Given Names

 

     My older brother and I enjoyed during elementary school a fraternal rivalry. We would compete in shooting baskets, in wrestling, in Monopoly and cribbage, and in verbal games as well.  In disputations about who possessed the more prestigious given name, I would argue that James was, as everyone knew, the most typical butler’s name after Jeeves, whereas William was the name of the much-praised Shakespeare.  He would respond that Billy was notoriously most appropriate for goats, but his trump card was the fact that the Bible was named after King James.  What reply was possible? 

     We operated on the archaic assumption that, as Origen said, names are not arbitrary or meaningless, but rather are significant (nomina sunt omina).  Some of my students in Nigeria had English given names chosen to increase their chances of prosperity either in a very general way (such as Moneymaker, Famous, and Goodluck) or more narrowly (College, Engineer, and Editor).  Yet once all our names were sprechende Namen. 

     My own first name has typically martial Germanic roots, deriving from the words for “will” or “willing” and helmet, hence meaning “resolute protector.”  The representation of strength, even ferocity, in personal names often made use of animals like those on heraldic coats of arms, reminiscent of totemic beasts, such as in Eberhard (”strong boar,” paralleled in Old English Wilbur, “wild boar”), Bernard (“strong bear”), and Leonard (“strong lion,” the Norse Bjorn simply means “bear”). 

     On the other hand Hebrew names are primarily religious such as Michael ) ”resembling God”), Raphael (“God has healed”), and Jonathan (“Yahweh has given”).  Muslim names tend similarly toward piety: Mohammed, of course, (now, I read, the most common male name for babies born in the U. K.), while Hassan, Omar, and Ali, are all names of associates or followers of the Prophet, though each, of course, has an etymological meaning as well. 

     Hindu names, often selected with the advice of astrologer, conform to the same patterns.  Some are simply desirable qualities such as Sunita (“good” or “virtuous”) or Vijay (“victory” or “success”), while others may be names of deities (Ram, Lakshmi, Krishna), and others yet might be figures from history or legend, such Sita from the Ramayana or Ashok, the last Maurya emperor

     In most of Western Europe [1] the given name precedes the surname or family name.  Traditionally called a Christian name and conferred only at baptism or christening, in Europe it was almost always chosen from names on the calendar of saints, thus indicating not only identity but spiritual aspiration as well.  For this reason many priests insisted that a child’s name be chosen either from the Bible or the calendar of saints, but in fact it was not until 1983 that the proliferation of unconventional names caused a revision of canon law specifically forbidding names “foreign to a Christian morality.”  Yet I know of an earlier case in which priest refused to christen a girl Sybil, calling her Teresa instead, though she used Sybil all her life.

     Though the given name was to be religious in Christian Europe, the name Jesus itself was avoided everywhere except on the Iberian Peninsula (whence it traveled to Latin America).  Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain the popularity of the name in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries while it was little-used elsewhere: the celebration of the Feast of the Holy Name encouraged by the mendicant orders, or the use of the name for abandoned orphans and by newly converted men who had been named Mohammed.  As recently as 1998 a legal decision was necessary for Jesus to be entered on official records as an individual’s given name in Germany. 

     Traditionally in Europe people have celebrated their saint’s day in a way similar to American birthday parties, though, though, for the pious European, a mass or an offering might be included in the day’s activities.  This practice, often combined with observance of the actual birthday, emphasizes the significance of the saint whose name one bears as well as doubling one’s occasions for self-celebration.. 

     Puritans, determined to display their faith as prominently as possible, sometimes chose novel given names; the most well-known is the seventeenth century preacher Praise-God Barebone (whose brother was Fear-God). [2]  Others included Die-Well, Sorry-for-sin, Repentance, Kill-sin, Joy-againe, From-above, Hope-full, and Faith-my-joy.  It was as though they had stepped out of the pages of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. 

