Art and Life in the Haight Ashbury

     Doubtless the most prominent elements of the artistic legacy of the youth movement of the 1960s are the psychedelic rock music of bands like Big Brother and the Holding Company and the Grateful Dead, the innovating cartoon work from Zap and others, and the graphic design of the concert posters and the underground press, notably the pioneering Oracle.
     The Haight Ashbury itself produced few memorable paintings or sculptures and relatively little of lasting literary value in part because hip artists in the center of the scene sought to make life as a whole into art with street theater, extravagant costumes, community-based music, and a slyly ironic argot. Though the Beat poets had formed the best-known segment of the hip movement during the fifties and several of their principal representatives, born between 1919 and 1935, [1] read at the first Human Be-In in the Golden Gate Park Polo Grounds in January of 1967, the culture of the Haight-Ashbury was far less productive of lasting literary monuments than that of North Beach had been.
     The ambition to make everything an objet d’art naturally led to a paucity of distinct objets d’art. The widely shared goals of enlightenment and the transformation of American culture were inconsistent with aesthetic experience as a unique sort of consumption marked off, indeed exalted, by its separation from everyday life and often associated with the privileged. Along with the resistance to limiting art to self-consciously produced objects for a specialized marketplace came a democratic reluctance to glorify a few “geniuses” whose names are a sort of commercial brand and to cultivate anonymous art and art for free in which professional ambitions had no relevance at all. [2]
     Nonetheless the Diggers, the leading formation of the Haight-Ashbury scene, had emerged from earlier literary publications such as Beatitude and Underhound and other specifically artistic formations such as R. G. Davis’ San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Artists Liberation Front. They produced written texts from the beginning. As the Haight neared its crest, The Communication Company, with Claude Hayward and Chester Anderson at its center, assumed the task of publishing for the collective as members of a movement rather than as individual artists or advocates for strictly aesthetic values. Building on the legacy of the Digger Papers that had already appeared, the Communication Company printed hundreds of handbills as well as works of poetry by Richard Brautigan, Michael McClure, and Lew Welch.
     Having acquired “one brand-new Gestetner 366 silk-screen stencil duplicator” and “one absolutely amazing Gestefax electronic stencil cutter,” “Chester & Claude” announced the Communication Company with a manifesto titled “Our Policy.” The document, though printed on new equipment, has a makeshift appearance that reinforces its message. Across the top is inscribed The Communication Company in a hand that betrays nothing of art school polish. Beneath are detailed the group’s goals in a stencil made from a manual typescript, including a section headed “our plans and hopes,” of which only one of the twelve was explicitly (if vaguely) artistic: “to publish literature originating within this new minority.”
     Yet even this ambition is couched in terms associated with radical politics. The use of the term “minority” is surely influenced by the dawning of black consciousness with its demand for the publication and study of African-American writers. The implication can only be that hip writers, like members of ethnic subcultures, have their own experience couched in a unique rhetoric, and that the Communication Company could serve a role in the dissemination of this particular vision parallel to that of, say, the Third World Press of Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti).
     This collectivist emphasis questions the egocentric focus of Romantic theory with its fondness for the “genius” and privileging of individual vision, though it resembles in part such models as IWW culture, Dada, and Situationism and draws from the evolving forms of conceptual and performance art. The first of the “plans and hopes” of the new publisher, however, far from referring g to any of these precedents, is simple: “to provide quick & inexpensive printing service for the hip community.” In the first instance this meant “to print anything the Diggers want printed” and “to do lots of community service printing.” They hope in the way “to function as a Haight/Ashbury propaganda ministry” in the form of a new sort of journal “to supplement The Oracle with a more or less daily paper.” [3] They hoped thereby to counteract the straight press, what they called “The Chronicle’s fantasies.”
     Yet their language suggests that pursuing these goals would require language other than the journalistic norm. Seeking “to compete with the Establishment press for public opinion” would require their being “outrageous pamphleteers,” and “to produce occasional incredibilities out of an unnatural fondness for either outrage or profit, as the case may be.” In the end, the individualist impulse survived with the penultimate ambition “to do what we damn well please,” followed only by a reminder of the reality principle: “to keep the payments up” on the printing equipment.
     Though the authors of “Our Policy” allowed themselves a theoretically unlimited license to fiction and betrayed a fondness for provocation, their aim was congruent with that of the Diggers as a whole: to contribute toward defining, fostering, and protecting the hip youth movement as a whole. Anything less would have struck them as “Art as a fantasy pacifier,” in the words of the handout “Trip Without A Ticket.” This manifesto may be fairly taken to represent the most fully formed statement of the artistic ideology of the Haight, having been originally printed by the Diggers as a whole and then in part revised and later reprinted by the Communication Company.
     “Trip Without A Ticket” compares Americans to psychiatric patients, stupefied by tranquilizing drugs, sleepwalking through the horror of modern life, in desperate need of awakening, of “the single circuit-breaking moment that charges games with critical reality.” Without “the cushioned distance of media” people would cease to be the programmed “normals” required by the status quo and would be transformed into “life-actors” capable of seeing through the culture’s “consumer circuses” and feeling real rapport with the victims of American imperialism.
     The central form through which such eye-opening may occur is theatrical. To create “a space for existing outside padded walls” entails the elimination of the conventional theater building as well as the psychiatric unit. Art becomes an escape plan, with dramatic actions enacted in the everyday world rather than plays behind a proscenium arch, actions that function as “glass cutters for empire windows,” depending on the “universal pardon for imagination” that underlies “the intrinsic freedom of theater.” Only such a new “guerilla” theater can create “life-actors” and generate “a cast of freed beings.” In sum they aimed at establishing a “theater of an underground that wants out” aiming “to liberate ground held by consumer wardens and establish territory without walls.”
     In this way any location “that is free becomes a social art form. “Ticketless theater. Out of money and control.” Several vignettes illustrate precisely what this might look like in practice. “A sign: If Someone Asks to See the Manager Tell Him He's the Manager.”
     “Someone asked how much a book cost. How much did he think it was worth? 75 cents. The money was taken and held out for anyone. "Who wants 75 cents?" A girl who had just walked in came over and took it.”
     Not only is there no ticket; there is as well no script and no barrier between audience and performer. Clearly calling for participatory improvisatory theater set on the stage of the world, this is art without artifacts, beauty carved from the circumstances of everyday life, symbolic action that implies a new world view. With this vision the flotsam of unwanted surplus goods in the Free Store and in the world is transmuted into the tools by which liberation becomes available. “Fire helmets, riding pants, shower curtains, surgical gowns and World War I Army boots are parts for costumes. Nightsticks, sample cases, water pipes, toy guns and weather balloons are taken for props.” The magic appears when the cash nexus is removed. “When materials are free, imagination becomes currency for spirit.”
     Citing Gary Snyder on the necessity to “pin down what's wrong with the West,” the “Trip” finds models for such community-based ritual not so very distant from California. The specific mythic meaning of the original ritual is less important than the involvement in the moment and attentiveness to the constant stream of sensory detail.
     
