The Radical Vision of Gerrard Winstanley

 

 

As Winstanley’s writings were published for the most part in separate pamphlet form, I treat their titles (when I mention them) as though they are books, though some are brief.  Page numbers in parentheses all refer to The Works of Gerrard Winstanley, edited by George H. Sabine (1965) and available at archive.org.  Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.

 

     Gerrard Winstanley, the seventeenth century leader of the Diggers of St. George’s Hill in Surrey, was a pioneer of direct action and civil disobedience whose group, like the I.W.W., advocated “forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old” [1].  Three hundred years later his example remained fresh enough to animate the Diggers of San Fracisco’s Haight-Ashbury who greeted me and several thousand others during the summer of 1967.  Those who gathered there shared with Winstanley not only his brash attitude and uncompromising anarcho-communism; many were pursuing spiritual paths -- Sufi, Daoist, Zen, quasi-Native American – which they saw as parallel to their social vision.  Winstanley’s religion was the foundation of his politics; he was a Christian, but a heterodox one, whose vision was at once more rational and more mystical than that of his fellow Christians who remained in the pews of the Church of England.    

     In terms of politics, he viewed the profit system, whether feudal or capitalist, as inherently and inevitably vicious.   His communism was absolute in terms of the means of production, primarily agriculture in his view.  (He is careful to note his disagreement with the contemporaneous Ranters who were reputed to practice free love [519].)  Well before Proudhon, Winstanley declared unequivocally that “Those that Buy and Sell Land, and are landlords, have got it either by Oppression, or Murther, or Theft; and all landlords lives in the breach of the Seventh and Eighth Commandements, Thou shalt not steal, nor kill” (258).  He imagines a utopia in which everyone will work to “cheerfully put their hands to make these things that are needfull, one helping another” (184), then what is produced would be available to all in free stores: “every family, when they want such things as they cannot make, they shall go to these shops, and fetch without money, even as now they fetch with money” (526) [2].  Though his basic principle is simple, absolute, and, at its heart, entirely voluntaristic, Winstanley provides details for its operation in practice, involving numerous “peace-makers,” overseers, judges, and others [3]

     Winstanley regularly identifies the oppressive feudal system with “the Norman yoak” imposed by William the Conqueror (as though the Anglo-Saxons had not had their own equally oppressive kings).  To him putting commons to agricultural use seemed legal under traditional law.  More significantly, though, and quite apart from his more pragmatic suggestions, he viewed the Diggers as spiritual warriors and the contention as not between classes, but, as he often repeated, between the apocalyptic figures of the  Dragon and the Lamb.  He explicitly declares that his insights are divine openings, occurring in trance or otherwise gifts of God’s grace, “shown by Vision, Voyce, and Revelation” (257).  Winstanley clearly regards himself as a prophetic voice, a herald of divine insights.  He states with utter confidence that “the following declaration of the word of Life was the free gift to me from the Father himself.” [4]  His active interest in the apocalyptic symbols in the books of Daniel and Revelations, a curiosity he shares with many of his century, including Isaac Newton, is reflected in a number of passages [5].

     While a pursuit of esoteric meaning in Scripture is not unusual for his day, Winstanley’s theology was decidedly unorthodox.  His criticisms of the Established Church and its clergy do not advocate for any reforming sect.  (While he did have demonstrable ties to Quaker meetings, his actual membership has not been proven.)  Perhaps Winstanley could not find a doctrinal home in the England of his day, because his theology was, for all the mystical trappings, shockingly rational, a forerunner in significant ways of Deism and “natural religion.” 

     The most striking sign of his dissent even from Dissenters is in his use of Reason as an equivalent for  God.  Though he also refers to God as ”love” (375, 382, etc.), he explicitly says “I use the word reason rather than the word God in my writings” (104) and commonly speaks of “The Great Creator Reason” (251) and “the great Creator, who is the Spirit Reason” (253).  While his attachment to Christian language and to the sacredness of the scriptures remains intact, he was with his elevation of reason a prefiguration of the eighteenth-century advocates of a non-supernatural religion. 

     Due to the compassion manifested in his redemptive role, Christ is primarily identified with love; thus Winstanley speaks of “Christ who is the universall power of Love.” (446)  This emphasis made the idea of eternal damnation unacceptable to him as it would imply a limitation of divine love [6].  To him God’s “power of Universall Love” (375) can do no less than cause “a thorough salvation . . . and leave none under bondage.” (384)  He is quite explicit that since the deity is “absolutely a God of Love” in the end every man shall be saved, though some at the last hour” (82) since “Christ gave himself a ransom for all” (81).  For him in fact the trees of knowledge and of life are beneficial, not forbidden, though subject to corruption, with the first identified with imagination and the second with love and knowledge (452).

