The New Wave Makers

There seemed to be no airplane. There was just this parachutist sailing down through a cloudless sky. His face was masked. His chute was decorated with psychedelic-ecstatic colors. And below him, as he sailed so free, 20,000 grokkers said Ooh and Ah.

The occasion was the first Human Be-in on the Polo Field of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Tim Leary and Allen Ginsberg were there, the Hell's Angels were there, the Berkeley New Left politicos were there, the Provo like Diggers were there. There were children and parents, on a fine January day. There were banners, flags, costumes, drums, incense, chimes, many San Francisco rock bands, feathers, candles, heads and nonheads, families, lovers, heroes, animals, cymbals and symbols.

What was the cause? Just to grok and groove.

The police were absent. The crowd danced and played and loved each other all afternoon, and then Allen told them to pick up their litter and they did and then they went home. Nearby, the lawyer who represents the Hell's Angels in their continual hassling with the police was engaged in a rugby match, his legal talents unneeded. The Diggers passed out free food. Smiles and pats and kidding. Twenty thousand participants in the "Powwow, a Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-in" remember this as a causeless, meaningless and beautiful moment in their lives. A kind of history was truly made, an ecstasy, a memory of ecstasy and no police and no litter.

The whole thing was the conception of a couple of supergroovy wave makers. There have been succeeding episodes, and why not? All those bodies willing to be nice and knowing now, really knowing.

Where are these wave makers leading themselves and us? Should we follow? How can we follow? How can we not follow? How can we follow and not follow, all at once, picking up our litter?

• • •

Freaky doings down on earth, which is one of your top ten planets. Why add "the wave makers," another instant cliché, to the churning mass of language? Do we need another bumper sticker, another button, another dirge or snigger for the funny doings of the people who make the action? It is a matter of focus. After all, what are we standing on--peanut-butter--flavored yogurt? These are the people who are floating up all sorts of alien kicks through the rock-'n'-moil air. Some of them are developing products that will quickly be disposed of--rockets, missiles and youth itself. Some of them are working on a style of drugged psychedelic expansion or tripping with music and dancing and natural ease. "The Rise of the Uglies" would tell the story of the beards and the Goodwill Industry clothes and the haircut boycotts, except that the uglies are not ugly. Their charm comes in lumps, but it is charm all the same.

They are spontaneous. "I used to live with him," says the girl at a party, pointing across the room to a guitarist, "but now I live with him," as her finger crooks two ways southward toward a bearded postman, who is sleeping with his head on his mail sack. It is probably filled with Social Security checks. "Do you have a bicycle?"

"Yes."

"How many speeds?"

"Nine. It's Italian."

She absorbs this interesting data with gleaming eyes. Nine speeds is such a help getting up hills. "Would you like me to live with you?" she inquires. "Just for the weekend, I mean; it's such a drag making plans. But I do so love a man with nine different speeds."

They don't want to be up tight. They don't want to be brought down. They don't throw stones. They float out of the sky and keep the messy airplane out of sight.

Their older brothers and sisters were called beatniks, but the youths have other names now. The Zazzeroni of Italy, the Raggaren of Stockholm, the Provos of Holland, the Ladybugs of the Soviet Union, the Chuligans of Czechoslovakia, the Halbstarke of Austria, the Gammler of Germany, the Gamberros of Spain are all their cousins. An International is being created, with students and wandering loafers and the nervous-breakdown people and the remittance men and a few draft dodgers providing a network of communication; plus rumors, the telemouth; plus the conditions of industrialization and hard fear of war and disgust with mass culture that are settling over the Western world. "Arise, ye prisoners of affluence, arise ye processed of the earth----" They let hair and beards grow, they find God or godlessness (fanatic atheism is very close to religion), they seek out motorcycles and electronic music, they get high in a thousand different ways, they like leather and/or flowers, they question the traditional forms of work, they question (text continued on page 140) Wave Makers(continued from page 133) property and making out, they question their parents bitterly, they look for their brother and sister souls. In many different ways and with no great unity of action--this is not an organized movement--they are making ripples and waves from which even their elders are learning. Their styles catch on. What they emulate is being emulated by their elders. They are tuning in and they are taking over.

If a capsule signal is needed for what the wave makers are turning against in the world of their fathers, it can be found in a paragraph from a column written in Vietnam by Stewart Alsop for The Saturday Evening Post, January 7, 1967:

"We've killed a lot of friendly people, and I'm real sorry," said a sad-faced American colonel who is an advisor to the Vietnamese army here. "But, like Sherman said, 'War is hell.'"

The wave makers are not content with Sherman's famous remark. They may want to do nothing more about the war in Vietnam than evade it themselves, but it feeds their sense that a take-over generation--theirs--is required.

Student revolts are a serious matter, with political implications, meaning to change our ways about race, Vietnam, the abstract, hard-edged quality of education, the troubles of work. The revolutionists ask: What are we training for? Why? They express the post-Kennedy slump in national morale. Where are we at? Who puts us here? Why? Time passes, we grow old and die; or perhaps no time passes and we die anyway--is that all? Why? What mean your duties, moralities, wars? Where are we at, old folks? Your way is unplugged.

For some, it's simply good to get back at Mommy and Daddy, or to revive the old Marxism of that prehistory, the Thirties, or to put panty raids and Castro in the same Savio blender. They are all decent law-evading people.

The rules of habit, tradition and authority are eroded. The threats that kept those rules in force--the punishment of God, pregnancy or disinheritance--have been eliminated by the dimming out of religion, the pill and the erosion of the old family structures. One of the dangers of the new youth style is formation of what critic Harold Rosenberg has called "the herd of independent minds." The opportunity, however, is to make a new tradition of the tradition of the new.

The beatniks of ten years ago seemed to be triumphantly the victims of all they surveyed. They dropped out arrogantly; they preached poverty, ease, the reign of love and, somewhat stammeringly, creativity. They wore the old clothes, but not magic clothes. Their hipster opposite numbers dressed sharp but in uniform. If they marched to a different drummer, they all seemed to march to the same old different drummers. Paralyzed by the ides of Ike, they alternately slumbered and slouched or rode off on wild Dexe-drine highs, bopping a bit, and then returned to mattresses chez each other. They were nihilism's Organization Men.

The wave makers are lineal descendants of the Beats, in much the same way that Elizabethan England was composed of the lineal descendants of the Anglo-Saxon berry eaters who painted their rumps blue and lived in trees along about the time Aristophanes was writing his satires on Socrates. Though the word "dropout" has become popular, it is certainly true that the Beats really dropped out in a way that the wave makers have not. They are busy designing clothes, making movies, protesting the civil rights slothfulness and the nonfloating U.S. aircraft carrier that is the peninsula of Vietnam. They have blooming on their minds. They are present in the now. They are sometimes not here when you want them, but at least they are there. They set styles, Carnaby-Mod-Rock, and they capture philosophies--Marshall McLuhan, who plays Polonius to their Hamlets; Dr. Timothy Leary, who plays ghost on the parapets. They are the descendants of the Beats, but with new drugs, new toys, new fads and new sex.

They fill time with movement, space with gadgets, sound with volume and amplification, message with medium.

The traditional Western pattern for both personal lives and the history of a time requires a beginning, a middle and an end. We are born, we struggle, we die. There are climaxes, irregularities, tragic intensities. The circle is completed and then the circle starts afresh. But now, with bombs and fallout and war, with the powerlessness of will in a mass society, life does not seem to be so simply plotted. The pattern has gone peculiar, with paisley spirals and whorls. A new vision has gained a hold on the children. An on-going-with-ness, a stasis, a dropping out of time and a tuning in to perpetuity--these express the alternative ideals out of the East, the tube and history. The vision is not freshly invented. There has always been this element in Christian and Jewish mysticism; in fact, in all mysticisms. But as a popular style, it has taken new roots in the generation now young and active.

