(Ive been utterly preoccupied this week with preparing a re-edition of a novel invisibly published almost twenty years ago: Footprints in the Snow of the Moon. I hope to have it accessible on Amazon by mid-week. In writing the preface at any rate I decided that I could post an excerpt here that might not be uninteresting to ICs audience.)
I heard a television documentary declare recently that Sharon Tates murder at the insane hands of the Manson gang was the end of the Sixties. The remark wasnt intended chronologically: its implication was plainly that the depraved brutality of the deed corrupted the Sixties dream" and exiled American culture from the Eden of free love and rejection of social hierarchy. If only if only a few crazed loons hadnt flown off the preserve!
In a far more significant sense the Manson murders (there were several by the way) were the climax of the Sixtiesthe necessary inevitable dark fruit of a poisoned tree. When human beings are freed of their inhibitions the animal impulses that come to the surface vying for control may be lamb-like one instant… and then lupine the next. Not that any wolf deserves to be defamed by comparison with Charles Manson: no the human being wholly liberated of shame or guilt is an infinitely more atrocious creature than anything we can find in raw nature. Thanks to his imagination he can indulge a lust that has no analogue in any merely brutish chemistry: not a lust for sex or food but for dominating the will of otherslibido dominandi.
In unmooring the individual will from the cables with which two and a half millennia (punctuated by a few notable lacunae) of Judaeo-Christian and classical Stoic morality had secured it the Sixties set a generation of directionless young people loose upon each otherlooking high and low for what they wanted" and what they considered relevant" brushing aside entire systems and institutions that they considered old" or patriarchal". Frankly this thumbnail sketch of the Sixties ethos is already in error: only the final years of the decade grew radical". Most of the cultural clearing-and-leveling labor was accomplished in the Seventies.
Now I will not maintain that the decade of flaring cuffs and collars bushy unisex hair styles and anorexic pop-singers saw a proliferation of drug-addicted mass-murderers. Manson let us say was the face reflected in the pool at the chasms bottom. For if human beings are distinct from the purely animal in bearing their blessed curse of free will and imagination their distinction remains grafted upon an animal substrate. They like to move in herds. The herd lifts from the individuals shoulders the complex burdens of freedom. The hand of Satan that scrawled helter skelter" in Sharon Tates blood no doubt hazed many a young free spirit" away from the edge. Indulging impulse was tamed (superficially and for the time being) into a social endeavor and even a sociable one. In those passive pacifist Seventies it turned out that you could find yourself" while looking and acting exactly like the legions of seekers" all around you; and this was indeed unsurprising because it also turned out that our self" was essentially a construct of DNAour instinct to mate our natural aversion to forced labor our inbred terror of physical threat our primate comfort in belonging to a group.
Statistical outliersrogue elephantswould register a dangerous resurgence in the Eighties when the cult of pleasure irresistibly fed into a cult of acquisitive hunger. For most of the intermediate decade however I observed my peers to be lingering in an insipid sameness neither searching for a guru in India like the Beatles nor snorting cocaine to amass royal fortunes on Wall Street. The Seventies were a trough between crests. They were a lull in whose wash uninspired hordes supposed themselves to be riding the wild surf.
The word infantilism" would leap to mind if the present time had not laid yet a better claim to it. Today as I sit writing college students are (as an abandoned clich once had it) much as nature might have left them". Several years ago already my undergraduates hadnt a clue what I intended when as we read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight together I associated the evocation of fertility in Arthurs all-green visitor with the recovery of longer days after the winter solstice. Most of them didnt know what a solstice was. Now their younger brothers and sisters are lecturing all of us on the planets climate and ordering us to shut up" if we raise an objection.
In comparison the overgrown children of the Seventies were at least not rude brats. And they had developed a decisive gendervery decisive! In that they could be said to have blazed a trail into puberty that leaves their contemporaries far behind. Yet their hair still grew long in the pristine ringlets whose first formal shearing brings mothers to tears. Their bodies were of the supple quality that allows toddlers to absorb infinite falls without taking much harm. In fact it was wrong of me to celebrate puberty in them with such confidence; some of the girls at least had found a way to resist menstruation. I know I mentioned anorexia in passing.