"The Mexican Day of the Dead is celebrated in cemeteries. Yellow flowers falling petal by petal on graves. In moonlight. Favorite songs of the deceased and everybody gets loaded. Children suck deaths-head candy engraved with their names in icing."

     A parallel imagistic flow follows with the scene translated into the terms familiar to the Haight.


"A Digger event. Flowers, mirrors, penny-whistles, girls in costumes of themselves, Hell's Angels, street people, Mime Troupe.
Angels ride up Haight with girls holding Now! signs. Flowers and penny-whistles passed out to everyone.
A chorus on both sides of the street chanting Uhh!--Ahh!--Shh be cool! Mirrors held up to reflect faces of passersby."


     The hip community was influenced by a number of modern trends in art including improvisation, chance, collaboration, found objects, and street art, yet the most characteristic work that arose from the Haight-Ashbury eschewed the pretty in favor of the illuminating. The Haight Ashbury ethos favored the collective expression of the neighborhood and the movement as a whole to the promotion of individual art egos. The very fact that we have few works of poetry or fiction that fully embody the spirit of the age itself embodies the Haight Ashbury ethos. In order to recover some sense of what art meant in that time and place it is necessary to study the ephemera, and central to any such understanding must be the publications of the Diggers and the Communication Company.



1. Ferlinghetti (born in 1919), Ginsberg (1926), Gary Snyder (1930), Kandel (1932), McClure (1932), and Brautigan (1935) all read. The younger generation was represented by rock musicians.

2. The Cockettes founded by Hibiscus in 1969 insisted that one needed no talent whatsoever to perform. The associated Kaliflower Commune was exceptionally long-lived with related individual and groups active today.

2. Anderson was born in 1932, Hayward was younger, born in 1945.

3. Comparable to the daily publications from the Sorbonne’s École des Beaux-Arts in the spring of 1968 and the Occupy Wall Street Journal in 2011.