The willingness of so many of the most vital and energetic of the young to give up the sense of history, hope for the future, is understandable but unusual. What a French psychologist has called "la crise d'originalité juvénile"--"the crisis of adolescent originality" used to mean a youthful bursting of the bonds toward new achievements: ambition and lust--and art, money, power, creative expression of personality, hope for society. The Wanderjahr of the 19th Century scholar-poet, the adventuring of the troubadour youth, the killing of the father in the primal horde: There are plenty of examples in history and in myth. Change meant change, and youth did it. The new psychedelic mode--digging the scene--is an odd reversal of this pattern. But of course the wave makers, those who define the scene, are finding their road to originality, their wholly path homeward to the tradition of novelty.

The Soviet poet Evtushenko's evocation of Mayakovsky's revolver--to kill the conformists, to kill untruth, hatred and cruelty--is also an evocation of that same revolver with which Mayakovsky killed himself. If he hadn't committed suicide, very likely Stalin would have had him murdered. The revolver of Evtushenko and Mayakovsky is the revolver of angry, hasty, wasteful youth; and an echo of it can be found in the name of the Beatle album filled with sweet love songs and ironic nudges: Revolver.

The stony hipsters of the slums, the hang-loose protesters of the status quo, the wet-eyed psychedelic lovers ("I love! I'm beautiful!") are different in many ways, but they are similar in the hope of grooving and grokking. To groove means to swing; groovy means good, in the swing, with it, there. Grok is a word from a science-fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land; grok means to dig, to go in calm ecstasy, to relish what is before you. These decent people are eagerly grokking. They don't want to smuggle in or buy illegal marijuana; they want to declare it legal; but in the meantime, they feel they must fight the liquor lobby and help remove the smell of beer from places where men gather. "Junkies" for them are the old folks who accumulate junk out of advertisements; addicts are those who swing with a medicine chest full of pills; the insane are the politicians who run whole populations with fire and bombs; the weird are those whose sexual hang-ups include swift sorties with the girl at the sales convention or the neighbor's wife. The only thing they admit is that these strange and nongroovy people have temporary control of things.

The turbulence of youth is eternal; nothing unique to this fact. Their boiling and trouble accompany all the changes of civilizations, both the creative and the destructive ones. What gives it a special poignancy and risk today is that it has caused a punch-drunk unsteadiness of the balancing older generation. The wave makers seem to be asking the ruling (continued on page 190)Wave Makers(continued from page 140) husks of their fathers: Can you really want war? Do you really mean to let the air be filled with garbage, the waters poisoned, the populations sickened by both excess and want? You mean for millions to be unemployed and the rest overworked? You mean it, Dad? Aw, that's a dumb shuck. Aw, get off our backs, you old creeps.

And, oddly enough, the older generation seems to be answering to this: You're right. Show us the way. We'll follow like you and try to be young and full of despair like you, or full of hope, too, if you choose. This is the new and curious element, this willingness of the seniors to submit to their more experienced juniors, to take their lead and pattern their uniformed age on the wisdom of youth.

• • •

Let us now attempt a geography of the elements on the scene. what follows is an atlas of the new world being colonized by the wave makers. The various hard rains falling will surely change its contours; but like any explorer, we may have to be content to discover America when we are looking for India.

Beachhead. It is not nudism. It is not orgyism. But it is not what you could call just pure swimming or sun-bathing, either. It is "unstructured experience," says Darrell Tarver, the sociology student who organized the Free Beach Movement because he likes to frolic unclothed with friends. He is friendly with peace politicking and New Left theorizing; but his main interest is in getting boys, girls, Negroes, pacifists, soldiers on leave, belly dancers, architects, students, teachers, everybody! out! out on the beach, please! When a gawker takes the hand of a nudist, half the battle is won--and Darrell says: "Glad to have you here! Nice day, isn't it? That's my wife over there, playing volleyball." Pumping and pumping the hand and grinning and eyes darting and picking out something personal to say. The battle is generally won. Even sheriff's deputies, the daughters of sheriff's deputies--pants and panties and jeans and skirts, all the badnesses of nongrokking life come shed. For one thing, the volleyball looks like fun and they want to get into uniform. Darrell's wife--sweet, homey, nekkid--looks so right and relaxed, just the sight of her turns a gawker into a people.

Up and down the state of California there are now Free Beaches--free of clothes and free of nonclothes. The Free Beach franchise has gone out to the East Coast and the Gulf of Mexico, too. This is the most affable of revolutions, hardly a revolution at all. These are the converts to Human Be-ins, the advance guard of grokkers, those who believe they have only a few decades on earth and want to spend them now, unclothed, in touch with light, air, sun and other bodies.

They LSD explorers of inner space take an alternate line: you can love everyone, everything; the world can be changed by personal worship, example and contemplation. They dance to deafening rock 'n' roll with strobe lights, liquid light shows, flickering movies, all the stimuli their senses can bear. And in their ebullience and high health, their senses can bear a great deal.

They seek to break down the barriers between people set up by money and position and shaving. The psychedelic-ecstatic beat unites them.

The Thunder Machine presents, Space daisy and Lee QuarnstrominA Real Wedding

read an invitation. The couple got married to a rock version of Mendelssohn. The bride's child by her previous marriage danced the night through, stomping with six-year-old abandon. Some of the guests looked as if they qualified for slum clearnce and urban renewal, but they were comfortable with themselves. As author ken Kesey announced at his Acid Test Graduation Ceremony, "We must say it clearly, hairily and with good amplification."

Even The wall Street Journal has picked up on the superpresent world of the wave makers, which is the missing link not to history but to the future. "Call it Psychedelic and it will sell, fast, some Merchants say." This Was the headline of a front-page story. The subhead read; "Psychedelic Shops, Fabrics, Night clubs Make the Scene; Tootsie Rolls & Adolf Hitler." The news feature was an absolutely serious coast-to-coast survey of the market in "acidteric" merchandise, including posters, clothes, widgets for blowing smoke, diffraction disks for blowing minds, dream machines of various tilts and energies. The Wall Street Journal knows quite a lot about it, for The Wall Street Journal, that is ("markups run to 100 percent," psychedelicatessens can merchandise good that sold at cut rates in dime stores); but a few items from the world of commerce and profit have been omitted from its survey. For example:

The Attention workshop, a private school designed to bring joy. Fee: $37.50 per weekend. "Session will be in the nude. Smokers will be allowed to bring one pack of cigarettes."

A cooking manual that might produce the recipe for a wave maker would include the juice of three Hondas, the pulp of a raw beard and a soupçon of LSD. With nearly half the population under 25 and the other half wishing it were, the culture of expenditure is running full blast. And within the sound of money, the sound of ecstasy, the noise of destructibility (goods, time, youth itself), there remain enclaves of those thoughtful ones who seek the meaning of it all. These are the moral philosophers who approve of summer jobs but think that a boy should have a summer job all his life, all year round. And preferably it should consist in taking eight-millimeter films of his daily goofing and gefuffeling (don't ask what it means, do it). As Don McNeill wrote in an article on "Living Without an Address on the Lower East Side," in The Village Voice: "Privacy is easily sacrificed ... material possessions become less important, clean sheets forgotten. Yet the body is sustained and the mind is at work circumnavigating the answer." It's a great day in the history of hair.

The merchants who sell doughnuts and motorcycles and sleeping bags to these Dylanesque tribal troubadours have learned to love them. "Some of them are artists in their own way," an Army-surplus store told me. Actually it was a man, speaking for his business. "You know, poor as they act, they never buy the cheap sleeping bag. I sell 'em the forty-sixty-dollar job--good down, great attachments. They come in with their rags, but they don't buy anything but the Cadillac of sleeping bags. You think maybe they get money from some-place? Home?"

I thought maybe.

"Artists," he mused, "in their own way. They don't litter the streets the day after the night before. They're nice. Some of 'em I know by name."

The Children's Crusade has carried The Fugs, the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and Donovan on their shields toward fame and riches. The makers of light shows seldom become rich, but some do. Provos are in international correspondence, selling anarchism. Macy's takes a full-page advertisement, declaring:

Zen, the very essence of the Orient, sends a special subtle beat through the very heart of Macy's.... It is Zen, the spirit of "Stillness in Movement" ... the bold, unfaltering strokes of Japanese painting. It is this pure serenity that inspired Shiseido, Japan's most famous name in cosmetics, to create Zen perfume ... an exquisite fragrance that ... Come discover Zen, by Shiseido of Japan ... at your Macy's.