     The willingness to confer such improbable names enjoyed a bit of a renaissance among the less puritanical during the counter-culture youth movement of the late sixties.  One of the era’s icons, the inimitable Way Gravy and his wife, named their son Howdy Do-Good Gravy Tomahawk Truckstop Romney after he was born in the Tomahawk Truckstop in Boulder.  (He later decided he would prefer to go by Jordan.)  I recall, among people of my own acquaintance in the Haight-Ashbury, little ones named Wheatberry, Midnight, Ecstasy, and Winterlude.  Some well-known figures participated in the trend with Abbie Hofmann and his wife Anita naming their child america (lower case), but doubtless the celebrity with the most freewheeling and innovative children’s names was Frank Zappa (whose own name, though it looks like it might be invented, perhaps as a play on Zap comix, is his parents’) whose children were Dweezil, Moon Unit, Diva, Ahmet Emuukha Rodan, and Thin Muffin Pigeen.

    Our own identification with our names must be, though, a pale reflection of the feeling of our species through most of its history.  Quite commonly people have kept a personal name secret to prevent attacks by magicians.  According to Frazer [3] this practice is not only common across the globe from Australian and American aborigines, but also among what he calls “Esquimaux,” people from Chile, Indonesia, Hindus, and ancient Egyptians.  The anxiety surrounding personal names may take many forms: sometimes the name’s bearer cannot mention it, but anyone else can, sometimes the prohibition is limited in time.  Some people have veritable layers of names, each concealing a more intimate and powerful one.

     The ethnic connotations of names can be subtle.  Does Laurence carry some faint French perfume as opposed to Lawrence?  Geoffrey surely sounds just a bit British next to Jeffrey.  Such hints are of course, arbitrary and misleading, utterly without logical justification, yet they linger in our minds.  Otto must surely, it might seem, be more portly than Étienne, and Fabio more fun-loving than Olaf. 

     Ethnic cues may lead to altogether mistaken assumptions.  One might think that someone named Percy is either a British aristocrat or a Jamaican, but in fact the name is most popular today in Peru.  One expects Brunhild to be a Valkyrie, yet Brunilda’s Cuchifritos is a small café near me owned by a Puerto Rican woman.  In Guatemala I encountered a tour guide named Ivan, and I know a child with four Orthodox Jewish grandparents named Bronwen.  

     The fact that people wish sometimes to change their given names is further testimony to the power they retain even for moderns.  European converts to a Hindu or Buddhist guru or to Islam may wish to change their names, while immigrants from Thailand or China may adopt an English name if they live in the United States.  Actors, writers, and telephone salespeople often choose professional names, while prison inmates, hobos, and hikers on the Appalachian Trail devise sobriquets.  

     Adam is said in Genesis to have named the animals and mothers and fathers are able to exercise a similar power in giving names to their offspring.  Feeling the responsibility of this choice, parents often deliberate at length and consider many possibilities before settling on one.  Though we no longer consciously accept the principle of magic that claims that words can influence reality, we remain wary of their power.  No name can satisfactorily express an individual personality, but we seek to provide each infant with the best odds, unimpeded, if not aided, by an auspicious given name.  My own has served satisfactorily, though, after a thousand years of popularity, “plain old Bill” has become a set phrase, to me an acceptable one, expressing familiar comfort like worn old slippers.

 

 

1.  In Hungary the family name comes first. 

2.  The most elaborate Puritan name of all, “Unless-Jesus-Christ-Had-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned” is variously said to be Praise-God's baptismal name, his brother's name, or the name of his son, commonly called Nicholas. 

3.  The Golden Bough, 284-289 and elsewhere.

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.

