My Generation: A Memoir of the Baby Boom
How and why I survived the American Dream, found a new utopia, and made the revolution personal.
In which the vulnerable crab leaves his shell, survives catastrophe and bruising, and grows a new one.
Every home became a stepping stone to the next death escape, career break, heartache… giving way to a new beginning. At first, acceptance, then comfort, even fresh commitment. Then stasis… spelling disillusionment, alienation, withdrawal.
And so, on to the next. Will it be the promised land?
“That’s all right, I still got my guitar.” —Jimi Hendrix
The Fifties
A deep motive for making literature or art of any sort is the desire to defeat the formlessness of the world and cheer oneself up by constructing forms out of what might otherwise seem a mass of senseless rubble. —Iris Murdoch
The Sixties
The massive upsurge of the revolutionary impulse during [the 1960s] was not only or even principally a political phenomenon, for it expressed itself in every aspect of cultural life: in the music heard, the books read, the ideas discussed, the ideals embraced, the images produced, the evolution of language and fashion, the radical changes in social and sexual mores. It was visible in the incessant challenge to established beliefs and widespread embrace of new perspectives, the movements for radical theological and church reform and antireligious revolt, the drive towards innovation and experiment that affected all the arts, the sudden empowerment of the young, the pivotal role of university communities in the rapid cultural shift. And it was evident above all in the prodigious energy and activism… the general impulse towards extremes and “radicalization” in so many areas, the suddenly intensified will to construct a new world.
* * *
The eruptive and emancipatory intensity and extremity of the [1960s] brought about a kind of self-immolation of the entire epoch. The unleashed forces of destruction and self-destruction—and the unleashed forces of violent conservative reaction—deeply compromised and complicated the emancipatory and creative impulses of [the era], even as those impulses continued to live and develop in the ensuing decades. No less problematic and consequential were the unleashed energies of violent power in the already powerful during [this time]: the United States in Vietnam…, modern civilization itself in its vast technological potency and destructiveness.
All these observations suggest the immense historical and individual responsibility presented by these powerful forces in the collective psyche and in ourselves. For what has happened in the past is not past, but lives within us.
—Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche (200–01)
Listen to the My Generation Playlist on YouTube
The Seventies
Follow your bliss. —Joseph Campbell
Youth—A Recap
by Robert St. John Gray
All things are possible to the brash youth in his first foray into the world, once he gets his feet wet. Now he knows the ropes, and feels comfortable hobnobbing with the great and powerful, or with the lowly and streetwise. He walks with angels and demons, matching them stride for stride.
With psychic powers turned up high, he converses by night with Nixon, Hitler, Lucifer himself. Accosted by Steppenwolf in the guise of a Frisco wharf rat, he maintains his innocent smile. Drives Nate Thurman’s Rolls, barely managing to reach the pedals; sleeps with the boss’s daughter. Buys a hot little sportscar convertible, spins out on a mountain road between cliff and cliff, dances in the streets of Hollywood. An avant-garde artiste and darling of the new theatre, he appears on cable TV and wows the old ladies of the Mt. Davidson Easter Sunrise Society. He takes a breather in the Nevada desert, the Yosemite snow-swept wilds, the Tahoe ski-hills.
Oil embargo!—Step right up, he’ll fill your quota of gas today. Hearst kidnapped!—he’ll read it hot from the Berkeley newstand. Watergate!—he’ll check out the testimony live from his air freight office, between pages of Jung and The Last Temptation of Christ.
He can apply to sell ingots for the Kaiser Steel empire, and then volunteer in the dusty courtyard of the free school to teach children arts. He can paint your bathroom or exterior siding, service your airplane or send your car through the speed-wash. When he loses his new job he can go back to his old one, find free housing with old friends.
He can spend a chill night on a wilderness ridge among lions and wolves; take the part of the police lieutenant in Arsenic and Old Lace. Truly, all things are possible…
This footloose felix is you; you are he; so to you I say, explore, young man, while you’re in the West! Glory in the expansiveness of your condition, your culture and stage of life, the era in which you live. Write your poems and have a class of dancers perform them to your taste; direct the gifted generation-to-come, in ritual dramas of your selection. Dream of Allen Ginsberg, and the next day walk beside him to his poetry reading in your neighborhood. Accept the gift of stolen drugs, pop a few shamelessly, and watch as nothing happens.