Even Macy's, the land of What Is and What Sells, wants to tell us how the world might be, if only the world becomes different. The Hobbits are coming. Frodo Lives. The kids are electrocuting themselves, mixing acid in their souls and calling The Fugs square. Mao and Trotsky and Ramblin' Jack Elliott are over the hill. Debutantes are looking for what comes after plastic materials--nonplastic materials? They are dropping out of Andy Warhol and joining the Provos: "Anarchists, goblins, punks, saints, wild men, dope freaks, dropouts, vagrants, sorcerers, unite! If you want to put down this kiss-ass society, then you are a Provo!"

What debutante or disaffected graduate student can resist this touching appeal? The Provos of Amsterdam, the Living Children of Boston, The Diggers of San Francisco are all aimed at doing good, at simplicity, at cutting the shit. They feed the hungry, they attain some sweet family groupings on the tribal model, they cut some of the shit some of the time for some of the people. They trip out in a scene of advanced creative martyrdom, flowers, gang sex, big laughs, soft touches. It's too easy, of course, to ridicule the herd of independent minds. But everyone in this life seeks to trip out through fantasy and art and religion and sexual ecstasy, friendship and hope and a dream of community. The wave makers are seeking the trip directly, giving up money and position and an ethic of proving something to parents. Some of them, of course, get rich, get famous and prove something to their parents; but the style obeys the injunction: Make new!

Moses Maimonides speaks for the older fashion in his Guide to the Perplexed (that was in the 12th Century). When a boy is tormented by desire, he advises: "Drag it into the house of study." In other words, read, work and forget desire. Now his descendants, bearded, flapping, eager, drag it into the house of study along with the chicklet and the whole group and all their instruments. And the pills. And then blow the fuses.

The wave makers can be easy even on the tender questions of race and war. They want to swing. As one says, "We've learned two things about Negroes. (A) Not all of them want to sleep with our sisters. (B) Some do." And now that they face it all, it's easier, they can ride with it, there are more important things to do than protecting little sister from what comes naturally, such as feeling, flowers and fooling around.

Maybe 10,000,000 Americans turn on or have turned on. They are happy monaural with casual styles and rock 'n' roll and marijuana; they are ecstatic in stereo with acid and dropping out and devil-take-the-rest. They leave a part of their souls in the youth bag. While the waves beat on the shores, they are waiting to take over.

• • •

At the opposite extreme from these pure and purehearted grokkers stand the New Left militants, the peace marchers and the politicals, those who want to kill war and segregate the segregationists and bring political and economic justice to a world badly in need of these qualities that it has never enjoyed except in the ardent imaginations of men. Some of them also seek violent change to make this better, more peaceful world. Their youthful heroes are men like Stokely Carmichael, aged 26, who led SNCC from the problems of race in the South into the problems of race in the North and on into the confused realms of international hate-mongering; and Mario Savio, aged 24, who is seen as fighting the good fight of the individual against the multiversity and against an education designed to suit the military-economic machine.

But the grokkers and the revolutionists are not purely one thing or another; they join in an evolving conception of modern man. They may look like Hell's Angels dropouts to the old stratified society, but to themselves they look ready: ready for change, ready for novelty, ready to mess around and perhaps ready for fun, too. Some of them are maturing into a sense of their own internal power, if not yet into political control. They are nonideological, rhythmic rather than intellectual, turned on rather than convinced, products of the disposable culture and possessed of the most disposable commodity of all--youth, that disease that is no longer even cured by age. In the past, it was. Youthful idealism, hope, laziness and disposability hobbled toward the future, gathering goods and compromises and clucking over the excesses of its own children. The kids no longer take pride in these gains and losses.

• • •

Poverty, Pollution, Peace and Race. It may seem trivial to link these four issues together; but, as James Joyce may have said, it is not trivial: It is quad-rivial. The same social activists move from one issue to the next. The New Left--writing in such organs as Ramparts and The village, Voice. New Politics and Dissent, Liberation and in occasional ephemera--argues that the old radical solutions, Marxist, mainly, are not adequate. The turned-on, plugged-in times seem to demand a radical humanism, a responsible anarchism, formulas of improvisation. The Radical Education project, initiated by the Students for a Democratic Society, extends some of the organized lines of traditional student efforts. It is a large-scale reaching toward both knowledge and power, but in its immediate program it states that: "The forms of democracy cannot be judged in the abstract, apart from the actual freedom and humanness which they allow." It is concerned with values and utopias, the analysis of myths and realities in the actual world, strategies of change. There is no basic theory; that is yet to develop, though certainly there are positions on poverty (Help!), pollution (Stop it!), peace (Stop the little wars, end the arms race!) and race (Use law!). But techniques and organization are still being studied. The Radical Education Project, like the underground press that has radically and psychedelically exploded in every hipster community, seeks an international educational intelligence network that can link scholars, journalists, youth leaders, officials, guerrilla leaders all over the world. "One former staff member," says a recent bulletin, "visited Guatemala last summer, where he made extensive contacts with Guatemalan guerrillas." The active figures belong to a generation for whom the Spanish Civil War, World War Two, the lowering of the Iron Curtain, the Korean War--that whole clanking paraphernalia of history--are mere chapters in textbooks. No wonder men in their 40s, fancying themselves still young, stare at them in wonder.

The "New Left" has become the cliché term that names these new radical critics of American society. But men such as Stokely Carmichael are not registered members of a political movement called the New Left: there is no such party. The prime differences between the old leftists and the new lie in the areas of doctrine and organization. The old leftists believed in final principles; they had explanations and factions; they disagreed among themselves, but they splintered and splintered into tiny, sometimes one-man parties. Shachtmanites and Lovestonites may have included only the founder and his wife, plus the family dog, and then there was a divorce--but no matter, it was a party all the same, with one lonely man the proprietor of his final truth to console him for the loss of wife, dog and mass base.

The New Left activists have been called anarchists because their criticism of society is basic and they are mistrustful of organizations to improve matters. However, at the same time, they form alliances wherever useful, without previously prepared grudges against, say, the Communists. They are too young and uncaring of history to remember the old grudges--too young to be suspicious and yet both hopeful and desperate. And just as they are resistant to doctrine, so they are resistant to the notion of leadership as such. They have observed the abuses of power--this history is familiar to them. They are not, on the whole, pursuing power. There seems to be a rare, almost temperamental shyness, even among the natural leaders. Bob Moses, once a leader of SNCC, found that he was being called by the contemporary cliché "charismatic"; he changed his name to Bob Parris to drop himself down a bit; and then he dropped out entirely. Moses/Parris is a man who fought the good fight in the South, risking his life. When he discovered that his fellow SNCC workers were being inspired by his example rather than by their cause, that they believed him when he said something, that he was in a position of enormous guiding power and inspiration--instead of being gratified, as most men would be, he was disappointed. He wanted the cause to speak for itself and leadership to be self-generating. He disappeared. Some friends say he is now studying in Africa.

The leadership in the New Left changes because the leaders seem to be interested in personal fulfillment--knowledge, understanding, getting in touch--rather than in running a bureaucracy. This is not selfish dilettantism; it involves principles about leadership. The natural result is that the bureaucracy is weak and organizations tend to fade away, as during the present lull in the civil rights struggle.

The fading in and out of activist groups can mean, however, a deeper rooting of democratic process than is traditional in America. The war in Southeast Asia has tended to gather many disparate groups--pacifist, religious, political--into allied organizations and has drawn energy away from the struggles against poverty and race prejudice; but immediate local issues are able--wherever there are the young--to cause spontaneous combustion. Whether it is parking garages to replace parks, freeways to replace redwood forests or the filtering of garbage-laden air, there is an increasing popular ability to act.

