"WALDEN IS ALIVE AGAIN"
Bromwich, David
Looking through a good deal of the literature about communes, one is persuaded that something important must be afoot, and that the writers have not discovered in what the importance...
...in what should have been a relaxed living room bookshelf I saw only complete editions of Marx, Lenin, and Mao, and, battered and alone, an old hard-cover copy of Barbary Shore...
...Toward actual children the Rainbow Farm parents took a curious attitude...
...Houriet must have heard many—and less of the endless chronicle of day-by-day life on the communes...
...Yet it must be an axiom of everyday life that wherever too many people of a like mind get together a certain mindlessness is likely to flourish...
...An interesting commune near Venice grew from the resources, and resourcefulness, of 15 lawyers and legal assistants who needed a decent way of caring for children in families where both adults worked...
...Only a joke...
...One should add: 334 maybe a little less than sincere...
...Early on, this author confesses to "a craving to be a free-floating observer of what I guessed might be a symbolic turning point for America," and it was this same craving, no doubt, that generated the optimistic tone which so often runs away from the evidence...
...Beggars, red-eyed still born...
...EXCEPT FOR THE INVADING FORCE of gas stations, Venice, California, is a loose assortment of pleasant, slightly run-down shanties spread across an asphalt plain that recedes into the ocean...
...I have to thank Marjorie Hoyt and Barbara Polland for helping me to track down some of the communes they knew...
...Houriet rightly declares that group marriages will be hopeless until we find "a community with some objective higher than human love...
...Yet the feeling of community so created rings perfectly true...
...For even at Astro boredom was occasionally a felt presence, and dope was considered the surest remedy for it...
...I do not see how we can miss the religious element in his point of view...
...In the education of children, most of us would agree, we could do with a little less of the spirit of competition...
...Religious belief without rules, flies without flypaper: would this have puzzled the average American farmer...
...Children raised according to the beliefs of the liberal middle class might legitimately claim to have been, in certain respects, molded selfishly after the image of their parents, but there could be no doubt that "The world was all before them, where to choose/Their place of rest": they might become merchants, or professors, or surprise everyone by joining a commune or shipping off to Madagascar...
...The tension of conflict has been lost, and with it a part of the faculty of judgment...
...Everything in the commune was appallingly dirty: one aspect of the place, among others, which made it unhealthly for small children...
...You're on the wrong trip, brother," Lee shouted to Skeeter, when once he had got up and removed himself to a safe shouting distance...
...q 336 DAVID BROMWICH...
...Gail, a huge, friendly girl, advancing toward the house at Astro from a trail winding out of the forest, bearing in one hand a shovel, propped like a shotgun against her shoulder, and in the other a roll of yellow toilet paper...
...But his twelve-sided house was nearing completion, and he faced an important decision: what to do with it assuming the world did not end...
...Doors open...
...Equipment for life" can scarcely be supplied by teachers who teach the fategoverning influence of a Scorpio Rising...
...You're using violence, that's what it is, that's all it is: violence...
...Though the hardest workers in the commune, many of them, had gone through a "heavy" period with drugs some time back, their indulgence lately was confined to marijuana and hashish, and even with these they relied mostly on the supply brought by crashers...
...Rick no longer makes any difference, life is too easy, and our own Anything is too horrible even to contemplate...
...A number of schemes had been entertained, such as making Astro a public "alternative community" —but that would be too nebulous, or using it to house underprivileged people from New York—but that would only attract hippies...
...And "You don't know how to live, man, you don't know how to fucking live," or "You're a fucking fortyyearold maniac, you don't belong here...
...The place always looked like a radical hang-out, though it became one only recently...
...Because they saw his seriousness they behaved decently toward him: what could be simpler...
...The successes of the lawyers' commune are certainly plain enough so that allowances can be made for their falling short of their final goal...
...But the abolition of the nuclear family looks like an unfair criterion of success...
...Let us make a small digression and return to the point just barely outlined about the conflicting desires of the individual and the group...
...Diane was sitting in the dirt eating a late afternoon lunch, with the cat beside her eating from her daughter's bowl, when she spoke of the hopelessness of getting houses built for the Oregon winter...
...Let me quote two of my favorite examples...
...The purity is very well expressed in a passage from Tagore, part of which one communard recited to Mr...
...Yet to provide decent care they would have needed a mental stability to which none of them could lay claim, as well as a sense of responsibility entirely foreign to their habits...
...Let me set against it the following little poem, which I copied from the outside wall of a shack in Venice...