     These concepts of God and Christ underlie and justify his social campaign.  For him the mandate for the truly pious to open what he repeatedly calls the “treasury” of earth to all people is nothing less than allowing love and reason rather than tyranny, crime, and self-interest to govern human affairs.  This partial rationalization of Christianity is evident, as well, in his identification of entities such as Adam, Satan, Eden, Heaven, and Hell as essentially psychological though he never denies their independent existence.  Thus the significance of Adam is not as a historical figure, but as he is manifested in every individual (203).  He refers to “the garden of Eden (mans heart)” (447) and notes that “a half hours silence” is equivalent to being in Heaven (223).  The devil that matters is the one “within you” (95).

     With some asperity , he insists that, in fact, all history including the events in scripture are most importantly located within the individual soul.  “All that which you call the history, and have doted upon it, and made it your idol, is all to be seen and felt within you, before you cast off true peace.” Adam and Christ, Cain and Abel, the Canaanites, Amalekites,  Philistines, he very land of Canaan, Judas, Heaven and Hell, good and bad angels are “all to be seen within” (215).  Therefore “that which a man seeks for, whereby he might have peace, is within the heart, not without” (213) and any people who wish to look for heaven or for hell had best look into themselves (216).

     Winstanley rejects authority and even scriptural revelation as the basis for religious belief, privileging only personal experience.  Thinking that “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you” (213) the believer must find inspiration not from books, but inside the soul (204).  For his part he is emphatic in his claim that his own inspiration is of this kind (204), a “free gift to me from the Father himself” (445).  “While I builded upon any words or writings of other men, I builded upon sand.  Man has a teacher within him” (93).  “What I hear another man speak is nothing to me until I find the same experience in  myself” (96).  He claims to receive these “openings,” as the Quakers would call them, from his meditative trance experiences (190, 261, etc.).

     In a few passages, Winstanley comes very close to what sounds like pantheism.  Not only does he call the earth the “mother” of humanity (271), he declares that God is to be seen only in the world.  The deity cannot be fully known and to imagine him is simply “to build castles in the air.”  Not only is God a mystery, the afterlife is as well.  “To reach God beyond the Creation, or to know what he will be to a man, after the man is dead, if any otherwise, than to scatter him into his Essences of fire, water, earth, and air, of which he is compounded, is a knowledge beyond the line, or capacity of man to attain to, while he lives in his compounded body.”  All one can really know is this world.  “The creation is all its dimentions be the fullness of him, that fills all with himself, and if you yourself be part of this Creation, where can you finde God but in that line or station wherein  you stand?” (565)

     In the twenty-first century we remain far short of Winstanley’s recovered Eden in an egalitarian anarcho-communism, yet he can still indicate the need for change and the characteristics if a more just social and economic order.  Any step toward a more equitable sharing of the good things of life heads in the right direction.  In his use of direct and uncompromising non-violent action he is exemplary for protestors to the current corrupt regimes of this earth.  And in religion, he points the way to a more truly catholic Christianity, in which the specific symbols of the Christian tradition are understood a symbolic and in which any person may pursue salvation or enlightenment or liberation without sectarian boundaries.  An inspiring example to the cultural revolutionaries of the ‘sixties who, though not perhaps deprived of the necessities of life (as the poor were in the seventeenth century) nonetheless felt alienation and spiritual hunger and who, like him, followed the dictates of their inner vision to try to practice what in Jewish practice is called tikkun olam, the mending of the world.  Gerrard Winstanley was a mystic as well as a revolutionary.  Over fifty years ago, when I met some of the San Francisco Diggers, their message seemed to me quite compatible with that of Che Guevara, honored during “The Year of the Heroic Guerilla” in 1968, whose slogan that year seemed to be on everyone’s wall.

 

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.  [7]

 

The same love of all humanity that motivated Gerrard Winstanley in Surrey animated Emmet Grogan, Peter Coyote, and Peter Berg in San Fransisco’s Haight, and countless others before and since.  Perhaps, I flatter myself, even this essay can spread a little love.  

 

  

 

1.  Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World.

2.  The vision was realized by the San Francisco Diggers.  The Haight-Ashbury store had several incarnations including at 1090 Cole.  A Black People’s Free Store later opened at 1099  McAllister, then one in New York City at 264 East 10^th Street, and many other cities followed.. 

3.  For details see in particular The Law of Freedom in  a Platform or True Magistracy Restored.

4.  Fire in the Bush p. 445.

5.  See, for instance, pp. 87-90 in The Breaking of the Day of God and 464-472 of Fire in the Bush.

6.  Universalism, though later condemned, was taught by early church fathers such as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Diodorus of Tarsus.

7. From “From Algiers, for Marcha. The Cuban Revolution Today,” later reprinted as “Socialism and man in Cuba 1965” in The Che Reader (2005).