The New Left is the label they are given, just as if they were the children of the old left; but these are self-fulfilling wave makers whose weapons are impiety, energy and rage. At a recent confrontation of New Left activists with some veterans of old-timy radical movements, Robert Scheer, editor of Ramparts, candidate for Congress in 1966 and barely aged 31, cried out with absolutely crystalline purity: "We don't care about your final goals.

"We don't have your rules. If the capitalists can give us peace, that's fine. If socialism means war, it's absurd. We want to stay alive today!"

• • •

New Philosophies, new families. Between the extremes of politicalized man and Eastern-mystic-contemplative man stand the curious efforts of the utopian or educative communities that are being organized in various isolated spots. One of the most serious, sensible and firmly rooted of these is located in Big Sur, that spectacular California stretch of mountains and Pacific Ocean beach, where a young man named Michael Murphy has taken a run-down family hotel and lodge and transmogrified it into the Esalen Institute, "a center to explore those trends in religion, philosophy and the behavioral sciences which emphasize the potentialities of human existence." The guests--students? clients? patients?--participate in seminars on such subjects as "Meditative Techniques and Depth Imagery," "Alternative Views of Reality" and "God in the Secular City." Mike Murphy has found his cause--a nondrug expansion of consciousness through techniques gropingly and intuitively understood by creative people in all fields: medicine, engineering, architecture, the sciences and the arts. Having returned to this family property after long wanderings that included over a year in an Indian monastery, he has organized a rapidly growing institution that aims to conduct its program in major cities, to publish papers, to find a way to end loneliness and to come close to answering the ancient questions about the meaning of life.

The resident staff includes Dr. Frederick Perls, one of the last surviving pupils of Freud, who dispenses wisdom and probes anxieties--or sometimes dispenses anxieties and probes wisdom. Gia-Fu Feng, calligrapher, also conducts classes in Tai Chi Chuan (meditative movements) and smiles inscrutably. Bernard Gunther leads in "body sensitivity and nonverbal communication." Occasional visitors are such thinkers as Buckminster Fuller, who invented the geodesic dome and the Dymaxion House; S. I. Hayakawa, the semanticist; Bishop James A. Pike, Episcopal and controversial--scholars and innovators of all sorts.

The point lies in a communal search for an open, freer world. People massage each other; people take the hot baths together, frolicking over spectacular cliffs looking out to sea. The fog is lovely. The sun is bright. The visitors can look at the mountains or the ocean. Some of the contemplation is merely histrionic, designed to let others know--that pretty teeny bopper, say--that you are contemplating; but there is also a seriousness about the quest.

On one weekend at Esalen, Nelson Van Judah, a designer, led a large group of students in creating a "total environment experience." They constructed a geodesic dome and then filled it with delights and people. As the audience lay about inside, the students projected films and slides, played tapes of sounds and jazz and Handel, dripped projected colors, plugged in smells of eucalyptus and mint and ether. People giggled; people were moved and said Ooh and Ah; the claustrophobes and the rigid fled pellmell. As with the drug experience, the "total environment experience" kicks the radio; that is, either people are stimulated to start functioning or they crack into kindling.

On the outside of the geodesic dome, the total-environmentalists, mostly aged 18 to 25, leaped about like manic maestros, improvising sounds and smells and film projections. They had labored over the construction for days; they had practiced together like an orchestra; and then, when it was all over, that was it. They walked away from it. They left the dome to Esalen and went back to San Jose. While at the Hot Springs, they slept in cars and in sleeping bags; it made no difference about comfort. Said Kathy Sullivan, a sweet and pretty young girl who was one of the star improvisers of the group: "I'll never need to sleep again!"

This is the way these people feel at the pinnacle of their creative acts--marvelously alive, fully human, making waves.

• • •

Teenies. The youthful tribes have found new camping grounds and new forms of peace to smoke in their pipes. The old families have shriveled up and blown away. Now Junior doesn't rebel so much as take off. The Provos, The Diggers and the teenies of the Sunset Strip or Macdougal Street find families without parents, houses with only other kids sleeping 20 or 30 on a similar number of mattresses.

The Provos of Holland go about in flowered trousers, long hair or shaved heads, 19th Century army dress tunics, anything they find or like. Even white jeans and white T-shirts. They live communally. They paint bicycles white and leave them about, hoping people will go where they want to go and then leave the bicycle for the next voyager. The police find them provoking. They are provocateurs. They seek peace, justice, power, fun, truth, beauty, fresh air and the freedom to smoke pot. They want their elders to be responsible to history. Who'd have thought these friendly anarchists would leap to prominence in Amsterdam, of all places, among the staid Dutch, of all people?

The Diggers of San Francisco seem more likely. They have named themselves after a sect that opened business in 1649, in Merry England, urging the abolition of private property and the sharing of, well, just about everything. Afternoons, Diggers feed the hungry in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park. They beg, borrow and maybe even steal some of the food. They house the teeny runaways. They don't use too much "speed"--Benzedrine and other energizers. They are reasonably anonymous. They seek to do good without too much theory and to have some fun while doing it. The cops push them around a little, but also admit they give some of the kids a place to sleep.

Late last year, there was a massive summit confrontation between the hardline hippies (joy, drugs, dropping out) and the then-mysterious Diggers (joy, fewer drugs, taking control) on Haight Street, the Boulevard of Brotherly Love, in San Francisco. Rival Beatnik Bands Fight It Out! The Diggers versus the Acidheads! Two Hell's Angels were arrested by the fuzztrated fuzz--why? Drinking chocolate milk in a provoking fashion! Dangerous motorcycling. Harboring a wild look in the eye. But on the whole, the cops were watchful, confused and outwitted. There was a parade with candles, candies, children, flowers, fun. Peyote, the mongrel dog that had been mated with a coyote, was there, along with its pups. Buddha ambled amuck. Cops rode up, looking things over, and then rode away. Cheers.

On both sides of the street, men, women, children and in-betweens stood with incense and candles, and whistles in their mouths. A serious couple, one on each side of the street, began busily passing out leaflets. Trained in many demonstrations, the mob obediently took the sheets they were offered and gazed literately at the paper. The sheets were blank. Reams of blank proclamations, pure-white manifesto. More cheers.

A Negro bus driver got out, shook hands, grinned. Flags and flowers decorated his bus. The passengers frowned, giggled and prepared to try to tell the story at home. The Diggers passed out candy to the passengers, and flowers and kisses. Everyone unrioted. Teeth, smiles, cool. Buddha directed traffic and the bus moved on.

We all live in a yellow submarine,a yellow submarine,a yellow submarine....

The song swept down the street. It was December 17. It was a merry Christmas coming. Love, love, love.

Well, the East Village and even Chelsea tend to be a bit more up tight than San Francisco. But surely the weirdest is that illegal stretch of up-tightness called the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles.

There, the teeny boppers tried to graduate to teenyhood. The Sam Brownes killed it. What was gracious and sweet in San Francisco quickly became nervous and dead. A "White Watts" resulted in the destruction of a swift and neat reign by the kids. "Teen Power" is a slogan that has no future; what they called the "blue fascists" can easily bring up their big guns--curfews, hoses, clubs. And sighing, incompetent parents are obliged by the curfew laws to make bed checks.

Instead, the teenies will have to learn to seep into power. Orthopedic surgeons are reporting a mass influx of creaking adults who have tried to imitate the teen dances. Teen clothes cause rapture and rupture in the middle-aged chicklets and Wall Street hippies who try to hang loose in those mind-hugging clothes that look so groovy on a 16-year-old. New kicks, such as smoking dried bananas, promise to catch on among those old folks, twennies, thirdies and even fordies, who look to the cute Sharons and Kevins for guidance.

Deep thinkers for several generations now have poked and pried at the breakdown of the American family, the failure of paternal authority. The old conglomerations, stuck together in Mom's apple pie, have gone the way of some flesh: into myth and memory.

Slum gangs receive poverty funds and a certain amount of attention from sociologists, but have yet to receive their full due as models. And the new family, groupy, tribal agglomerations have gone back to a more primitive village culture. They seem to be merely camping out, but the need for meaningful structure is one of the most touching qualities of the teen rebellion. Fan clubs no longer satisfy their quest. That boy rapping on the mailbox at the corner may have Methedrine in his madness, but he could merely be trying to tell the post office something in Digger code. Mom didn't love me wisely. Dad didn't tell me what to do. Where are we all going?