...It is not yet an effective or thoroughgoing rebellion—communards wait every month for welfare checks from The Beast—but it is extremely personal...
...When I arrived two members of the commune had unaccountably come down with worms...
...Resentment on the part of these steady workers is for the most part suppressed, but when it finds a voice there is a tone, or rather an undertone, of alienation...
...You've got to stop reacting...
...There was in any case this element of choice...
...Yet drugs were important...
...Whether this was the real purpose of the thing I never could discover...
...There were also some articles about the Venice Canal, a project voted through by the Los Angeles City Council which will deprive Venice of much of its low-cost housing...
...It was the religion of Mish-Mash, yet it could be curiously affecting...
...They want to set up a whole new system, instead of the one we have now, where everybody gets ripped off all the time...
...That isn't where it's at, brother...
...The communards have an odd way of kidding themselves, imagining what would happen "if our kids rebelled against us, and went straight...
...Adjustments must be made, though not compromises...
...The communal movement is after all a complex phenomenon, and one ought to respect this complexity by avoiding wild—i.e., tedious and predictable—generalizations...
...The thing has stayed vividly in my mind, and may be worth recalling in some detail: the main actors (for it was nothing if not very wild theater) were Garrick, Lee, and Skeeter...
...You get the point, and of course there is no sure answer...
...I came here for freedom and now you want to kill me...
...Surely we ought to ask why this should be so—why, more 328 over, the sensation of being at peace within a completely isolated community should seem so attractive at this particular time to the sensibilities of this particular Younger Generation...
...Houriet, though I quote it in full...
...The common answer given to a child requiring attention was: "Fuck off, don't hang around me all day, stay on your own trip...
...So attention was pretty well forgotten, and in its place came freedom...
...O Lord of my broken heart, of leave-taking and loss, of the gray silence of the dayfall, My greetings of the ruined house to thee...
...Speaking of the government, she wondered: "What do they know about being poor, what do they know about hunger, and people on the streets...
...He bought the land and soon was into the task of building...
...The members of Rainbow Farm, on the face of it, are simply bored...
...And for the gratification of that impulse rural communes have been the readiest choppinggrounds...
...weekend duty—staying at home, that is— strikes every seventh week...
...The communal library occupied about one quarter of the Eastern part of the kitchen, and included a few volumes on Buddhism, Kenneth Keniston's The Uncommitted, Pound's Cantos complete, equal amounts of Rod McKuen and Tolstoy, an DAVID BROMWICH extremely well-thumbed novel by Ken Kesey, and some organic food cookbooks...
...Yet one cannot hope to be sympathetic (or even critical) toward the movement without first separating out a few of its characteristic articles of faith...
...Joanne mentioned that her parents didn't approve of her living in a commune, "You know, they think it's some freak pad where all we do is make love all day, or something...
...You're a crazy, violent bastard and you'd like to murder me...
...Ask a few communards about "resistance," and they will tell you it means disturbing somebody else's trip...
...I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable advice from my seniors...
...After graduating from MIT he was employed for two years "designing weapons of mass destruction": the most convenient way of evading the draft, if you happen to graduate from MIT...
...You— don't touch—my—brother...
...The whole episode served finally to recall the words of the Czech philosopher Erazim Kohak, when he marveled at the capacity of certain young people to "lock loins where most men can at best touch fingertips...
...She answered vaguely but, the more so as time went on, passionately...
...Isha, a tiny four-year-old at Rainbow Farm, crying when her mother had cleansed her hurt knee but would not comfort her...
...From near the outdoor stove came the voice of an anemic young man with a flowing beard, out of a meek but sincere effort to calm things down...
...and "their healthy, wild children," Mr...
...Meals get cooked once a week by each family...
...You know, I wanted to get out of that game...
...I have never yet met a man who was quite awake...
...but I was never led to think of communes as portending the end of anything...
...One girl, who had vacated her station in the outdoor shower, now stood contemplating the scene and betraying no particular reaction, meanwhile rubbing baby oil into her naked body...
...The drugs are not after all essential, they are only the short-term means of calming a disease of the spirit...
...Back of the apartments, a kitchen-and-dining room, a playroom, an arts-and-crafts room (both of these for the nursery school, which is self-contained), a library, and, off to the side, a little purgatory for television...
...All our children...
...it is showing signs of exhaustion...
...My guide, I am a wayfarer of an endless road, My greetings of a wanderer to thee...
...One wondered precisely because the (minor) violence seemed inevitable at Rainbow Farm, as it would not have seemed anywhere else...