Wasnt abortion part of the same bid for prolonged innocence"? Children dont become mothers and fathers so... so pregnancies just shouldnt be happening. Something was amiss there. Reset the clock and go back to playing in the nursery: those two months of alarming discomfort never happened.
Well our overgrown children today appear to have discovered the full Mansonian potential of sacrificing small fleshy masses with little fingers and tiny noses. Its a rite performed to a known god whose name I shall not repeat. In that respect as in so many others I prefer the terminal adolescence" of the Seventies. Observers of the scene back then could still see that something was wrong; and the gullible young fools sucked into doing the wrong still had as often as not an inkling that they had been led astray. It was a time suitable to be the backdrop of a morality play whereas today... today we find only the appalling chaos fit for writing what the ancients would have called a catabasis: a journey through Hell.
Why the difference? I think it consists entirely in this: fifty years ago vestiges of those twenty-five hundred years of Western culture lingered among the herds hoofprints. Today theyre all gone. Fifty years ago the young who had jettisoned the cargo of Western civilization in favor of relevance" (which in terms of college work involved a much lightened reading list: a very happy accident in the Decade of Pleasure) had still seen Franco Zeffirellis version of Romeo and Juliet and Robert Bolts Man for All Seasons at the movies. Todays graduate students have cut their narrative teeth on comic-book superheroesabout whom some of them will probably write a dissertation. I devoutly hope that a few of our twenty-first century crop will find their way out of Hell having heeded a spiritual voice within that can easily outshout the Call of the Sociopath if attended to... yet Hell is where they are where they have to search for exits. Fifty years ago exits higher up the road were still open. They just werent being well maintained.
Nothing distresses me more in retrospect about that lost decade than the invertebracy of the Christian church in the face of so many formidable challenges. As a young man navigating the days troubled waters I had a keen sense that most Christian denominations were responding to the times Wait! Dont leave us behind! Were one of you! Love peace togetherness a better world... thats what were all about!" Yes... and that was apparently all they were about: no sin no guilt no repentance no abstinence no difficult ascent through stones and briars no resistance to worldly seductions. No comfort. In my experience of the Seventies the Church desperately fought against irrelevancy by rendering itself irrelevant. Those whom it courted abjectly had already found what they craved in the here-and-now; or if their souls were not wholly drained of breath and secretly craved a lifeline to the Beyond the Church had cast aside that line in its zeal to fashion a better here-and-now.
Again one might make precisely the same claim of organized Christianity in the twenty-first century and make it with a vengeance; but the trend began when trousers rode low their buckles spread broad and their bottoms belled wide.
I could write lengthily about the charismatic" movements that sometimes spiraled into cultism during this decadebut I should be wandering too far afield from the subjects addressed in Footprints which do not include these. If I lend any emphasis at all to the matter of religion here its because the novel struck me so powerfullyas I edited it after almost two decadesas groping for the spiritual. This too seems to me characteristic of the Seventies: I mean groping clumsily after something fulfilling and immaterial... and not being able to find it. Finding substitutes for it in all the wrong places. Yet again yes one might say as much of any generation of human beings. The difference is that most such generations were graced with some form of organized faith that offered a clear alternative to sex drugs wealth and power. The Seventies having inherited from the previous years a contempt for all reverend institutions were left with a Church that embraced the secular worlds facile opposition of sex and drugs to wealth and power as if those pairs defined adversarial ends of a spectrum.
The charismatic represented less a third waya midpoint on the spectrumthan a retreat into that infantilism (too young for sex too young for power) typical of the eras approach to other moral crises. There was no genuine escape from this worlds traps (and Sartres Huis Clos whose title literally translates such despair was taught in every sophomore French class). Those who survived the days Charybdis of rival forces circling the same focal void and were at last spewed out upon Odysseuss stunted fig tree faced a bleak lonely prospect.