Soon, it seems, the last remaining suits and ties will be bought up for museum exhibit. And the stars above will hang loose and free and echo the faulty genius of earth. They have seen other wars before the Children's Crusade. Some of those peculiar wars have changed history.

• • •

Music and art and clothes. And money. The new permutations of Liverpool rhythm-and-blues country-and-western Dylan madrigal psychedelic ecstatic rock need more than a mighty flow of adjectival modifiers to be understood by someone who has not picked up on it. Perhaps Miss Susan Cox, former production manager and editor of Tempo, a newsletter that rates records for top-40 stations, has found the right language: "Vital... unbelievable... it's here. Pop music is pop music."

"Like man it don't have to be acid man if it's good it'll sell." This is an unpunctuated record producer talking. He works the dials, the globes, the speakers, the tapes, the mixers, the echoes, the overlays, the underlays, the rerecordings, the speed-up and slow-down levers. And if the guitarist (the wailer. The flutist, the combo) is good, it'll sell, he says. Of course, they shouldn't perform publicly, since so much is done in the studios.

A few years ago, it could be said that the kids didn't invent the music they didn't listen to, but they did influence it and they did do something to it--live by it, love by it, if not listen to it. As the leader of the band said, "Now we're going to play an oldie but a goodie, a dusty diamond, friends. Some of you may remember gettin' pregnant to this song, away back in 1964...." Rock music came to life from a Negro tradition, blues, jazz and rock 'n' roll, after a sea change in Liverpool before it was shipped back by the Beatles, who have now been canonized through a habit of the times of producing Instant Tradition.

Other groups have taken the torch passed by the Beatles and Bobby Dylan while these torchbearing wave makers are still in their middle 20s and still actively creating, but perhaps being made to feel a little like fathers and uncles. Initially, the new groups are attracted by the slogans of Zen and Leary; they want to see truly and do little; but then the pleasures of money and esteem come in and they feel they can change the world by making the millions listen, and so enter the managers and agents and echo chambers and the soaped-up lyrics. Climb On, Cash In, Cop Out.

At the higher levels of money, the designer John Bates, English partner in the firm of Jean Varon, suggests that men learn to wear a gold disk at the shirt throat or even a circle of pearls for evening. "It may sound effeminate," he boldly declares, "but it needn't look it. There are some pink suits being worn in London now that look great. They really do. If you don't look effeminate to begin with, nothing you wear will change you. Wait till men's pastel furs take hold."

The questing in clothing, like the questing in music, is partly a search for definition and partly a lust to live in the here and instant now. "Life is a game. I want to be game-free." This is one of the philosophical statements that, in different forms, the wave makers will utter to explain themselves as they stand around digging one another's funny clothes, each other's funny sounds. They are seeking to discover the ultimate psychedelic--mankind--but in the meantime, they dig raga-rock from India, raga-soul from Motown in Detroit, Carnaby Street from Seventh Avenue, Salvation Army from that little boutique across the tracks that also sells old Reader's Digests and burned-out sofas.

The Fugs, shock troops in the Rise of the Uglies, are so ugly they have surely become pretty. From trouble with the fuzz they have risen to trouble with the charts. These children in the sand pile, working out their games with electronic amplification, began in the East Village and headed inexorably toward Broadway and, who knows, maybe Caesar's Palace in Vegas. "Kill, Kill, Kill for Peace" is tantrumantra; a song like My Baby Done Left Me and I Feel Like Homemade Shit has a perverse tender longing in it, beneath the nasal whine of electricity. The on-edge artist of the group, Tuli Kupferberg, poet, and Ed Sanders, a smiling Midwest American who edits Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts, have found their little game turned into a commercial product with vast implications--money and air time. (See The Underground Press, Playboy, August.)

The hippies will vote for the first candidate who promises pot in every chicken. They will lie in the park with a nude girl, reading The Oracle, because The Oracle gives the Word and every girl is nude under her clothes. Mouse and Wes Wilson, doing Nouveau Frisco posters, can thumb their wavy, psychedelic noses at the premises of poster art--be clear! punch hard!--in favor of fun and design and obscure play. People have leisure time now; they can figure out the words on the posters; and if they can't, who needs them?

The wave makers are ready to try anything that keeps them awake. The Beard, a play by the hip-and-beat poet Michael McClure, ends with cunnilingus committed by Billy the Kid (symbolic, stylized) on Jean Harlow (stylized, symbolic). The act, however, looks real in every way; and as the critic Grover Sales put it, "This play will go down on literary history." The police stalled awhile and ground their gears before arresting the actors and the writer. The American Civil Liberties Union entered the case, and now see how complicated it is: If they are really doing what they evidently are doing, they it is an obscene performance. But how can they really be doing it every night, in the identical way, with spoken lines? ("Star! Star! Star! Star! Star!" sobs Jean Harlow.) Then they must be imitating the action; that is, performing an act of art. But also the act they are imitating (or are they really doing it, plus lines?) is one that perhaps is inciting to some people. And it is illegal in many states to do it, even for married couples, though perhaps not to dramatize doing it for theatrical edification. And the police were confused and didn't move for a long time, but then they did (or imitated) their usual performance--they performed a bust. And now writers, critics and professors step forward to testify that the play is a moving, etc., symbolic, etc., testimony to the eternal, etc., dubieties. The poor police.

What is good and what is evil these days? Why should a poor cop have to think about such things, instead of helping Dick and Jane cross the street safely on the way to school? The fact is That The Beard is a black-comic fantasy with some touching moments in it. Since it deals directly with sadomasochistic fantasies, among others, it is as confusing as much of contemporary sexuality. It has found a partial means to control and master the confusion--laughter.

An English girl of the upper class, aged 16, recently wrote to her older sister in New York:

Men look so innocent and angelic in bed, don't they? Tell me, when did you first go to bed with anyone? How old were you? Mike and I really love each other. It's not just a mad infatuation--it's grown slowly. I knew him last holidays--not like Patrick, who was all glamor and titles, and also he was queer. He was really very fascinating, but my God he was so selfish. Mike's selfcentered, but not selfish, so we make a good couple. We both need the same thing.

This touching girlishness and innocence, and the total will to accept sex as a mutually helpful collaboration, must produce a faint quaver in the bellies of the older, romantic generation. Just as throwing flowers and kisses at the cops--one of the hippies' favorite techniques, except that they don't think of it as "technique"--confuses the veterans of class wars, racial wars, boss-and-worker wars.

In a collegetown apartment in Ann Arbor recently, a girl glanced up from making love with her friend to find a pair of eyes peeking under the window shade. The eyes peered through three levels of glass--her window, the neighbor's window, the wearer's specs. She calmly met the eyes and then they retreated with shame and she continued what she was doing, a mutually helpful collaboration with her visitor.

"Actually," she commented, "I don't really blame him. But I don't like to give him the advantage over me."

The new mass family is replacing the father-mother-children small group of yore. The Army and mass transport, orgies and key parties, the electronic McLuhanite plugging in are all feeding a public straining out of encapsulated sex. A reporter doing a survey for a national news magazine explains: "I used to be afraid I was queer because I like to go to bed with my wife and another man at the same time. But now I know it's just I never had a brother and I want one. My wife, she's great--understands. I was a lonely only child. And now tell me: What's the mood of the country?"

Henry Fairlie, a fairly warmhearted English conservative, has protested the imitation of the young by the less young. He believes that it is for the benefit of the young that their opportunity for rebellion should be untainted by easy capitulation by adults. He writes:

Anxious not to be thought "square," they steal the music, imitate the dance, adopt the dress, of the young. Anxious to be thought "understanding," they anxiously follow all that the young do and, with a giggle, applaud it. This adult invasion of the world of the young is, committed against themselves, a banal act--committed against the young, almost criminal. It is as if the adults today are searching for some kind of reassurance from the young, which is exactly where they have no right to look for it. Generations should keep their fences in good repair.