...Lee went into the forest hissing and moaning to himself...
...This surprising news must have made me flinch a little, because she let out a roguish giggle...
...while I stayed on, a benevolent Saint Bernard named Mojave received treatment for a skin infection...
...People who say, Let us build up a comfortable life for ourselves —together instead of apart, have at least a chance...
...Communards never stop talking about the evils of the nuclear family, but how much of this do they believe, how much do they drum into themselves...
...When I spoke with her, she was operating a switchboard that does duty for several food collectives, and between calls she told me to sit down and then nodded, yes, I could have some of her Pepsi Cola, "There's acid in it," she warned me 'a few seconds later...
...You're just reacting to each other, brothers, you're just reacting...
...Kill me...
...Otherwise the books were shelved...
...My prediction is that Joanne will go on to a rural commune...
...No, you're the violent one," Garrick put in, but that didn't help any...
...These living arrangements divide into a plethora of "food conspiracies," a shady term describing the quite ordinary procedure by which consumers purchase large orders of food wholesale...
...That their suppers can be extended over a period of four hours helps to blunt this sensation, but does not help enough...
...But in the industrial nations this culture has now lost much of its selfconfidence...
...Robert Houriet belongs to the "greening" school of social reform, but he knows that the grass will only grow through cracks in the cement...
...those words register -a world of possibility in which Bogart/Rick could indeed make a difference...
...The large commune in Norton, Vermont, calls itself by a special name that escapes me just now: "Free Land," "Alternative Communities, Inc.," pretty soon they all blend together...
...Garrick seemed to have become suddenly rather detached...
...Tibetan mysticism, Zen, Yoga, astrology, Yin-andYang theoretics, Jungian psychology and, who knows, Madame Blavatsky: all these were appreciated at the commune, but no one set of rules was strictly respected...
...In defiance of all the cliches of popular psychology, the pressure of urban life seems to have made them healthier—palpably so— than their more spectacular counterparts outside the city...
...And so quite suddenly, with the exception of astronauts and athletes, there are no more heroes...
...In some time past he had been a wrestler, and just recently at Rainbow Farm he had built a temporary corral for his horse, almost singlehandedly, in a matter of six hours...
...We have no Spains in which to fight the good fight...
...Only the most elusive of "positive values" inspire the building of rural communes...
...Comrade of the road, Here are my traveler's greetings to thee...
...You can try and tell them, and get things done, if you want to," she told another girl, whose own daughter was crying for blackberries and being told to finish her onions and beans...
...Thoreau: "To be awake is to be alive...
...This feeling, I am afraid, is one I have not been able to share, partly because it comes out of an "oceanic sense of oneness" which seems to me unreliable, but also because my sharpest memories of communes occur as such distinct moments...
...Lee drove off his accuser alternately with kisses ("The name of the game is love, brother") and with accusations of his own (Garrick was irresponsible, presumably gave too much time to the yo-yo, etc...
...Mostly, I would say, these exist in modest efforts like the Venice lawyers' commune, or in "intentional communes," where families live separately on commonly owned land...
...While I made my little inspection a lovely oriental girl was reading Love Story topless, complaining that it bored her to death...
...You worked—hoeing in the garden, feeding the chickens, building houses, shopping in town—whenever you happened not to be feeling lazy...
...There was, however, one point of similarity between Astro and a place like Rainbow Farm...
...Their breakdown is either a complete going to pieces or a nearly complete withdrawal...
...Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must believe...
...As an engineering student at MIT, Roger had been interested in radical politics...
...It found its highest expression in the concept—no less, in the actuality —of the hero...
...About one thing there can be no exaggeration: communes represent the most visible form of rebellion against modern industrial society...
...Lee was a middle-aged drop-out blessed with a rather unwholesome-looking gray beard, who had contributed money to the commune, one heard, to the tune of several thousand dollars...
...My own visits to communes, I had better say, have not been very extensive...
...In general, Rainbow Farm showed the rustic habits of city dwellers trying to "pass" in the country...
...Roger, one of the three owners of the land, and the only one who spent all his time there, told me that he had originally moved to Vermont because he thought the world was going to end...
...What do you do for a good time at Rainbow Farm—you certainly have a good deal of leisure...
...After the last prayer, a Jewish boy from the Bronx solemnly intoned "Wow," and added a minute later, "Chanting sure does make you hungry...
...The communards tended to have gloomy memories of their own childhood, as a time when too much dependence went with not enough attention, and they wanted their children to be at once freer and better cared for...