One of my faithful collaborators in the charitable venture The Center for Literate Values gave the original novel a kind review (what else would you expect of any officer in a public charity?)but voiced a mild regret that the book did not investigate faith as a solution. I wont say that I took the criticism under advisement in my rewriting. Rather in my rewriting I discovered that the forces I had unleashed in these fairly ordinary Middle Americans (ordinary on the surfacethe only level at which anyone is ordinary) most of them well under thirty needed to blow up the world" a little more. There needed to be more frustration with the options offered by a relatively smooth-purring profitably hedonistic society now free and clear of the Vietnam nightmare. I dont say that there needed to be more options: faith often grows exactly because more is needed but no further options are possible. I felt a considerable pressure to let something intrude into my dystopic pastoral" which would lighten lifes burdens paradoxically by acknowledging that burdens dont disappear in this life.
I had to make the narrator turn somewhat more consciously mature at the end. And I did so: thats the books major change. Some may persist But I still dont see his faith taking shape. Wheres his faith?" My answer: not in the things and people of this worldbut running straight through them; not in the institutions of this world but thriving in spite of them.
How many people in fact weathered the Seventies with a spiritual insight of such elevation? Well... as a novelist I dont do statistical analysis. I try to present the most instructive case and sometimes I thereby present the least probable. I will bring to general attention however that the narrators retrospective places his final thoughts in the late Nineties: hes had plenty of time to mull it all over. If you were on the ground" during that somnolent spiritual war which was the late Seventies you didnt yet know that promiscuous sex might harm your body as well as your soul: AIDS was yet unheard-of. You didnt know that foreign nationals might plot to murder thousands of your neighbors in the midst of their routine: plane hijackings always ended with a rerouting to Beirut or Tripoli usually after the passengers were swapped out for a million bucks. You didnt know that school children might so much as fantasize about gunning their classmates down: video games and our sociopathologizing social media" were a glimmer in some developers eye.
I doubt that we learned much of anything from the Seventies in short while they were being played out. Any lesson would have come years later (and it doesnt appear that most of us have learned the full lesson even fifty years later). What I like about the Seventies as an artist though is precisely that they are pure" of mixed motive when one scans them for moral cautionary tales. At the time no one would have known just how risky to bodily health and mere survival were many trendy new habits. The only reason for resisting them would have been abstract: a stand in principle uncomplicated by a gun pointed at the head.
(Ive been utterly preoccupied this week with preparing a re-edition of a novel invisibly published almost twenty years ago: Footprints in the Snow of the Moon. I hope to have it accessible on Amazon by mid-week. In writing the preface at any rate I decided that I could post an excerpt here that might not be uninteresting to ICs audience.)
I heard a television documentary declare recently that Sharon Tates murder at the insane hands of the Manson gang was the end of the Sixties. The remark wasnt intended chronologically: its implication was plainly that the depraved brutality of the deed corrupted the Sixties dream" and exiled American culture from the Eden of free love and rejection of social hierarchy. If only if only a few crazed loons hadnt flown off the preserve!
In a far more significant sense the Manson murders (there were several by the way) were the climax of the Sixtiesthe necessary inevitable dark fruit of a poisoned tree. When human beings are freed of their inhibitions the animal impulses that come to the surface vying for control may be lamb-like one instant… and then lupine the next. Not that any wolf deserves to be defamed by comparison with Charles Manson: no the human being wholly liberated of shame or guilt is an infinitely more atrocious creature than anything we can find in raw nature. Thanks to his imagination he can indulge a lust that has no analogue in any merely brutish chemistry: not a lust for sex or food but for dominating the will of otherslibido dominandi.
In unmooring the individual will from the cables with which two and a half millennia (punctuated by a few notable lacunae) of Judaeo-Christian and classical Stoic morality had secured it the Sixties set a generation of directionless young people loose upon each otherlooking high and low for what they wanted" and what they considered relevant" brushing aside entire systems and institutions that they considered old" or patriarchal". Frankly this thumbnail sketch of the Sixties ethos is already in error: only the final years of the decade grew radical". Most of the cultural clearing-and-leveling labor was accomplished in the Seventies.