Fair enough. What is more gluey to the taste than an aging hippie? But then he feels obliged to ridicule the new inventions, those magic carpets ridden by the young; and here he mixes sweet good sense with sour:

The only new factors which seem to me to introduce any real novelty into their situation are the scientific aids, from records to contraceptives, from travel to LSD, which provide both the temptation and the opportunity to satisfy, far more fully than before, the desire for immediate experience which is the source of the young's impatience.

The Psychedelic Rangers, riding drugs, riding kicks, may merely be satisfying "the desire for immediate experience." Fighting the fuzz may merely be a dramatic illustration of the blocked aggressivity noted by such writers as Robert Ardrey and Konrad Lorenz. But it is more likely that their new institutional forms will consolidate at least some of the kicky gains.

As the (original) Diggers Song, three centuries old, puts it:

Gainst Lawyers and gainst Priests, stand up now.For tyrants they are both, even flat against their oath,To grant us they are loath, free meat and drink and cloth.

Stand up now, Diggers all!

To conquer them by love, come in now, come in now,To conquer them by love, come in now!

No power is like to love.

Glory here, Diggers all!

And thanks to these boons of modern technology--records and contraceptives, jet airplanes and superproduction--the old dream of the Diggers seems at least possible in the hearts of these anonymous souls who provide shelter to runaways, meat in the parks and a disconcerting habit of burning the money they are handed by condescending squares.

• • •

The Acid-Truth Mumble. "Sure I'm interested in those other things--politics, work, everything. But it's all a part of love. And love is all a part of acid."

Now, of course, there is that vexed matter of drugs, about which there are strong positions on all sides except perhaps the middle. This article provides no exception, but anyone should at least be suspicious of experimenting with his own chemistry. Blowing the mind is cool (art, fun, sex, work), but blowing out the mind with the newest discovery is hard smack on the trail to El Rancho Tuckered Out.

Lysergic acid diethylamide, the chief of the psychedelic drugs, has put its convoluted stamp on the style of the period. Its users are not dulled or woozy, as with alcohol and the other depressants; nor are they jittering, as with Dexedrine and Methedrine; rather, their minds are expanded. They see visions. They proclaim truths. They are the travelers of inner space.

One deep critic of the drug cult has said, "LSD is harmless unless talked about." Surely 1967 was not a vintage year, and 1968 promises to be worse. A lot of peculiar sugar got into circulation, and Dr. Timothy Leary got some contradictory ideas into the press. At times, he promises spectacular sexual achievements while on acid trips; at other times, he says that erotic pleasures are irrelevant; and then again, he reconciles these contradictory positions with further contradictions. He is too busy "organizing the energy" to be consistent. Leary says, "You have to go out of your mind to use your head," but going out of your mind is not necessarily a guarantee that you are using your head.

At Millbrook, New York, on an estate built in 1889, Timothy Leary dwells, when not on tour, in a mansion filled with mattresses and a shifting group of followers of the new religion, LSD, the League for Spiritual Discovery. Asked by a visitor if he is a guru, he answered, "I was the one to get the lucky script." At the regular ingestions of LSD, he appears in white dress to lead the faithful: "Now we are making this trip together. Now we are like spaceships in space. Now we are going to try to keep in formation. Now there might be voyagers who might want to leave this room, but spiritually we should want to stay together...."

The little cubes of sugar are passed about. The celebrants look through prismatic glass together at a stone, at flowers, at the sky. Their spirits are elsewhere. Timothy Leary wears red socks, because he doesn't like his socks to be confused with others in the common laundry.

Out on the lawn, some children are playing. One ten-year-old asks a riddle: "What goes up and up and never comes down?"

"What?" asks the visitor.

"A guy on LSD with two boosters."

Mike, a merchant from one of the branch offices of the League for Spiritual Discovery, engages a visitor in discussion. The visitor says, "OK, maybe it's good for Leary, Alpert, Allen Ginsberg, people like that. Maybe it's a kind of fuel for a machine already in motion--gives them energy and insight, maybe, helps them power themselves. But what about some high school kid who thinks she'll get to be like the poets, the gurus, the heroes of the movement?"

"Well, she's using it, isn't she?" Mike answers.

"I mean, she doesn't know who she is. She hasn't really got a self yet--she's a lonely adolescent. She gets a euphoric high and maybe a desperate bring-down or freak-out----"

"But she's using it, isn't she?" asks Mike.

"Yes, that's what I'm saying. She doesn't know herself at all. She just flips out into the drug----"

"But she's using it. Well, isn't she using it? Well, if she's using it, she's OK, isn't she? Isn't she using it? OK, then, she's OK."

Failure of communication. Dead stop. If she takes acid, then that defines OK.

Later, in an acid-pusher's pad--or shrine, as he would prefer to define it--I sat among the wall hangings, the Buddhas, the tapestries, the pillows, the teeny boppers, the smell of incense and pot and herb tea and the macrobiotic rice cooking on the stove. Blonde Honey, wearing nothing but a smock, her eyes shining with tenderness, looked into a visitor's face and said, "You're beautiful. There's so much sweetness and love in you. I want to look at you so much. I really dig you."

She is 19 years old. She worked as a hustler for a time in New York, but now she has found truth. She works only enough to buy her supply of acid. It's not very expensive, though the price continues to go up. She sleeps where a mattress is offered, and this week the mattress is offered here. She's nice to have around. She finds beauty everywhere, and especially in new men.

Another visitor to Mike's shrine is a former psychologist from Coral Gables, Florida. He wears a fuzzy-wuzzy sweater that makes him look like a cuddly favorite son. Jeans, tennis shoes. He explains what goes on during the acid voyage toward reality. "Inside it's truth and all true contemplation, feeling, meditation for peace of understanding type, man. Don't ask me to use words. What a drag. I been a word man all my life, consulting psychologist for industry, man. Miami, man. Jacksonville. Now I dig. That there Honey got the truth, man, right there where she keeps it. Ooh ah, there it went."

"Man," says the psychologist as Honey disappears to stir the rice, "suppose we could turn on ...Johnson? Think of that. Lawrence Welk. The fuzz. Oh, I get a fine paranoia going for me. Ooh ah, there it went again. We could turn on everybody."

People have been tripping out in various rooms of the apartment. There is a quiet buzz in the air. A raga record plays over and over again, but when Ravi Shankar is tuning up and when he is playing--that's the beauty of it--the Western ear judges only with great difficulty. He is at one with his instrument. The new audience is eager to catch up with his training, but without actually learning what Ravi Shankar knows.

The Italian-longshoreman husband of a lady painter is on a bad trip. He misses his wife. She is out dehexing a boarding-house. In addition to being a painter and a belly dancer, she is a witch.

The husband is sweating and flailing the air and panicky. "Come on, Professor," he wails, "you got to straighten my head around, someone got to straighten my head around, I mean turn it around, I don't care, Professor----"

He is grinning, but hysterical.

Mike, the organizer of this little cell, puts his arm around the man's shoulder and leads him onto the porch. He smiles back at the knot of concerned friends. I can take care of all this! his glance and grin seem to say. He listens to the flipped-out longshoreman. He pats his arm. The man is wailing for his wife. Mike calls to Honey to come and help listen, too.

Later the pusher, Mike, explains that he is a hero of our time. "Like, I'm a hero, man. I could go up for any amount of years now, them laws they got. Like, I'm putting my life on the line every time to make sure the people get blown out of their mind. Man, I'll turn on a cop, he wants it. I'm a true guru of our time."

"Guru means teacher, you know that?"

"That's what I said. I used to sell Meth, but it dries up the head, so I stopped that. I also sold pot. But, hell, grass is good--I'm really special. Now I found I have this mission, you know? To turn people on and make them OK. I'm the center here, you know, man? You know, man? You know, man?"