...Houriet believes, in the end, that there is something beyond human love...
...True, this was a rather "WALDEN IS ALIVE AGAIN" unpretending seriousness, but after seeing the other kind I am sure it is the only—but why worry about "success"?—it is the only kind that will get along with the neighbors...
...Noticing the absence of televisions, radios, phonographs, and newspapers, I made for the last obvious source of recreation, books...
...I'm free...
...Where—one is driven to that horrid old phrase—where is their "equipment for life...
...the government rips people off at their jobs, and everything, And they want to do away with that system...
...Looking through a good deal of the literature about communes, one is persuaded that something important must be afoot, and that the writers have not discovered in what the importance consists...
...This is the syndrome of a good many rural communes where, so far from complaining about the squalor that comes from an oblivion to planing, everyone is at peace, resigned, "enlightened...
...This isn't violence, it's freedom, it's love...
...Where would the kids learn about the other side to which they might defect...
...Houriet says, "they are our children...
...Did you bring some dope...
...Now I know why and I dig it...
...Chief among these—if one were to make out a list that simplified a great deal and distorted only a little—would be belief in the proper ascendency of the community over the individual...
...It does involve a degree of material sacrifice...
...Yeah," a boy mused over in the corner, "it's hard to fight ignorance...
...Instead there is a nostalgia, partly desperate longing, for the good old days...
...In each row there is a children's room where half of the kids sleep, watched by their adult neighbors on either side...
...By this time most of the commune was watching, and doing nothing to stop the fight...
...Rather a schematic group of non-responses: "really," "right on," "for sure," "that's cool," "far out," "I can dig it," "that's your trip...
...The members of this commune, I gathered, agree in wanting to get rid of the nuclear family, even if their strength of conviction varies...
...This bit of advice was not followed, for when Skeeter had reached shouting distance Lee started in once again, jumping up and down as he screamed...
...tourists generally get asked as they drive into Rainbow Farm, and a negative answer is greeted by the even so of cheerful accommodation: "Well, that's OK...
...And yet serious college students— (and I do smile when I say that)—felt that a certain guilt must attach to the repeated use of the stuff...
...If a child is given too much freedom, an eminent clinical psychologist once remarked, he feels that with every step he's walking off the edge of the world...
...Mish-Mash does not, as far as I am concerned, come under the heading of religious discipline...
...Although the people of Rainbow Farm were irrational—I use this as a descriptive not a pejorative term—their irrational beliefs tended toward the eclectic...
...I t is a common misconception these days, that you can commune with the physical or metaphysical essence of someone whom you would not feel right calling by his first name: consider, for example, the phenomenon of encounter groups...
...Cost: $10...
...More than any general impression it was a particular incident that brought me to understand the derangement of the emotions which, I think, must be characteristic of "let it be" communes like Rainbow Farm...
...For the moment the Rainbow Farm kids looked healthy enough, but then they had all been on the Farm for less than 332 a year...
...With a terrible ferocity, letting the words ring out one by one, he said to Lee, "Lay—your—goddanlned— hands—off—my—brother...
...Children with "low affect," children unable to react in a normal way to emotional stimulus—whose life of feeling is without any intensity—such children often come from the sort of family remarkable for an extreme permissiveness...
...And now they were doing their best to communicate the disease to their children, and somehow one could find no way of blaming them—they were still children themselves...
...Yet— I am hopeful...
...You're insane...
...But this is pure fantasy...
...This brought us to politics, and I asked Joanne what she thought of the Peace and Freedom party...
...but nobody at Rainbow Farm would have understood what this meant...
...To this position the communal movement actively subscribes, and —except in the case of religious communes bound by a peculiar discipline—it is very likely to pursue it to the furthest extremes...
...But how do you free a five-year-old...
...So Mr...
...Only a small number of people are involved in making any decision at Rainbow Farm, because only a small number care enough to help...
...Flies were always present in huge quantities in the communal kitchen, but there was no flypaper...
...Others, more successful, resolve on some kind of group project in which profits stay ahead of alienation, such as a bookshop or a health food store...
...What one sees, looking past the friendliness, is often less reassuring...
...I would not want to count how often I heard children, nursery-school age, being turned away with those simple and ultimate words: "Fuck off...
...If there was anything strange about the commune, it was the slight pall of austerity one could feel from time to time...
...Unfortunately, the tone of his book is such as to suggest that we will find a community like that, if only we look hard enough and long enough...