Vignettes of the Sixties

1. a raid

     In the late sixties they lived in an old building in Chicago close enough to Lake Michigan that the sound of the water lapping on the shore was audible at night. Except for the front apartment on each floor, the building was made up of studios with little kitchenettes and Murphy beds in the closets. The elderly widows who occupied most of the units sometimes would call on him for aid with such chores as replacing lightbulbs. He and his wife were there largely because it was cheap and the management allowed their cat.
     A few other tenants of their own generation lived there with whom they soon became acquainted. The first-floor front apartment, right by the building’s entrance, was occupied by two young women of spirits so buoyant and innocent that they drove a Volkswagen Beetle covered with hearts and daisies and slogans such as “make love not war” and “smoke pot.” No one could have been more amiable, and the two were masseuses as well, though the car in the street did seem rather uncool. After all, in those days really substantial penalties were exacted for simple possession, though in this particular city, cash could resolve most cases.
     They also met Gino, a flamboyant hair stylist who also lived on the first floor. Something of an interior decorator as well as a coiffeur, he had covered all his walls with metal foil. Serious about his profession, he designed original looks and hairdressing magazines were scattered about his place along with gay pornography. They had some pleasant sociable evenings with these three.
     But, one night came a knock that somehow sounded troubled even before they had opened the door. It was Gino who breathlessly informed them that the police were raiding the women’s place at that very moment. He had managed to slip down to the end of the hall where there was a small closet with a garbage chute near which he had concealed his stash before coming like Paul Revere to alert them on the fourth floor.
     As it happened at that moment they had a miscellany of minor contraband: half an ounce of decent pot, a bit of a better variety, a chunk of hash, a few psychedelics and amphetamines for a rainy day, nothing big, but enough to be very expensive in the corrupt city in which they lived. He wasn’t sure what to do. He knew he did not want to lose his little collection. Or get busted. The garbage room seemed risky, especially if the cops had managed to turn up Gino’s stuff. With the foolish bravado of youth, he strode to his back stairway and descended decisively into the alley’s welcoming darkness.
     Of course, had it been a serious police operation the back door would have been the most obvious place to keep an eye on, but as it happened he walked on unimpeded to the home of nearby friends where he left his stash for safekeeping.
     Upon his return he found that the poor women had been arrested. The officers had visited Gino as well, but his place was clean by then and the putatively straight cops had such a rollicking time examining his gay oriented magazines that they had no wish to hassle him further.
     He was not surprised, upon recovering his stuff from its guardians, to find that the pot had palpably diminished.


2. a demonstration

     My friend’s parents in some ways typified their generation. His father, whose own parents were urban and working class, flew in World War II and came home from a German POW camp to the possibilities suggested by the GI Bill. He acquired some college, then a white collar job with a major corporation and, after a bit, a substantial brick home in a prestigious suburb.
     He must have felt that America was working out pretty well for him. He was a purchaser, a position which by his own account consisted largely of three-martini lunches with salesmen who had long been suppliers and then renewing or signing a deal. His work consisted largely of socializing, of which he was naturally fond, and of which he became fonder.
     He and his wife were easy-going people, unfailingly pleasant and hospitable, but, as the sixties wore on, it seemed that something was not right. The war in Vietnam was expanding in an alarming way, dominating the news, and threatening the comfortable security of their son. Somehow it seemed very different from the war of their youth. And people’s reactions seemed different, sometimes difficult to understand, especially the attitudes of the youth.
     I and my friends had gathered at their house from our various colleges on Friday night, March 24, 1967. We had come to our parental homes in the suburbs for this weekend because the following day an antiwar march was planned for Chicago. As it turned out, it attracted about 5000 people which was a good crowd in those days, doubtless boosted in this case by Martin Luther King’s leading the parade and then speaking at the Coliseum. He had spent the previous summer in Chicago working for open housing.
     That is, however, only background for Ben’s story. Maybe a dozen of us were lounging about our friend’s TV room when his parents returned home in high spirits after a night out. They courteously came in to chat with us before retiring. After we had exchanged a few pleasantries, though, a frown crossed the woman’s face.
     “What is going on, that’s what I’d like to know. You’re all a bunch of good kids, but you want to go ‘round looking like bums. I don’t get it.”
     She paused, ruefully looking across the room. Her eyes lit on Ben, the only one of the group who wore short hair and a preppy sport coat. “Look at Ben,” she said. “Why can’t you all take care of yourself like Ben does. Anyone can tell he’s a good boy.”
     This kind of talk, while common in those days, had a certain irony to my ear. We all knew, while she did not, that Ben was so well-groomed because he was a member of the Communist Party, USA which has never much cared for bohemians, though some bohemians have cared a good deal for the Party. His appearance was meant to facilitate his organizing efforts. The Maoists in Progressive Labor were similarly distinguishable in youth movement circles due to their effort to be indistinguishable from the mainstream.