Meanwhile, Honey is giving truth to the former psychologist on a mattress while mildly curious visitors troop past them to look for grass, chat with friends, dip into the communal pot of rice. Honey's tenderness is real and it will be just as real for the next man in an hour or two. The psychologist feels that he is in touch with the universe, thanks to Honey, both of them meditated by acid. They know that acid is the magic carpet. It has transported them both to true love. They don't ask work, time, patience or sacrifice. Instant true love will suffice. It's not sex. They are opposed to mere sex. That's lust--square. It's love, love, love. Of course, they express it through sex. But that's only the means. It's not what you'd call square sex, like other people's. It's hip sex. It's special. It's theirs. And the psychologist says about his relationship with Honey: "In return, I give her the companionship of an exciting mind."

"What does she give you?"

He looked at me as if I were crazy, blind or all three--that includes malevolent. Yes, it was evident. "Which has broken out of the establishment game," he continued, diagraming his exciting mind for me.

In America, we now live in a drug culture. It is estimated that six dozen mood pills were consumed per person in 1966. Dracula is blurting chemicals into our blood streams, not sucking the blood out. Walter Mitty, wanting to be King Kong and finding himself married to Fay Wray for 40 years, escapes by taking a pill and dreaming he is James Thurber. It excites him. So he takes tranquilizers. It bores him. So he takes stimulants. He looks at the sky and doesn't see God, so he asks Mike what to take, and Mike is delighted to tell him.

A few years ago, the drugs of choice were Methedrine or Dexedrine compounds--speed, as they are called, or forwards. But now the glory trip of Dr. Leary has advertised the new psychedelics, everything from acid to morning-glory seeds. Even in Cleveland, Ohio, there was until recently a Headquarters ("Travel Accommodations for the Discriminating Smoker"), where books and The Fugs and girls with Berkeley-Radcliffe ironed hair could be found on friendly Euclid Avenue. Can you pass the acid test? asks the card illustrated with a recruiting-poster version of Uncle Sam. All over the country, the acid-culture people flash funny cards and prisms and pieces of glass at one another. They are recognized, they recognize their reality. They feel at home, even on Euclid Avenue.

In a psychedelic boardinghouse in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco--"Psychedelphia," columnist Herb Caen has called it--the residents have taken an old building and made it pretty with bits of glass, collages, clippings pinned to the wall, antiwar and prolove posters, celebrations of dances, poetry readings, Happenings, plastic hangings, little objects, rugs, tapestries, things fill the rooms. A boy with a Brooklyn accent giggles and says, "Like, man, wow, I'm on a trip now." The residents wear beads; the men and girls wear beaded headdresses, but without the feathers, because they are not quite Indians.

Joel, the boy from Brooklyn, explains about love. Acid helps people love. For example: "I love everyone, Johnson, Sheriff Clark in Alabama, Pat Boone----"

"Hitler?"

He turns thoughtful. "Well, I don't know much about him. But I love his soul. 'Course, I've been told some bad things about him. My parents are Jewish. So I don't love what he did, man."

"You're the first person I've met who loves Hitler."

Joel looks at me with pitying tenderness. "If you take off the ego," he explains, "we're all the same, I'm me and you and everybody. It's groovy."

"Do you ever get sore at anybody?"

"Well, my wife, sort of. We got divorced. But I love her. But not using acid should be grounds for divorce."

"She didn't use."

He shook his head with shame for his former wife. "She ran off to her mother. Scared, when all I wanted to do was help her. I knew this other cat, he gave up his college degree two weeks before he had it, he wanted to go to India to learn this flute he heard on a trip."

"What do you want out of life?"

He giggled and pulled the beads down tighter around his skull. "Travel around, see people, experience things, live in a cabin...."

In the meantime, though, he lives in a boardinghouse with a lot of other people who want to live in a cabin, experiencing things. He likes to answer questions about what he is doing. He has a missionary intention. He is eager to please; like Polonius, eager to swell a progress and be of use.

Acid culture is similar to other drug cults, except that the mood is generally sweeter. There is much insistence on gentleness, smiles, love, the yeah-hey-groovy manner. A group living in Psychedelphia takes to the far-out taped music, to raga and other Eastern rhythms, to stained glass and dark rich colors. When their optical nerves are jangled by acid, this is what they like to see. Beaded and glowing, they abandon the self to use by the great organic and the great machine worlds. Peace. A groove.

At a special gathering, Ken Kesey's Halloween Acid Test Graduation Ceremony, Kesey, who was fighting convictions on narcotics charges, announced a graduation from drugs. Among the crowd present were some Hell's Angels, students, teeny boppers and Kesey's personal club, the Merry Pranksters, devoted to funny clothes, tape and film and grooving together. There was a band, costumes, an air of expectant reveling. There is a hip way to be square--the general idea of the meeting.

Taking a microphone, Kesey segued into an abstracted rhapsody about different spider webs. On speed, the spiders make lots and lots of lopsided webs. On marijuana, beautiful wild webs. On acid: one simple web and that's all.

Well, he implied, there might be a way to do it without acid.

This called for reverence. The ecstatic revelers, the psychedelic-ecstatic plus the reporters, the photographers, the TV cameramen, the girl from Vogue and Tom Wolfe all knelt with Kesey. The gifted novelist of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest was in trouble and knew it. He was trying to find his way back to society and to find it publicly. He was tired of running to Mexico and Canada under Federal indictment. It was silly to be abused on mere marijuana charges. Now he was waiting for his inspiration to strike. The crowd kneeled, hushed. He asked for comments from the floor and a bit of quiet meditation. The Merry Pranksters were stilled. Ken's wife and children beamed upon him.

He waited and waited for something to say. It would come to him in a moment. He practiced calm as a few disgruntled and impatient ones peeled off and went home. Some of the Hell's Angels who had been turned on to acid were puzzled by their colleague. Why didn't Ken say it? What was he thinking? What was the word?

The drama of the drug culture is partly illusory, depending on the ambiance of conspiracy and illegality. Living out this romance is often like having a lovely and delicate girl's hearing aid, but without the girl. Like pop art, much of what is produced is mitigated trash--mitigated by its fair expression of a confused and frantic time. It submits to the mood-weariness; it says that the way out is chemical, as Huxley predicted in Brave New World, where he showed a sheepish population lining up for soma.

Ken Kesey held a candlelit press conference at a Twin Peaks pad to announce that he was returning from the lam in Mexico or someplace in order to straighten out the minds of everybody. "I feel an idea flying through my head like a bat," he declared.

He chuckled about his lecture before a creative-writing seminar at Stanford. Wanted by the police, he was everywhere, if not like Batman, at least like Robin. How did he avoid arrest? "I just stand small and ooze along," he explained. "The cops never see me."

Relaxed now, Kesey sat hunched in a chair in his sheepskin coat while he imparted a few more of the ideas that came like bats to his head. Soon everyone was huddled closely about him as he called the signals: "No more acid! Turn on with other means--dance, clothes--it's time for a new thing in this country."

His admirers admired the masked profile of courage that he turned toward the inept fuzz and the inepter FBI. He would ooze along, blowing his mind in his own way.

A few days later, Kesey was arrested. After two mistrials on 18-month-old possession-of-marijuana charges, he was finally convicted of "knowingly being in a place where marijuana was kept." On June 23, he began serving a six-month jail sentence.

A few months ago, Dr. Timothy Leary took his traveling show from New York to San Francisco and held a press conference.

Leary: "I am here on a religious reconnaissance mission." While the reporters scribbled, the tape spools spun. He peddled his religion with fluent charm and eloquence, mixing the language of hippie and the language of Harvard and a certain je sais quoi of his own. He wore a red lei. "We want to distribute LSD only to our co-religionists, otherwise you get in a hassle. We don't want to engage in the game of power politics."

"Game" is one of the operative words for Leary. He continued. "You must be in a state of grace to take the sacrament, LSD. Of course, we don't have any formal routine--you're the best judge of that on your own internal chessboard."

"Chessboard." that day, was also one of his important words.

"We have witness of the divine process," he said slowly, keeping pace with the reporters' pencils.

His friend and colleague. Dr. Richard Alpert, warned the journalists: "If you write anything to do with drug, hippie, ex-professor, addiction, cult, you're wrong. It's all a metaphor, spiritual."