...The sense of this could only be: we have to make it on our own, drugs won't relieve us if we fail...
...When I left Astro, Roger was already working as an electrician for some of his neighbors...
...Skeeter was already bound to react, and so he walked over to where Lee was standing and told him, in his best controlled tough-guy voice, "You want me to hit you, that's the only reason you keep blubbering, "WALDEN IS ALIVE AGAIN" and if you don't shut up that's exactly what I'm gonna do...
...permissiveness, we know, can be construed as a form of rejection, and this is the result...
...the bill can be met without the owner being appeased...
...With few exceptions, the people at Rainbow Farm were securely and utterly withdrawn: they had walked off the edge of the world...
...They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything to the purpose...
...The difficulty of reconciling his political views with his profession at last became, for Roger, insurmountable...
...His statement that the Jesus Freaks and Krishnaites should be thought of as injecting "new wine into old wineskins" is, indeed, the very reverse of felicitous...
...Still...
...Les, nineteen-year-old black celibate and a believer in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, later told Lee, "All I've got to say is, you guys are playing with something you shouldn't be playing with...
...and it is not communes in general that interest me, but only this or that specific commune, and whether or not it makes life more bearable—humanly speaking...
...And the cool summing-up delivered by a disabused Communard, speaking of her past experiences at a place called Drop City: "'We tried a few orgies but couldn't make it as a group marriage.'" Indeed...
...One might call this the romantic—the wanderer's— view of communal life...
...The turning away itself, merely the gesture, is what matters...
...Also, and this follows smoothly if not necessarily from the other points, most communards believe in the abolition of what is called the nuclear family...
...Literal bad weather had begun when I arrived—the sun was no longer pure in the afternoons— and I found never more than 40 souls present at supper time, which is when the population of any commune reaches its peak...
...On the notion, perhaps, that it would be especially interesting to observe their effect on these naturally creative beings...
...The commune provides an excellent focus for the radical activities of its members: in legal collectives, in the National Lawyers Guild, in left-wing political sects (the old Peace and Freedom party is still a fixture in Venice...
...The argument grew more and more intense...
...The communal experiment thus gains a significance, purely symbolic, which is untainted by any perception of things as they really are...
...The food at any rate seemed good—though an imaginative cowboy could have done better—and I do not hold it responsible for the intestinal virus I mysteriously contracted the day I left Rainbow Farm...
...but she does not want life to be subtle, or difficult, so that it might require of political judgment more than the ascription of substantial blame to an insubstantial "they...
...I'm gonna make you happy and give it to you right in the teeth...
...Which was fine...
...and the responsibilities of child care are shared out similarly, with the help of a hired staff...
...perament stays the same...
...At all events, I was convinced after leaving Rainbow Farm that the only people ready for the delicate project of building up a commune were those who did not perform this kind of inversion—who did not share the illusion that you can connect with a man's soul before you know his mind...
...Houriet reports several like changes of mind, his own evangelistic tern * Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 412 pp., illustrated, $7.95...
...Some of the depressing material is on the face of its extremely funny, although Mr...
...It is not easy to get down the sense of living among people who seem in every way normal, yet lack every human energy: like drifting, endlessly drifting, in a sea of amniotic fluid that never moves outward to the pulse of life...
...and this had happened DAVID BROMWICH before, Garrick said, because Lee showed a bad temper generally, and was deep down inside a violent person...
...Forty people simultaneously droning "Om," for example, sound like parts of a strange and enormous pipe organ, and one gets a euphoric sense of drowning in the noise...
...and to me, at all events, the end seems less than self-evidently desirable...
...Such formulations offer a kind of pleasant high temperature thrill but, like all apocalyptic comforts, they have a rather dubious analytic value...
...Ya hear...
...An FM station from Montreal played constantly as the well was dug, and wood was sawed and nailed...
...She does not want to simplify, she wants to level...
...Lee was getting near to hysterics while Skeeter looked on coldly...
...All that chanting—but did they even know each other...
...Put me out of my misery...
...Just one more word and I'll do it...
...Afterwards, nobody in the commune could say just why the argument had gone on the way it did...
...This disease seemed quite immediate to me, but I find it hard to describe with much accuracy: the nearest I can do is to speak of what is known in child psychology as "loss of affect...
...I just wanna be free and all you know is violence...
...Myself, I would not seek further than human love...
...You're acting just like the outside world...
...In this they are not likely to succeed: they would need stricter rules and an inflexible resolve...
...These all mean the same thing, they do not involve separate kinds of implication, and they all mean "let us have silence...
