Now, on to buisness!
The 60's.
The twentieth century has had it's fair share of revolutions, violence, overthrow, death -- the end result; the re-arranging of the middle and upper classes caused by proletariat violence. The clever inciting the mob. The 60's were different, it was the only attempted non-violent revolution of thought in the west. I happened once before in Tibet when the warlike tribes all agreed to pacify and build monestaries. Change was caused, not through bloodshed, but through resistance, through ideas, through a new way of viewing outselves and the world. It almost worked. The above speech by Mario Savio shows that, can you feel the energy, the electricty? It should have happened, this perverse world that we now inhabit should have fallen there and then. What happened? Simple; drugs. Anyone who has ever done LSD knows the confusion it can cause, the idea of "expanding conscious" was so attached to the new way of thinking that all the goverment needed to do to maintain the staus quo, to derail the revolution was to plant a seed. So it was done. The kool aid acid test, Ken Kesey, subtley and cruelly diverted the revolution and turned focused mental revolutionaries into hippies. We have missed the bus. We missed our chance. There is now no peaceful end in sight, no non-violent shift of power or of consciousness. Human beings always do things the hard way.
We've got to live no matter how many skies have fallen.
"If you persist in throttling your impulses you end by becoming a clot of phlegm. You finally spit out a gob which completely drains you and which you only realize years later was not a gob of spit but your inmost self. If you lose that you will always race through dark streets like a madman pursued by phantoms. You will always be able to say with perfect sincerity: "I don't know what I want to do in life." You can push yourself clean through the filament of life and come out at the wrong end of the telescope, seeing everything beyond you, out of grasp, and diabolically twisted. From then on the game's up. Whichever direction you take you will find yourself in a hall of mirrors; you will race like a madman, searching for an exit, to find that you are surrounded only by distorted images of your own sweet self. ...
The world would only begin to get something of value from me the moment I stopped being a serious member of society and became- myself. The State, the nation, the united nations of the world, were nothing but one great aggregation of individuals who repeated the mistakes of their forefathers. They were caught in the wheel from birth and they kept at it till death- and this treadmill they tried to dignify by calling it "life". If you asked anyone to explain or define life, what was the be-all and end-all, you got a blank look for an answer. Life was something which philosophers dealt with in books that no one read. Those in the thick of life, "the plugs in harness," had no time for such idle questions. "You've got to eat, haven't you.?" This query, which was supposed to be a stopgap, and which had already been answered, if not in the absolute negative at least in a disturbingly relative negative by those who knew, was a clue to all the other questions which followed in a veritable Euclidian suite. From the little reading I had done I had observed that the men who were most in life, who were molding life, who were life itself, ate little, slept little, owned nothing or little. They had no illusions about duty, or perpetuation of their kith and kin, or the preservation of the State. They were interested in truth and truth alone. They recognized only one kind of activity- creation. Nobody could command their services because they had of their own pledged themselves to give all. They gave gratuitously, because that is the only way to give. This was the way of life which appealed to me: it made sound sense. It was life- not the simulacrum which those about me worshipped. ...
What I secretly longed for was to disentangle myself from all those lives which had woven themselves into the pattern of my own life and were making my destiny a part of theirs. To shake myself free of these accumulating experiences which were mine only by force of inertia required a violent effort. Now and then I lunged and tore at the net, but only to become more enmeshed. My liberation seemed to involve pain and suffering to those near and dear to me. Every move I made for my own private good brought about reproach and condemnation. I was a traitor a thousand times over. ...
The purpose of discipline is to promote freedom. But freedom leads to infinity and infinity is terrifying. Then arose the comforting thought of stopping at the brink, of setting down in words the mysteries of impulsion, compulsion, propulsion, of bathing the senses in human odors. To become utterly human, the compassionate fiend incarnate, the locksmith of the great door leading beyond and away and forever isolate
We each have to do it alone now.
God help us all.
I've been back nine days and had fried chicken four times. And lots of sweet tea. I never even liked sweet tea before.
France is the place, huh?
And, the French don't know about pumpkin pie?? You have to teach them, then. They don't know what they're missing!!