3. a work of art

     After I finished my B.A. in 1967 I skipped the graduation ceremonies and drove nonstop in a driveaway car (does anyone do that today? do the youth even know what that is?) with four friends to the Haight-Ashbury where, sure enough, at the moment of our breathless arrival, the Diggers were serving food in the park and we found we had arrived just in time to dine.
     Dine we did. We were crashing with a onetime classmate who had left before finishing his degree. He was very proud of his cat. He had been listening to KMPX (at the time so very freeform that it seemed one could wander in off the street and take the microphone). The station had received word that Grace Slick’s cat had had kittens and they were being offered to good homes. He ran the few blocks over, knocked on her door, and, sure enough, was given a cat.
     We petted the cat and ate short-grain brown rice and vegetables. Our host’s girlfriend made jewelry which she sold to a store on Haight Street. Most of the people about had even less visible form of support. They had, however, in compensation, many ideas. We heard that we should look in on a guy named Raphael whose art was said to be mind-blowing. Though we did not know anyone in the building, we went to call on him. Without hesitation we were conducted to his home and gallery, though in fact it was little like either a home or a gallery. Raphael slept in a storage closet on the landing of a Victorian home’s stairway, an oddly shaped space in which the roof met the floor and one could not stand upright. It was an imaginative person’s idea of a sublet. Though three in his space made a tiught squeeze, Raphael received us graciously.
     His art was all about. His sole oeuvre. He had hung hundreds of small objects – pieces of mechanical watches, transistors, indescribable bits of tiny and delicate debris – from his low ceiling with fine filaments. They were arranged in careful patterns to state a theme, repeat it, vary it. It was as though one found oneself inside a concrete representation of a Brandenburg Concerto. Raphael gently blew and it seemed the whole environment was jiving. We were now in an Ub Iwerks cartoon, though Bach’s soundtrack continued. The entire Haight-Ashbury neighborhood surely pulsed in harmonic sympathy. The new America and a new art were, it seemed at that moment, unquestionably emerging. New possibilities were daily blooming. Raphael and his art have never been mentioned until now.