...occasional qualms about "copping out"—leaving the big city, land of big problems—were stilled by a general sense of satisfaction, of "I did the right thing...
...Stillbirth or rebirth...
...The popular use of marijuana would seem to be a very plain symptom of this shifting of en, ergies...
...The hundreds of kids going up and coming down ( I believe no pun was intended) were of the least pleas ant sort of parasite: "crashers" who traveled from one comune to another, stayed as long as the going was good, and left with the onset of climatic or financial bad weather...
...There, too, one discovers a rich population of urban communes: apartment buildings let out wholly or in part to professionals, students, aimless (but employed) young people who live, pay, and sometimes get along together...
...Young audiences always feel a peculiar thrill when they hear Ingrid Bergman crying out to Humphrey Bogart, in Casablanca, that this is a terrible world where "anything can happen...
...Garrick was the New York boy already mentioned, in fact a friend of the Living Theater, who had spent part of his adolescence under the gentle guidance of Julian and Judith and the gang...
...Our hands reaching out...
...Don't Bogart that joint, mah friend, pass it over to me": now we can all be heroes together...
...Modesty is perhaps the essential thing...
...The bare fact of this rebellion is at any rate hard to miss, and it is conveyed pretty accurately wherever one reads about the subject...
...When we came to New Buffalo, we questioned why society had laws and customs...
...She looks like a nice person, full of the best good feelings...
...So it went, back and forth, for a long time...
...Their very newest project for raising money was thought up by the Hog Farm group, famous for causing riots wherever they go, and involves bringing over a lot of New York types—the kind that dismember Vermont barns for their Manhattan kitchens—to participate in an "ecology workshop...
...The ritual consisted of the chanting of several prayers and correctly Eastern-sounding mantras, consummating in a communal Om-saying, and coming round to a severe denouement with an "Our Father, Who art in Heaven...
...Skeeter returned for a second time, knocked Lee down into the dirt once more, and walked off slowly...
...Just one more word...
...Lee, in his army jacket, arguing with a Rainbow Farm tourist, being told that if you abolish law and order somebody will invent it again...
...They've got plenty in their fat bellies," she spat out the last word as though kicking a city councilman in the groin, perhaps a bit startled by her own sharpness...
...The irresistible, we learn, is often merely that which has not been resisted...
...In retrospect this treatment of children seems to me the worst thing about Rainbow Farm—the only thing quite tangibly evil, because it was more than self-destructive...
...There were very few other children to play with, and the forests were thick and not well suited to a five-year-old all alone...
...Electronics were an integral part of life for the Astro workers, far more so, since these were engineering majors, than they can ever be for the ordinary dweller in a suburb...
...Lee kept on trying to kiss the sorrows away, but on his fifth or sixth effort, Skeeter, who evidently took the embrace as an attack on Garrick, and had evidently had something building inside him for a long time, leaped in to defend the younger one...
...Anyhow, maybe dope inspired creativity...
...Competitiveness therefore simply does not exist: a good thing or a bad, depending on what it means in detail...
...Whenever they did come near each other they would trade insults, until finally they met face-to-face and remained that way...
...How could I have looked him in the face...
...Underground rag sheets were noticeable around the room, and of these one in partic "WALDEN IS ALIVE AGAIN" ular was recommended to me, which contained a women's lib slant on the movie Repulsion and speculated, in the course of a crossword puzzle, that John Wayne was "effete, underneath all the bullshit...
...Perhaps they had been not reacting for too long...
...This realism, as far as it goes, is what sets the urban "WALDEN IS ALIVE AGAIN" communes apart from the rural communes (or collectives, or cooperatives, or communities: the names are interchangeable, and someone is always offended when you use the wrong name for his) . Communes in the city are first of all practical: cheaper and less worrisome than single apartments, with only a marginal diminishment in domestic luxuries...
...There is no discussion, no argument, no back-and-forth talking, no heat or light or friction...
...The day I came to visit, everyone was getting ready for a sympathy rally for George Jackson, "going out this afternoon...
...when I left several people were deciding what to do with a quantity of goat's milk thought to be contaminated...
...In other words, as sociologists have let us know, "a communitarian fiction with capitalist content...
...surely the Rainbow Farm communards would have been better off for summoning them...
...Violence...
...Oh, yes, anything could happen then...
...Actually, though he could expound more "purposes" than he knew what to do with, Roger was building the house simply for himself and his friends...