Now I will not maintain that the decade of flaring cuffs and collars bushy unisex hair styles and anorexic pop-singers saw a proliferation of drug-addicted mass-murderers. Manson let us say was the face reflected in the pool at the chasms bottom. For if human beings are distinct from the purely animal in bearing their blessed curse of free will and imagination their distinction remains grafted upon an animal substrate. They like to move in herds. The herd lifts from the individuals shoulders the complex burdens of freedom. The hand of Satan that scrawled helter skelter" in Sharon Tates blood no doubt hazed many a young free spirit" away from the edge. Indulging impulse was tamed (superficially and for the time being) into a social endeavor and even a sociable one. In those passive pacifist Seventies it turned out that you could find yourself" while looking and acting exactly like the legions of seekers" all around you; and this was indeed unsurprising because it also turned out that our self" was essentially a construct of DNAour instinct to mate our natural aversion to forced labor our inbred terror of physical threat our primate comfort in belonging to a group.
Statistical outliersrogue elephantswould register a dangerous resurgence in the Eighties when the cult of pleasure irresistibly fed into a cult of acquisitive hunger. For most of the intermediate decade however I observed my peers to be lingering in an insipid sameness neither searching for a guru in India like the Beatles nor snorting cocaine to amass royal fortunes on Wall Street. The Seventies were a trough between crests. They were a lull in whose wash uninspired hordes supposed themselves to be riding the wild surf.
The word infantilism" would leap to mind if the present time had not laid yet a better claim to it. Today as I sit writing college students are (as an abandoned clich once had it) much as nature might have left them". Several years ago already my undergraduates hadnt a clue what I intended when as we read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight together I associated the evocation of fertility in Arthurs all-green visitor with the recovery of longer days after the winter solstice. Most of them didnt know what a solstice was. Now their younger brothers and sisters are lecturing all of us on the planets climate and ordering us to shut up" if we raise an objection.
In comparison the overgrown children of the Seventies were at least not rude brats. And they had developed a decisive gendervery decisive! In that they could be said to have blazed a trail into puberty that leaves their contemporaries far behind. Yet their hair still grew long in the pristine ringlets whose first formal shearing brings mothers to tears. Their bodies were of the supple quality that allows toddlers to absorb infinite falls without taking much harm. In fact it was wrong of me to celebrate puberty in them with such confidence; some of the girls at least had found a way to resist menstruation. I know I mentioned anorexia in passing.
Wasnt abortion part of the same bid for prolonged innocence"? Children dont become mothers and fathers so... so pregnancies just shouldnt be happening. Something was amiss there. Reset the clock and go back to playing in the nursery: those two months of alarming discomfort never happened.
Well our overgrown children today appear to have discovered the full Mansonian potential of sacrificing small fleshy masses with little fingers and tiny noses. Its a rite performed to a known god whose name I shall not repeat. In that respect as in so many others I prefer the terminal adolescence" of the Seventies. Observers of the scene back then could still see that something was wrong; and the gullible young fools sucked into doing the wrong still had as often as not an inkling that they had been led astray. It was a time suitable to be the backdrop of a morality play whereas today... today we find only the appalling chaos fit for writing what the ancients would have called a catabasis: a journey through Hell.
Why the difference? I think it consists entirely in this: fifty years ago vestiges of those twenty-five hundred years of Western culture lingered among the herds hoofprints. Today theyre all gone. Fifty years ago the young who had jettisoned the cargo of Western civilization in favor of relevance" (which in terms of college work involved a much lightened reading list: a very happy accident in the Decade of Pleasure) had still seen Franco Zeffirellis version of Romeo and Juliet and Robert Bolts Man for All Seasons at the movies. Todays graduate students have cut their narrative teeth on comic-book superheroesabout whom some of them will probably write a dissertation. I devoutly hope that a few of our twenty-first century crop will find their way out of Hell having heeded a spiritual voice within that can easily outshout the Call of the Sociopath if attended to... yet Hell is where they are where they have to search for exits. Fifty years ago exits higher up the road were still open. They just werent being well maintained.
Nothing distresses me more in retrospect about that lost decade than the invertebracy of the Christian church in the face of so many formidable challenges. As a young man navigating the days troubled waters I had a keen sense that most Christian denominations were responding to the times Wait! Dont leave us behind! Were one of you! Love peace togetherness a better world... thats what were all about!" Yes... and that was apparently all they were about: no sin no guilt no repentance no abstinence no difficult ascent through stones and briars no resistance to worldly seductions. No comfort. In my experience of the Seventies the Church desperately fought against irrelevancy by rendering itself irrelevant. Those whom it courted abjectly had already found what they craved in the here-and-now; or if their souls were not wholly drained of breath and secretly craved a lifeline to the Beyond the Church had cast aside that line in its zeal to fashion a better here-and-now.
