would seem.  creating has nothing to do with replicable results and, thus, operates on the instance of impulse.  the purpose of creating is not in fact even to produce a material object made from the force of creativity, though it may be so.  the purpose of every creation is insight, one single, often irretrievable instant of counter-productive thought, not rolled along in the assembly line of taught channels of analyses, hypotheses, theorems, or logistics.  art is  the moment where we halt at attention, essentially the counter-productive, while wholly creative and original in that originates some new thought for the sake of its own delicate existence and no other.  all else is productive: out to reap the tangible fruits or manufacture some object not for the sake of itself but for the sake of how it will be used for something else, on some never-ending chain link stretching upwards from used to user become the used, and no other.

and yet within the designated parameters there is the illusory idea of counterproductivity.  this is why universities are controversial, accused of fostering ideologies or weak intellectuals--fostering not productivity, but teachers who, after finished with a lecture, gaze out a nature, or students who, also subsequently finished with lecture, go out and get drunk.  this is only partially true about teachers and students, but that is besides the point: the point is that the very reason a teacher can even gaze at the wonders of azure skies or a student can drink himself to death is because somewhere we have produced more than we can consume--that is, they do not need to be directly productive.  this allows the illustrious institution of the university the power of claiming counterproductivity and taking up the banner of counterculture.  just because a university is more like a cog in a gear of production rather than the pistons does not mean it is any less involved in the process of production.  it is only a less obvious piece.

universities are breeding-grounds for activism, but it is contained activism.  because of the ideal of deep, even original thought sparked in their heads, college youth march down the channel of counterproductivity, often on the claim of higher purpose.  "i have better things to do than school.  i can save darfur!  i can prevent global warming!"  this idea of becoming an opposing force to production, while remaining part of an institution wholly established for the training and fitting of individuals into productive roles in society, can never work.  universities provide a comfortable and self-satisfying environment for contained activism and intellectual self-gratification, continuing the ruse of insightful, counterproductive thinking, confirming their own beliefs in their high intellect, and "making a difference," which breeds the herds of roaming and trampling pseudo-intellectuals with blaring, nasal mating calls of jazz theory, gender issues, ethnic relations, and moral philosophy scouring the quads.

however, the reason i am conflicted about education is this: the only way i can see to truly act counterproductively is, in fact, to use the productive system against itself.  one can never "destroy" the system, as anarchists would believe--that is too simplistic and idealistic, equally simplistic as continuing perfectly and blissfully unawares  into your role in the production system.  punks are only another designated role that people have set out as supposed fringes of society, but in fact are integral for the impresion of the very fringe itself. the same goes for bohemians, who are only another face of designated counterculture--although closer to acting upon impulse and fostering art, the bohemian ideal of easy love has been shattered time and time again, and they operated to heavily upon ideals, not upon actions. society is as stable as ever--stratification has existed and will exist forever, french revolution, egalite, liberte, and fraternite aside, not to mention another buzzword: Marxism. 

the only thing we can do, as i said, is continue in the system, and indeed find your niche, and carve your own hole in it.  as emily dickinson did, act with chastity and disguise the contumely in white, allow yourself to be taken care of because "you are a woman," and "a child," then use the time you now have, in place of taking care of yourself by engaging in productivity to instead engage in creativity.  exploit what is expected of you, act meekly and obediently, but surge underneath.  create when no one is looking, because we do not create for the use of eyes, only for its own existence as remnants of ourselves.  produce when people are looking, or when expected.  act as jesus did, meek and humble and a lamb, appear as a baby and rise, secretly, and without anyone really believing, as a holy spirit, both begetter and begotten, God-king, for all who create are gods to their creation and to themselves, and no university will prepare you for that kind of autonomy.

and do as i have done, use the very tools of self-satisfying intellect: vocabulary and analysis, to prove these modus operandi in fact weapons to their very ends, and where you tread in intellectually masturbatory grounds, use the gratifying stimulation of ideas for exposure, for windows into how to get out. act as mahatma, king, and jesus christ would have:  lower yourself out of your niche. do not fight, do not rise up. 

.I got so much more work done when I was unhappy. It's ridiculous. Now, all I do is sit around and go, "Yeah..." I think I've become possibly the most bohemian-ly useless person ever to exist. I guess I'm just not used to being happy. I guess I'm just not used to... this. Damn my romanticism. Happiness ruins my GPA. Oh, well. It's nice all the same.