8.  The Ranters seem to have gone further in  the directions of antinomianism and pantheism.  The most reliable statement of their ideas is likely in Laurence Clarkson’s A Single Eye (1650) which declares “what act soever I do, is acted by that Majesty in me God be in all things” and “if God be in all, why are not all things one in God?”  Though Winstanley takes pains to distinguish himself from this even more radical group, particularly due to the allegations that they (including Clarkson) practiced promiscuous sexual relations, in his own day they were viewed as similar.

The Hip Aesthetic of the Invisible Circus

 

     The three-day event produced by the Diggers and the Artists Liberation Front in Glide Church during February of 1967 titled Invisible Circus is significant in the evolution of performance art, but rarely discussed in histories that stress the New York City scene.  While East Coast artists like Allan Kaprow, Joseph Beuys, Carolee Schneemann, and Robert Whitman were making a stir in locations like the Rueben and Smolin Galleries, hip San Francisco artists were devising events that embodied distinctly West Coast artistic values.  Among these were a distaste for celebrity and a democratic vision quite at odds with the ambitions of most artists, avant-garde or mainstream.  Through the Artists Liberation Front and the Diggers’ Communications Company, Chester Anderson, Claude Hayward, and others produced truly novel and radical works of art.  The fact that the artists’ names and their most significant works are virtually forgotten in art history is perhaps appropriate.

      The New York performance art scene developed first, its roots in the European trends of Dada, Futurism, and Surrealism.  From Ubu Roi through Artaud and the Theater of the Absurd, modern plays remained conventional in the most fundamental ways with scripts, actors, and spectators.  While the evenings at the Cabaret Voltaire may have seemed altogether chaotic to the audiences, they were planned in detail apart from spontaneous eruptions from the audience and the occasional police raid.  Artists and viewers might become boisterous with cat-calls, boos, and shouted challenges, but the evening, however far out, remained recognizably theater.

     Likewise, for a show often cited as the first “happening,” Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959) at the Rueben Gallery those who attended received detailed instructions on what they should do, when they should move, and the like.  A bell punctuated the movement from each of six sets of three simultaneous happenings. The following year the same gallery presented Robert Whitman’s American Moon for which viewers entered an immersive environment and viewed the event from partial tunnels while performers, including Whitman and Simone Forti flashed lights, produced loud noises, and projected films.  At the conclusion Lucas Samaras sat in a swing above the spectators.  The entire proceeding was “carefully conceived and tightly scripted” to create “an interactive environment that manipulated the audience to a degree virtually unprecedented in 20th century art.” [1]     The limits of innovation in these early happenings are clear.

     A more radical program is explicit in the Fluxus group.  The 1963 manifesto by George Maciunas proclaims itself “REVOLUTIONARY” and advocates “living art, anti-art,” “NON ART REALITY, to be fully grasped by all people, not only critics, dilettantes, and professionals.”  Fluxus demands a fusion of “the cadres of political, social, & cultural revolutionaries into united front and action.” 

     What this might mean in practice is suggested by Maciunas in his “Manifesto on Art / Fluxus Art Amusement” (1965).  He stresses a democratic theme, insisting that, “art-amusement must be simple, amusing, unpretentious, concerned with insignificances, require no skill or countless rehearsals, have no commodity or institutional value.  The value of art-amusement must be lowered by making it unlimited, massproduced, obtainable by all and eventually produced by all.  Fluxus art-amusement is the rear-guard without any pretention or urge to participate in the competition of ‘oneupmanship’ with the avant-garde. It strives for the monostructural and nontheatrical qualities of simple natural event, a game or a gag. It is the fusion of Spikes Jones Vaudeville, gag, children's games and Duchamp.”

     While this program sounds quite revolutionary, it is largely imaginary.  Fluxus was in reality, of course, anything but unpretentious, simple, or natural, and its audience was anything but a general one.    Still, for all that, the events associated with its members remained in many ways highly conventional.  The 1961 Chambers Street loft concerts produced by Yoko Ono and La Monte Young in 1961 observed ordinary concert proprieties, with a clear distinction between onlookers and participants, credited composers, and intermissions, though some involved mixed media and some aleatory elements.  The 1963 Yam Festival devised by George Brecht and Robert Watts was novel in its locations, outside of art galleries, in its element of absurdity, and in its use of mail art, but retained the distinction between creators and consumers.  Never did the group stir outside these boundaries.

    On the other hand, in San Francisco, the epicenter of the ‘sixties youth rebellion, certain events, such as the Invisible Circus were produced that challenged expectations anew and constituted a revolution within the avant-garde itself.  Several activities had indeed been planned, often designed more to stimulate reactions than as an end in themselves.  For instance, the Communications Company brought the Gestetner printer they used for their broadsheets in an activity Richard Brautigan called the “John Dillinger Computer,” but its use was unforeseeable -- they were prepared to print anything for anybody.  Even the projects of insiders were improvisatory.  Chester Anderson went next door to a tavern where he overheard an animated discussion whereupon hie returned to the church, transcribed some of their remarks, printed a few pages and returned to show the bemused drinkers their words on paper. 