Notes on Recent Reading 40 (Saunders, Adichie, Radhakrishnan)

Lincoln in the Bardo (Saunders)

     For all its idiosyncratic form, the novel seems deeply conventional in theme, including a happy ending with Willie and the crew of deads making the right choice at last and the president turning his mind away from his consuming grief. In a lesser way, the racial theme struck me as quite reductive as well as anachronistically modern. Apart from that dissonance the multiple voices of the spirits seemed a wasteful and intrusive device as they at times served only to narrate and seemed often interchangeable, finishing each other’s phrases. Even worse was the mingling of genuine and newly composed historical sources. I suppose critics have sorted them out, but I cannot see the point of the exercise.
     It was entertaining to hear the various voices on those exchanges in which they were differentiated, and Saunders is certainly capable of some well-turned poetic phrases, but the attention the book has attracted strikes me as misplaced. It is basically a book with a gimmick.


Americanah (Adichie)

     Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s third novel, is a substantial (five hundred pages) and accomplished narrative. Having established the relationship between Ifemelu and Obinze during the opening expository chapters, the romance is then held in suspense for much of the story while Ifemelu experiences an American immigrant’s odyssey. The ending is abrupt, and the reader suspects that Ifemelu’s impulsiveness will surely lead to further complications. The book could be an effective soap opera, in fact, moving from one unsatisfactory love relationship to another.
     Love is not the focus, however. The book has in fact the same center as the protagonist’s blog, that is, the life of Nigerians in the USA or, even more precisely, the reactions of white Americans to Nigerians. Though Africans are not spared Adichie’s satiric thrusts, the book is first of all a non-American black person’s experience of race in the U.S.A. While the Africans, like the main character, are struggling, seeking material security, many of the white Americans she encounters are affluent liberals. The fierce racism of working-class Americans finds as little a place in Adichie’s world as the attitudes of traditional and poor Nigerians.
     One need not agree to think it salutary to hear the opinion of the supercilious Senegalese who maintains that he would never eat either McDonald’s or a cookie. Whether true or not, it is stimulating to be told that Africans do not appreciate the charm of old buildings but prefer everything new because they know that the future is theirs while Europeans and American fancy historic preservation because they know their best days are past. Hmm.

The value of such exposure emerges when I cannot consider strictures in these comments (the book is undisciplined, loose and overlong, overdetermined, with multiple exempla of every thematic point) without wondering if I, the white person, were being condescending, committing what is today called microaggression. On the other hand, were I to praise her to the skies, I would be like the comfortable though slightly ridiculous suburbanites who think all dark and poor people are beautiful. In this way identity politics, once a necessary and liberating force, can disable criticism. (Indeed it has nearly done so in many influential places.)
     The author has won the Booker prize, a MacArthur Grant, and virtually every other prestigious award. Like every other African writer seeking an international reputation, she relies on white approval, and, like many other readers of English, I find a particularly rewarding sort of DuBoisian double consciousness in such writers as her, Salman Rushdie, and Kazuo Ishiguro.
     I suppose these musings indicate that the narrative has proven its worth, and the fact that it is an engaging story makes it a readerly pleasure as well.


Indian Philosophy (Radhakrishnan)

     For the non-specialist this grand two-volume set is surely still the best account of the ancient and sophisticated Indian philosophical tradition which flourished alongside equally vigorous mythological and devotional writing. The author was the first Indian professor at Oxford and knows how to address a sympathetic European readership. He is adept, for instance, at providing European parallels for South Asian developments. His study like all broad surveys is stronger in some areas than others, and he has his own biases – for instance, his preference for a Vedantic Advaitism -- but these volumes fill an essential role for Westerners of all opinions and doubtless for a good many Indians as well. If nothing else Radhakrishnan has provided a useful reference work that includes all major and many minor thinkers with a good index to boot.

Every Reader's Sidney

This is the twelfth of a series of essays meant to introduce (or re-introduce) non-scholarly readers to the work of important poets. In this series I limit my focus to the discussion of only three or four of each writer’s best-known works while providing a bit of context and biography, eschewing most byways and all footnotes. The general introduction to the series titled “Why Read Poetry?” is also available on this site.