Again one might make precisely the same claim of organized Christianity in the twenty-first century and make it with a vengeance; but the trend began when trousers rode low their buckles spread broad and their bottoms belled wide.
I could write lengthily about the charismatic" movements that sometimes spiraled into cultism during this decadebut I should be wandering too far afield from the subjects addressed in Footprints which do not include these. If I lend any emphasis at all to the matter of religion here its because the novel struck me so powerfullyas I edited it after almost two decadesas groping for the spiritual. This too seems to me characteristic of the Seventies: I mean groping clumsily after something fulfilling and immaterial... and not being able to find it. Finding substitutes for it in all the wrong places. Yet again yes one might say as much of any generation of human beings. The difference is that most such generations were graced with some form of organized faith that offered a clear alternative to sex drugs wealth and power. The Seventies having inherited from the previous years a contempt for all reverend institutions were left with a Church that embraced the secular worlds facile opposition of sex and drugs to wealth and power as if those pairs defined adversarial ends of a spectrum.
The charismatic represented less a third waya midpoint on the spectrumthan a retreat into that infantilism (too young for sex too young for power) typical of the eras approach to other moral crises. There was no genuine escape from this worlds traps (and Sartres Huis Clos whose title literally translates such despair was taught in every sophomore French class). Those who survived the days Charybdis of rival forces circling the same focal void and were at last spewed out upon Odysseuss stunted fig tree faced a bleak lonely prospect.
One of my faithful collaborators in the charitable venture The Center for Literate Values gave the original novel a kind review (what else would you expect of any officer in a public charity?)but voiced a mild regret that the book did not investigate faith as a solution. I wont say that I took the criticism under advisement in my rewriting. Rather in my rewriting I discovered that the forces I had unleashed in these fairly ordinary Middle Americans (ordinary on the surfacethe only level at which anyone is ordinary) most of them well under thirty needed to blow up the world" a little more. There needed to be more frustration with the options offered by a relatively smooth-purring profitably hedonistic society now free and clear of the Vietnam nightmare. I dont say that there needed to be more options: faith often grows exactly because more is needed but no further options are possible. I felt a considerable pressure to let something intrude into my dystopic pastoral" which would lighten lifes burdens paradoxically by acknowledging that burdens dont disappear in this life.
I had to make the narrator turn somewhat more consciously mature at the end. And I did so: thats the books major change. Some may persist But I still dont see his faith taking shape. Wheres his faith?" My answer: not in the things and people of this worldbut running straight through them; not in the institutions of this world but thriving in spite of them.
How many people in fact weathered the Seventies with a spiritual insight of such elevation? Well... as a novelist I dont do statistical analysis. I try to present the most instructive case and sometimes I thereby present the least probable. I will bring to general attention however that the narrators retrospective places his final thoughts in the late Nineties: hes had plenty of time to mull it all over. If you were on the ground" during that somnolent spiritual war which was the late Seventies you didnt yet know that promiscuous sex might harm your body as well as your soul: AIDS was yet unheard-of. You didnt know that foreign nationals might plot to murder thousands of your neighbors in the midst of their routine: plane hijackings always ended with a rerouting to Beirut or Tripoli usually after the passengers were swapped out for a million bucks. You didnt know that school children might so much as fantasize about gunning their classmates down: video games and our sociopathologizing social media" were a glimmer in some developers eye.
I doubt that we learned much of anything from the Seventies in short while they were being played out. Any lesson would have come years later (and it doesnt appear that most of us have learned the full lesson even fifty years later). What I like about the Seventies as an artist though is precisely that they are pure" of mixed motive when one scans them for moral cautionary tales. At the time no one would have known just how risky to bodily health and mere survival were many trendy new habits. The only reason for resisting them would have been abstract: a stand in principle uncomplicated by a gun pointed at the head.