...Garrick managed to get in the last word when he informed Lee of why he had not bothered to call off Skeeter, with his fists and his saddle...
...When Garrick and Lee returned, one day, from buying chicken feed in town, they went off conspicuously in opposite directions...
...Arthur, nine years old, showed me the beginnings of a model geodesic dome, fashioned out of toothpicks, which had been revealed to him in a vision "while I was high...
...And one could wish for more remarks like this—Mr...
...So the rule is that mornings are elated, afternoons depressed, and evenings— when they go right—so full of dope that you can't feel much of anything...
...Here one found no ritualized community spirit, no gathering in a circle to say premeal mantras...
...It is not we that failed, it is society that failed us...
...A long-standing member of the commune told me that it had become a summer camp for rich hippies, and predicted that very few of those who remained after the summer would last through a winter in Vermont...
...one wondered why things had been allowed to get so far...
...And what could the kids do for their own trip...
...The physical, kick is of course potent, qnc should not discount that, but the appeal of the stuff derives in some part from the act of sharing it, the creation of an inner circle secure against the threats of a hostile world...
...Now I just don't have the energy...
...Individualism, as we know it, was a product of bourgeois culture during one stage of its hegemony...
...There were no electrical appliances, no toi 330 lets, only one or two lights, and (this was strictly respected) a vegetarian diet...
...The abstractness is already killing: let us get down to some cases...
...The wider community is sick, and contaminating, and you had better get away from it before it gets you...
...And some of those who make the sacrifice could have managed well within the system...
...He stood there for a while, facing Lee, and then hearing no reply he walked slowly away carrying a saddle...
...If you don't love me, kill me...
...but otherwise the place was not far different from Rainbow Farm...
...What seems less accurate is the claim, rendered in the coloring of Psychology Today and the Esalen Institute, which is sometimes made to emerge from the communal movement: that this means the end of our mechanized, plastic society which is the cancer of Western civilization...
...Yet, we may be forgiven for wondering how new it all really is...
...Although Mr...
...Yet this sort of commune has to be called eminently sensible-a small bourgeois compliment which some of its members might frown upon...
...The physical layout is intelligent: eight apartments constructed along two rows, like certain motels, with the walls between apartments torn down in favor of doors...
...On the one hand, and I never had any doubt of this, there was some version of genuine love seeking an outlet...
...Like other visitors, I found the friendliness of most communards amazing by everyday standards...
...He tried always to appear full of love, but the generation barrier, the locked circle of kids, cut him off from much of the returned love he needed...
...I have to admit," he said, "it did look like that's what you wanted...
...it transpired that Lee had bawled out one of the town merchants...
...Skeeter was a bit older than Garrick, about twenty-seven, and the toughest one in the commune...
...Drugs "made you lazy," this much was known, but to limit laziness would be to limit freedom, would it not...
...the solution was a commune revolving around group funding, group meals, and organized child care...
...One might call this the deromanticized or children-of-disaster view...
...Brother, I love you," or "What the hell were you doing when I tried putting up the roofs yesterday...
...I have found us 50,000 of us lying beside our cars...
...and it may be that they have some faith left which belies that experience, and they are only less young than they were...
...Well, I don't know...
...Baby-sitters had been found unsatisfactory all around...
...Now the question arises: how to go about drawing conclusions...
...1.3 rban communes, like religious ones, are exceptions to every rule...
...The cooperative groups in cities, on the other hand, by their very location deny any escape from the reality of politics, or the reality of getting along with the neighbors...
...A review of some of the literature about communes ought to help the reader set his thoughts in order, though for our purposes one book will work as well as 20...
...Urban communes are generally self-supporting: the group members know that in the city they can survive only so long as they are "realistic...
...Yet it is felt that our society nurtures a false sense of community...
...Certain communes go in for guerrilla theater, and then fall apart...
...Most of the children around Rainbow Farm, it turned out, had been fed LSD at one time or another...
...Contributions to the common fund are made according to income—progressively, of course—though it has recently become necessary to require a "minimum" amount for the discouragement of loafers...
...the only things I actually saw people reading were comic books...
...This is Thoreau, of course, and it makes a good text for any discussion of present-day communes...
...It must be added that Garrick, Lee, and Skeeter were three of the hardest workers in the commune...
...Meanwhile the children are reasonably happy, playing with rattles and absorbing their parents' politics...
...You're a murderer...
...One does have to perform tasks recognized as socially useful by the outside world in order to preserve an enclave away from it, and how is guerrilla theater useful...
...It is old, very old wine going into new skins...