     Sir Philip Sidney would very likely to be surprised if he found from his perch in Elysium that his reputation in the twenty-first century rests securely on his writing. Child of a prominent and powerful family, he became a Member of Parliament at the age of eighteen and later undertook diplomatic missions for Queen Elizabeth, participating in the social, political, and military responsibilities of court life until dying from combat wounds at the age of thirty-one.
     The legends surrounding his demise are significant whether or not they are literally true. Sidney was said before the battle to have voluntarily put off his thigh armor when one of his men lacked such protection and then, dying, he was reported to have refused water, saying that another injured man had greater need.
     His reputation in life was as the perfect courtier – he was said to carry on his person Castiglione’s manual detailing the ideal nobleman’s accomplishments, including not merely the martial arts of horse and sword, but, in addition, expertise in sports, dancing, music, poetry, drawing and witty conversation. The courtier should have mastered all these activities to such an extent that he may display his skills with an air of nonchalance or spezzatura.
     Perhaps in part due to the desire to achieve that studied indifference, Sidney called literature his “unelected vocation” and claimed he had “slipt into the title of a Poet” by some “mischance.” His casual attitude and full-time profession in court did not prevent his popularizing the sonnet sequence in English and writing the most significant theoretical critical essay of his day. His literary eminence should not, however, cause the reader to forget that he wrote because an elegant sensibility, a grand capacity for love, and a cultivated artistic sense were for him among the noblest ornaments of humanity, more exalted but hardly different in kind from expertise in hawking, sports, and dancing .
     Sidney’s sequence Astrophil and Stella, like those of Petrarch before him and a good many since, focuses on love as the most profound human experience. Yet, as in the work of other poets, a self-reflective turn often diverts the topic to poetry itself. The opening poem, indeed, the opening line, sets these themes.


Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain,
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,—
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain,
Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburned brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting Invention’s stay:
Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Study’s blows,
And others’ feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:
“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart and write.”


     Anatomizing love like a Renaissance scientist, he opens by insisting on the poem’s fidelity to his lived experience. His amorous desire motivates his pen with the hope that his beloved will receive his poem with the twofold Horatian response: delight and instruction. We are here in the late crest of courtly love in which romance uplifts both parties spiritually while maintaining a real base in physical attraction. The lover rises toward the ideal skies through the selflessness of love while his suffering, like that of Jesus, is redemptive and may stimulate grace.
     Portraying himself in the position of those male birds who perform the most elaborate courtship rituals, the poet considers how most effectively to use his verbal skills to appeal to the lady. He considers earlier writers for whom “wit” might be an important design element, but concludes that he can make no progress in that path, hot (“sunburned”) as he is and tongue-tied. In a sudden and dramatic trope, he then describes himself as pregnant with poetry, indeed, giving birth. Feeling “spite,” and struggling with his own pen, he concludes that sincerity is his only route. “’Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart and write.’”
     An avowedly sincere statement of passionate love, the poem powerfully expresses the energy of eros. However, with the ambiguity of art and of the human psyche, many other readings lurk just behind the first. While the author appears to be helpless and suffering, beseeching the favor of a dominant woman, the Elizabethan world was a patriarchy in spite of the powerful rule of the queen. Like many sixteenth and seventeenth century love poems, the poem could be read as cynical seduction technique or as a ritual enactment of a pose for artistic value alone, unrelated to any actual relationship or emotion.
     Further, the claim of sincerity is such a common and ancient rhetorical figure that its use in a paradoxical way, calls attention to the artificiality, the literariness of the text. The writing of sonnets was a hallmark of the aristocracy and if Sidney was an outstanding exemplar, he was no different in kind from Thomas Wyatt and Sir Walter Raleigh. He could thus be expected to produce just such a poem whether it had any relationship – direct, ironic, or refracted – to his personal life.
     Even the simplest love lyric from Sidney’s pen bears the marks of learned tradition so valued in the poet’s time. His “Ditty,” the very title of which suggests an occasional piece tossed off in a moment of emotion, was cited on Puttenham’s authoritative Art of English Poetry as an example of the rhetorical figure epimone, or the repetitive statement of the same proposition.

MY 1 true-love hath my heart, and I have his,
By just exchange one for another given:
I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss,
There never was a better bargain driven:
My true-love hath my heart, and I have his. 5

His heart in me keeps him and me in one,
My heart in him his thoughts and senses guides:
He loves my heart, for once it was his own,
I cherish his because in me it bides:
My true-love hath my heart, and I have his.

His heart his wound received from my sight,
My heart was wounded with his wounded heart;
For as from me on him his hurt did light,
So still methought in me his hurt did smart:
Both equal hurt, in this change sought our bliss,
My true-love hath my heart and I have his.