     A few pranks were programmed.  For instance, what was presented as a panel discussion on pornography to which a police officer had been invited was really a set-up.  When the police officer began to speak, he was unaware that, on the wall behind him, a penis had emerged through a hole and waggled about while the representative of the straight life was unaware of the cause of the audience’s excited amusement. 

     Though the Circus was punctuated by such moments of pre-planned if playful theater and music including appearances by Pig Pen, Janis Joplin and others, its central importance lies in what was wholly unplanned, what happened that was utterly forgotten as it involved no memoirists or big names in general.  What happened there is gone, something new is happening today.  The pertinent data’s having vanished is in fact the evidence for its authenticity.  Like sand paintings or archaic ritual, the point is in the action as it occurs, not in seeking to fix and retain it like a butterfly specimen in an album.

     While identifiable as a specifically hip aesthetic, the attitude implied by Dave Hodges’ poster was far from universal during the youth rebellion of the ‘sixties.  The “acid tests” of 1965-6 produced by Ken Kesey and Merry Pranksters such as Lee Quarnstrom and Neal Cassady with the aid of Owsley Stanley’s refreshments were very like parties featuring bands such as the pre-Grateful Dead Warlocks and light shows and appearances by Allen Ginsberg and other celebrities prominently featured on the posters.  The same pattern is evident for the Trips Festival at the Longshoremen’s Hall for January 21-23, 1966 organized by Bill Graham, Stewart Brand, Ramon Sender, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.  Similarly, publicity for the iconic event of the Haight-Ashbury era, the Human Be-In in 1967, resembled a routine concert announcement, lacking even psychedelic graphics.  Emmet Grogan specifically declared the intentions of the producers of the Invisible Circus to reveal “the feebleness of most public gatherings,” and to transform participants from “passive listeners” into “active participants.” [2]

      Though the Invisible Circus has been the focus here, the contrast between hip concepts and practices between the East and West coasts is, in fact, generally applicable, though hardly predictive in any individual case.  On the Pacific artists dared to defy the age-old artist’s ambition (so evident in Van Gogh’s letters) to be known, to sell.  Among the supporting examples that come first to mind are the scrupulous avoidance of individual celebrity in all Communications Company publications.  Authors are not mentioned, even names like Brautigan’s verging on fame; there is no “star” apart from the collective.  On the international level they had affinities with the Situationists. 

     The career of the Cockettes reinforces the point.   Originally an open door, anything-goes troupe founded by Hibiscus (George Edgerly Harris III) who lived with his company in the Friends of Perfection Commune, called the KaliFlower Commune.  They had welcomed men and women, gay and straight, gifted and untalented alike, and the shows were largely spontaneous.  The Cockettes met their end when their increasing popularity led to engagements in New York City where they were panned by critics who did not understand their anti-aesthetic aesthetic.  This did not, however, bring about their demise.   Rather, it was the lure of real celebrity and the financial rewards it implies, resisted by the idealistic communards that led to the end of the Cockettes and the spawning of the Angels of Light.

      Patty Smith’s Just Kids details an avant-garde scene just a few years later, illustrating a thoroughly East Coast goals.  The author and Robert Mapplethorpe were set on fame, always alert for any opening to a gallery, a dealer, or a wealthy collector.  Her depictions of their regular attendance at Max’s Kansas City, ever seeking to inch a bit closer to the Warhol table (though the maestro was not himself there) are richly comic and worlds away from the ethos I myself experienced reading poetry in the streets of San Francisco around the same time.   My broadsheets, like those of the Communications Company, had no attribution.  The conventionally over-sized artist’s ego was not considered hip. 

     The Diggers’ Invisible Circus broke new ground for the avant-garde by renouncing the illusion of the artist’s separateness and ownership of the work, embracing those in attendance as creators of what happens, a fact in any event.  Specific occurrences at the Invisible Circus were quite unpredictable, in a way impermissible even in works employing the aleatory devices associated with John Cage and Jackson MacLow.  The Diggers not only opened the door of the gallery; they did away with the gallery altogether, placing art in the context of everyday life and allowing its motive to be neither more nor less than fun.  While this ethos failed to move the centers of the art world, it did influence the margins, such as the activities at political demonstrations as well as Cloud House events, Burning Man, and Rainbow Gatherings.  Much remains to be done to understand the artistic implications of the hip movement in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury scene.

 

 

 

1.  Paul Schimmel, “Leap into the Void: Performance and the Object,” Out of Actions: between performance and the object, 1949–1979, MoCA Los Angeles, New York/London, 1998, pp.61-2.

2.  Ringolevio, 282.

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.