Hippie

     Even now, at the head of the page, I find the word most annoying. Though I went to San Francisco in the summer of 1967, though for some months I actually lived at the corner of Haight and Ashbury (in an apartment, though I would not be surprised to meet someone who lived in the actual intersection), though I sport beads and a Paisley vest handmade by my lover in my first passport picture, though I remain profoundly influenced by ideas of “hip,” I cannot stand that diminutive term. (The word passed into common usage after Herb Caen began using it in his column in the San Francisco Chronicle. Caen had also invented the equally obnoxious and derisive “beatnik.”)
     Not that “hippie” has no place. In my own memory, before I saw the word in print, I heard it used to describe young teens who aspired to be hip and were just becoming acquainted with the scene, not so different from the sort of person who might have been labeled a “teenybopper” in the context of musical taste. As such the word had a useful niche, but failed to describe the counter-culture in general. Despite my distaste for “hippie,” I had no good alternative. In the sixties “hip” served for some uses, though sounding slightly broad and old-fashioned. I do recall both both “freak” and “head” (referring, naturally, to “pothead”) having some currency, but neither seems really adequate.
     Born in 1946, I grew up reading the Beats, attending Paul Carroll’s poetry series at Second City, seeking out Old Leftists, and learning about Dada. In university I participated in the literary magazine and attended performance events and shows staged by friends. In spite of loose talk about “the sixties,” during my senior year at an institution with tens of thousands of students, I felt I knew the local counterculture: far-out intellectuals, dopers, artists, radicals, anarchists, yogis, sandal-makers, and singers. Virtually everything innovative seemed linked to this crowd. Forward-thinking professors and faculty artists made alliances with the hip youth. Just as Kenneth Kenniston’s studies indicated that, for the most part, student protesters were the very same who had been at the top of their high school classes, many of those participating in middle and late 60s youth culture struck me as unusually thoughtful and productive. Why, even LSD trips were assimilated only through hours of analysis based in part on Scientific American articles and anthropology studies seen in the light of esoteric Buddhism. I was taken aback just a few years later when I heard of people dropping acid to go to a concert or party.
     Thinking I knew the scene in my major Midwestern university, I was surprised and I believe I recoiled when in the spring of 1967, a crew of slightly younger celebrants tripped across the university quadrangle, blowing soap bubbles in celebration of Buddha’s birthday.
     These new folks seemed to be violating canons of cool, while on the national scene, it was obvious that Peter Max was instantly kitsch, Tim Leary at best an entertaining con man, and, late in the day, cooptation seemed fully accomplished when Hair premiered, claiming to be a “tribal, love-rock musical.” Its tunes can now be heard in elevators while the really radical grass-roots theater has vanished to limbo along with underground movies. In 1967 when I made it to the Haight, the kids who liked rock and roll and smoking pot, however genial, had little in common with the people I had known at college who preferred electronic music, Tibetan folksong, or, at any rate, down and dirty blues. Only a few months later the Diggers, who ought to have known, were to proclaim the death of hippie on Haight Street.
     Still, it certainly seemed as though the movement, however vaguely defined, had something to say about every area of life: not merely art and politics, but also interpersonal relations, cuisine, and living room design. How many apartments did I enter with a huge cable spool for coffee table, beaded curtains, and Indian bedspreads? I remember a slightly older poet’s reminiscences of San Francisco only a few years before I (and a horde of my cohort) hit town. He described how he and his friends would often get stoned and eat “phony-burgers,” made with supermarket hamburger buns, ketchup, onions, mustard, pickles, everything but the meat. A few years later no one would have dreamed of eating Wonder buns; every kitchen held brown rice and vegetables.
     I won’t aim here to define hip beyond a few sketchy outlines. Hip is a form of twentieth century Romanticism, celebrating the unconscious, the natural, the ecstatic while striking a counter-cultural pose with bohemian habits and left politics. Hip participates in the double vision DuBois analyzed in African-Americans, also evident in kitsch, camp, and other modern forms of irony. Susan Sontag located the essence of camp in her 1964 essay as occurring in the gap “between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice,” in other words, between signifier and signified.
     Authentic hipness requires the pose at least of a vision sharper and more piercing than others’. That’s what makes it so annoyingly elitist. One can always take irony around yet another turn. In contrast to this off-putting and esoteric claim, hippie was accessible to all, its wardrobe available not in military surplus or Salvation Army stores, each individual his own invention, but in standardized sets at Sears.

How to be a Poet

(Here, preserved for you as though in amber, a bit of psychedelic nostalgia if no more, a street broadside from 1967 San Francisco.) 

How to be a Poet 

Still your mind a moment -- let the sludge run off. 

Unplug the robot wires that feed the ego cash pump whine. 

Banish the mass media sounds and sights, those hustler demons lower than us at our worst. 

Look around. 

Open your senses one after another; 

   then take a breath 

      and just before exhaling 

         see how they all dance together. 

Think of the modern building you most despise 

   and what it's like: 

      your old uncle frightening with face-creases 

         red and moist at bottom, 

         or a mad monkey, 

         or a vain immortal slug, 

         the breeze from hospital antiseptic. 

Or the building you most love and what it's like: 

   fingers on soft flesh, 

      clouds of good memory, 

         ants relating secret lore, 

         a spicy wind in winter -- 

Think of when you've been highest and lowest 

and what the colors of the planets smelled like then. 

Tell about a street corner familiar as an office-mate, 

a tree distinct from all the rest, 

a squirrel about whom you imply in twenty words a century's career. 

Know that your soul is holy and perfect 

    and base and mortal and easily hurt 

        and there the plot gets thick. 

Know that your sisters and brothers 

beat with the same heart pounding 

    to catch up with itself 

        and you may look to their eyes for the proof. 

 MAKE LOVE TO THE LOVELY WELCOMING YOU!