...Perhaps it would be wiser to call them a new beginning, as of a structure running alongside but not intending to supplant the industrial system...
...In Venice, there one is free" I found printed on a lavatory wall...
...It would be hard to underestimate the usefulness of such inhibitions...
...Of the beginnings of a Krishna commune: "They were searching for a guru and God...
...About the religious experiments—minority faiths, including various types of Buddhism and Christian revivalism-one remarks that they seem to promote ecstasy while prohibiting ordinary fun, and that they demand practical discipline of a kind quite alien to the hippie Weltanschauung...
...Souls, so one must speak of them in this context, for the soul of each person was subjected to a furious cultivation in the moments before eating breakfast or supper...
...SOMETHING DAMNED INTERESTING must be happening on top of that mountain," an auto mechanic thought out loud, just before I took the turn-off for the Rainbow Farm commune near Eugene, Oregon, "because it seems like there's been a hundred kids going up and coming down each day...
...Joanne, who came to Venice from Iowa and is, at 18, the youngest member of her commune, will provide an instructive case in point...
...But they spent too much time smoking the hookah, got dysentery, and had to return to New York...
...If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing about...
...There is a hail and farewell to the communards...
...Where is there a generalization roomy enough for all this...
...He was important at Rainbow Farm because—with a little help from his parents?—he owned its 600 acres of land...
...But I discovered," he said, "that politics was a bullshit reality...
...On the streets of New York City, a man living in the forests of Vermont told me, you can't look people in the face...
...Sometimes adults went on trips with them, sometimes they stayed and watched...
...but it does not avail me that they have tried it...
...People who say, Let us mark the beginning of the end of our mechanized plastic society, are not going to make a successful commune...
...Astro Commune in Vermont, which is just getting under way, was theoretically of the first kind but practically of the second...
...not again...
...Communes have their special fascination because they release natural communitarian sentiments, without directing them toward an object DAVID BROMWICH which is false in the most obvious ways...
...I would not like to answer for their future...
...Where the "practical" outlook is lacking the results are disastrous, and the failure then needs to be viewed through a screen of self-deception...
...Something very dear has passed away, though we have our compensation: with the erosion of individualism came a sort of displacement, a spreading out of the heroic intensity to embrace the entire community...
...The book, then, is Getting Back To gether by Robert Houriet,* a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, a prac ticing journalist traveling among communes, and lately the founder of his own commune in Vermont...
...What about communes without either illusions or hypocrisy...
...However, a commune such as Rainbow Farm blinkers the choice as effectively as any military school...
...Unlike other visitors, therefore, I do not think of the movement as an automatic source of hope...
...Of course, the trouble was that the communards of Rainbow farm had simply skipped ever touching finger tips...
...He apparently enjoyed playing with a yo-yo...
...Here it would be proper to say some deeply felt words against the use of drugs, "WALDEN IS ALIVE AGAIN" except that to do so would be so obviously to miss the point...
...The message out, he shoved Lee down into the dirt and stood over him for some seconds...
...Observers of the communal movement sometimes have an all-embracing sympathy for the "new community," which they show in every word they speak or write...
...You're on the wrong trip, brother...
...A year ago I tried to get things together, I tried to get everybody organized, but it never works...
...Sun of the everlasting day, My greetings of the undying hope to thee...
...The construction at Astro went on at a terrific pace, thanks to the work of friends from MIT and, in one instance, even a snooping journalist...
...It is still true, for example, that the form of rejection precedes the content...
...Drugs for children...
...Houriet often seems only half-aware of the humor in his situations...
...That illusion, when held not unwittingly but modishly, turns into a not wholly admirable form of self-indulgence...
...This is a "let it be" commune...
...The government was on a DAVID BROMWICH collision course with itself, but the real problem was competition among people, people always treating each other as objects...
...After several months in the planing, the commune has now lasted with a steady membership for more than a year...
...One night everybody smoked dope, the next night someone suggested it and there were groans of "Oh no...
...The governor of Vermont paid a visit to Norton, and is supposed to have remarked: "They're sincere but impractical...
...Houriet looks forward to a new community of one big commune, even though the kind of purity he celebrates depends on this being a minority movement...
...Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me...
...Action—of any kind—was hardly their strongest suit...
...and he believes that communal living, in the nature of the thing, sets us in the direction of this higher value...
...His concluding words ask parents to rediscover their children, the young people, "all members of the new community taking roots all over this, our land...
Vol. 19 • April 1972 • No. 2