     The poet keeps circling about his point obsessively, replicating the dizzy motions of a lover’s mind but also dazzling his courtly audience with his ingenuity. The third stanza, emphasizing the “hurt” and “wound” of love, did not appear in the first printing of this song-like work, but was added when the lyric was inserted into Sidney’s highly rhetorical prose romance the Arcadia as though to prove the writer could still turn his figure another few times like a juggler putting another object in the air after it seemed he had reached the maximum possible.
     Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella contains a hundred and eight sonnets, approaching love from a variety of angles, for the most part all familiar from earlier poetry. Since Ovid, sleeplessness had been a conventional characteristic of the lover, and in Sonnet 39 Sidney apostrophizes Sleep, asking for amelioration of his love-longing.


Come Sleep, O Sleep, the certain knot of peace,
The baiting place of wit, the balm of woe,
The poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release,
The indifferent judge between the high and low;
With shield of proof shield me from out the press
Of those fierce darts Despair at me doth throw;
O make in me those civil wars to cease;
I will good tribute pay, if thou do so.
Take thou of me smooth pillows, sweetest bed,
A chamber deaf to noise, and blind to light;
A rosy garland, and a weary head;
And if these things, as being thine by right,
Move not thy heavy grace, thou shalt in me,
Livelier than elsewhere, Stella’s image see.


     He begins by Invoking Sleep with words of general application, tossing off metaphors like a magician producing flowers from the air. Some of these blooms provide the modern reader with the opportunity to observe a few archaic usages. (Perhaps instead of finding such temporary obstacles an annoyance, some can enjoy the glimpses through the centuries they offer.)
     “Knot of peace” works satisfactorily in a rapid read-through but it may puzzle the reader who pauses. The fact is that in Elizabethan times “knot gardens” were fashionable, formal herb garden with walks in geometric forms. Thus Sleep is figured as a pleasant and fragrant retreat where serenity might be available. The landscaping reference reinforces the treatment of love as a adjunct of the courtly life. “Bait” in Sidney’s day referred not to fish food alone but to human snacks, and thus a “baiting place” was a refreshing way-station, a café where the mind may renew itself.
     Following the most common formula for hymns and prayers, after calling the goddess Sleep, Sidney then makes his request. He asks for protection from depression, the “darts” of “Despair” which cruelly parody Cupid’s love arrows. Note his repetition of “shield,” first as noun, then as verb, a move which continues the rhetorical show. This figure was called antanaclasis by scholars, but the cleverness does not depend on the Greek name.
     The image of the poet assailed by missiles thrown by Despair introduces a theme of warfare which is then developed as the poet offers inducements to Sleep for support to end the “civil wars” within himself. The “tribute” with which the poet will repay Sleep for her favor are described in the last six lines. All but the last are the ordinary desiderata for rest: nice bedclothes, silence, darkness, fatigue, and “a rosy garland” (presumably to provide a bit of what today would be called aromatherapy). Confessing that these all belong to Sleep “by right,” he offers what is most precious to him: the image of his beloved which will surely appear in his dreams. Since the lover assumes that anyone would take the joy he does in her appearance, he expects this to be a compelling reward.
     Yet the entire drama is an artifice. His negotiation with Sleep for a sort of treaty occurs entirely in the imagination, providing a pretense that allows him to express the most extravagant compliments while depicting himself as the sensitive and helpless lover. Does Sidney mean what he says? Of course he does, but he means it as poetry. In his influential “Defence of Poetry” he argues that poetry uplifts people, making them more moral. He explicitly felt that the aesthetic cultivation required of the arts was an avenue toward nobility. The fact that he was thought such a paragon indicates both the acceptance of such theories in court and his impressive success in embodying the Elizabethan ideal.
     In a more general sense Sidney was an excellent example of what is meant by the expression “Renaissance man.” Known in his own day for his horsemanship and his participation in tournaments, for his witty conversation and elegant manners as well as for his diplomatic and advisory roles in government, he took an active interest as well in the most exciting advances of his day in science and navigation. Hakluyt dedicated his collection of accounts by English explorers to Sidney – indeed the fact that over forty works were dedicated to him is more a testament to his active interest in a wide variety of fields than to his power at court. He cultivated an acquaintance with the mathematician and astronomer John Dee, the artist Nicholas Hilliard, indeed with all those whom he admired regardless of their field.
     In this version of how a life should best be lived, poetry had a critical role as an index of sensibility. An aficionado of poetry was likely capable of mastering the other arts and being a proper lover, or at least of playing persuasive and moving tunes of love. Such self-cultivation, together with the active physical mastery of sports, horsemanship, the handling of a sword and other skills of war, defines an ideal with much to recommend it. Sidney added a robust intellectual appetite extending in all directions and a body of writing that retains its power centuries and half a world away from the poet’s Renaissance court.