Leary: "We have celebrated the reincarnation of Jesus Christ in New York City. Now the people who go to the Fillmore to dance are doing it a different way. Everyone should start his own religion. We should examine our conscience. In ten years, I predict we'll have a psychedelic President."

"Who's gonna be the psychedelic President in ten years?" someone asked the publicity girl.

"Sh," she said.

Leary was explaining about bad trips. "Are there bad trips?" he asked. "Well, you're asking me to go onto the checkerboard of the minds of people I don't know. The reason people don't take LSD is they're afraid to--afraid of the divine process, they can't face it."

"Does that satisfy you?" Leary asked. "Good! Ask me another."

Someone asked about kids taking LSD.

"Well, a sixteen-year-old chick taking acid on a motorcycle with her lover, say. OK, she might be in a state of grace. A psychiatrist doing research for a paper, on an ego trip of his own, is more frivolous. Does that satisfy you? Good."

"Do you agree with the existentialists that a person is what he does, his actions?" I asked Carlo, a former Madison Avenue art director who was with Leary.

"Yeah! I got a Hash of that several times when I was on an acid trip! I believe it. No, it was a combination Methedrine high and acid trip. Yeah, I remember. You're right. You're absolutely right. If you do the right thing--take acid, see God--you're in the right bag. It's a glory trip. You're dropped out. You're nobody, you're everybody. Is that what you meant, man?"

Running through a cellular examination of themselves, the new druggies are content, peaceful, easy, unless they are tormented and violent. They are checking out what they feel. From the outside, in New York. Boulder, San Francisco, Chicago, London, on so many campuses, in so many towns, they have dropped out of the race. They look as if the population explosion has exploded them. They have taken a rain check on money, status, power, wars, the "games," as Leary and Alpert call the traditional pursuits: the power game, the establishment game, the academic game, the suburb game. They call their boardinghouses "communes." They write messages to one another on the walls and doors. They share elaborate in-jokes, in-art--jargon, designs, ways of passing the time. The heroin addicts of an earlier period had a heart-rending explanation of the rush and anxiety and achievement and peace of the occupation of being an addict: "It's something to do man." The answer to boredom and anxiety: something to do, find the connection, get the fix, something to do. The acidheads keep busy in ways that seem stimulated, disorganized and peaceful, at different times. And the "bad trip," the frights, the horrors, the freak-out is like the vengeance of the outraged cells. When does it happen? When has too much LSD gone through the body? When the soul is not prepared for the experience? On the third, the seventh, the twenty-sixth trip? When the guide is not the right one? When the body has taken all it can take? No one can tell for sure. Many end in hospitals, and their friends wonder why, since always before it had been "beautiful, just beautiful, loving, tender, beautiful." Electricity, aspirin, many medicines can be taken in small amounts: larger amounts act as poisons. The limits for lysergic acid are not known. They seem to vary in individuals. The long-term effects are also not determined.

One psychiatrist, initially enthusiastic about the possibilities of LSD, has offered a metaphor to explain its power. It loosens the glue that keeps a personality together. It's like soaking a glued toy in hot water. Things get jangled: there are new conjunctions. Then the glue hardens. But not as hard as before. Then a new dose, new loosening, a new hardening. But not as hard as before. And one day, depending on the quality of the glue, it doesn't harden enough and the toy goes jangling into bits. "It's too dangerous," he says. Institutions are filling up with people whose glue doesn't seem to harden enough to let them survive in the world.

"Well," said a delegate to the LSD conference in San Francisco last winter, "everything has risks. You cross the street, that's a risk. You get up in the morning. You take a pill." He shrugged. "It makes you loving."

This vague evocation of the highest virtues--love, creativity--can be called the Acid-Truth Mumble. The lips move. The voices come out. The voices repeat. It is acid speaking.

• • •

Conclusion: The art of Positive Naysaying. In all this wave-making confusion of innovation, a perennial vision of history is likely to reappear--the vision of continuity and permanence. The wave makers want to be what they are, what they really are. The kids are blowing their whistles and the cops are speaking in the careful, precise language of panic. Up tight, freaking out or just mind-blown, those who have seized upon leisure as their booty are creating demons, Victorian lamps and perhaps a new way of life. "Some of them," as that storekeeper in the East Village said, "are artists in their own way. They don't shoplift me so much anymore. They got a lot of love in 'em."

The young are leading the way to new forms of consuming and nonconsuming, setting the stage for the future with their smoky philosophies of Love and Express and Make Do with What You Have. Run far from America, cry these noble savages, and there you will find--America, America! They substitute for the beatnik's abstention a new complicity in the working out of things: You can't go into exile again. They look pretty good both in clothes and naked. When lost in storms, they force pills down their throats. They sneak glances at themselves in the mirror, but then they walk away. Like the Anabaptists and the Amish, the wave makers hate to bear arms, they believe in communal living, they have subtle rites of passage into adult life. They are cultural dropouts who see new cultures dropping in. They have extrasensory ignorances. They support themselves any way they can and sometimes get rich out of emulation of the rest of the world, which is seeking a better way, too.

The life you lead, they say, may be your own. They throw stones and live in glass houses because they like shimmering floors. They are careful to step on the splinters. They bear their wounds noisily.

In a manifest filled with questions, The Diggers asked: When will Timothy Leary stand on a street corner waiting for no one?

Frodo Lives! come to Middle Earth! proclaim the buttons of the new Hobbit cult based on J. R. R. Tolkien's trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. The Hobbits go along, they try to avoid danger, they don't like it, they don't want to get involved. But when the thing comes, they simply don't go under. This is the book of the wave-making age. Marshall McLuhan, Timothy Leary and Bobby Dylan are the foam of the wave. Tolkien's Hobbits swim in the tides beneath.

At Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, a representative of the Esalen Institute at Big Sur declared: "The life of every man--the heart of it--is pure and holy joy." This is a religious statement; but while this vision takes the imagination of some, others think back on the beatniks, the holy barbarians of ten years ago, or back into history--so many cults and credos and revolutions that are now merely footnotes to cultural history. Another vision takes the skeptic:

Two A.M. at the corner of Haight and Ashbury in San Francisco, or Bleecker and Macdougal in New York, or on Kings Road in London, or near Le Drugstore at St.-Germain-des-Prés in Paris. An ancient hipster of 40 is picking up a vinyl-clad teeny bopper with raga record under her arm. "Hey, man," he says, "you want to fall up to my pad and blow some music 'n' stuff?"

"Cool," says the fading teeny bopper with the copy of John Lennon, the clipping about Bobby Dylan's accident, the Ban the Bomb sticker on her miniskirt.

As they leave, two strangers appear. They are wearing wire glasses and antique clothes. One, the girl, has a skirt hanging all the way below her knees. She is carrying the last remaining Tiffany lamp. The other, a boy, is wearing a zooty suit with wide lapels and is driving a green tricycle. "Good Lord," he says, staring after both the 40-year-old hipster and the 19-year-old fading teeny bopper, "look at those ricky-tick, worn-out articles. Come on, miss, let's go get a milk shake and a hamburger at the drive-in."

For, indeed, there is a certain permanence in rebellion, in the generational conflict. And all through history, back to the conflicts of Alcibiades the Young Hippie and Socrates the Square Professor--the Euthyphro is a dialog in which Plato ravishes the problem of what sons owe to fathers--there has been this struggle for pre-eminence. The sage habits of the elderly have given way to the wild impatience of the young, which has given way to sageness.

But the wave makers have found their way back, through all their many experiments, violations, outrages, to an old and essential truth about not just innovation and fashion but about that essential ingredient of humanity--creation. It takes a great deal of will to do creative work, and some of the will must be used to relax the will--to let in the wildness. The wave makers are relaxing the puritan will and doing it with passion and determination. They are grokking and grooving, and with a moral passion to grok and groove. They are not Huck Finns merely floating on the river. When they float, they are trying to define the nature of rivers, the nature of man.

And, yes, they are also floating, too, and they ask the rest of the world: Come let us float and define together. Let us make waves.