Fall asleep while driving the Bay Bridge in the middle of the night—see if God cares. He does, it turns out. Why? You don’t know. You spin the roulette wheel, calling 4. Four comes up. Delighted, you try 5. Five arrives. Pushing your luck, you call 6—why not? And by now more delighted than shocked with the ease of it all, you watch the ball wobble and bounce, and land—in 6. Appalled with the possibilities, you go to Reno where your buddy works, and try the wheel. The cards. The dice. Nothing’s going your way. Down to your last nickel, you drop it in the slot, pull the long greasy handle. It chinks through its gears, clunks home; the little pictures whirr: and you see fifteen bucks worth of change come tumbling out at your feet. Okay, a new stake. Back to the crap table, and with three throws you walk away eighty dollars richer, in a mood to use the last of those free drink tickets.
You’ve come from Baltimore to Oakland: and so does the American league baseball crown. You go to watch them meet in the playoffs, predict correctly the game-winning hitter and pitcher, then in the parking lot after the game, stand in mad passionate rapture with your date, while the crowd walks past in another world.
It’s all very nice with her for a while, but not going anywhere because you’ve already made plans to move on. Thing is, the traffic’s got to be a bit too much. You’re tired of pumping gas, of teaching kids for the love of art. You’ve had your days of revelation on the foggy cliffs beside the Golden Gate. You’ve trod the distant mountains now, and their call is under your skin…
* * *
And so he retreats to the still pellucid grove of academe, where his jarred senses and world-honed ego can be soothed once more in the dreamy tones of poesy, the abstract ruminations of finer-tuned souls. Here he can escape the rat race of the city, the traffic jams, the singles bars, the hucksters and mad-eyed preachers of the streets, the jive and the hustle and the double-cross.
He can find his mushrooms wild here, in the tangled Canadian bush: no matter that he still doesn’t have positive identification; they pass through him without effect. Again, he is lucky; no further ahead, but neither behind. Another day passes, another year, another phase of his life. When he meets somebody this time, he begins to think it may be time to get serious. Not that she’s Miss Perfect, but maybe she’ll do—maybe she’s good enough. Maybe good enough is good enough. Who knows, unless you try?
Inukjuak, Northern Quebec
With my fiancée Jeanne, I begin my teaching career in an Inuit village a thousand miles north of Montreal. From that ancient culture we learn to hunt and fish and camp in igloos, to tell time without clocks. With our fellow misfits from the South, we are caught in the colonial dilemma of assimilating a people whose culture we admire more than our own. Our ensuing adventures, passing into legend as “the Golden Days,” include
a four-month exile during the heat of the Bill 101 crisis, when the Inuit stage a nonviolent counter-revolution to the language coup of the Parti Quebecois. With the shortwave radio talking World War III blues, I tempt a pickled worm with a fraught foursome.
“Tailor your lifestyle so that it nurtures your best self into being.”
—Sacred Rebel card, Follow Your Own Rhythm
It happens often in the twenty-ninth year of life that all the forces that have been engaged through the years of childhood, adolescence and youth in confused and ferocious combat range themselves in ordered ranks—one is uncertain of one’s aims, meaning and power during these years of tumultuous growth when aspiration has no relation to fulfillment and one plunges with energy and misdirection during the storm and stress of the making of a personality until at last we reach the twenty-ninth year, the straight and narrow gateway of maturity and life which was all uproar and confusion narrows down to form and purpose and we exchange a great dim possibility for a small hard reality.
Also in our American life where there is no coercion in custom and it is our right to change our vocation so often as we have desire and opportunity, it is a common experience that our youth extends through the whole first twenty-nine years of our life and it is not until we reach thirty that we find at last that vocation for which we feel ourselves fit and to which we willingly devote continued labor.
—Gertrude Stein, Fernhurst (in Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche, p. 120).
The Eighties
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. —Thoreau
“Considering what we’ve been through,” she said, “do you think they’d mind if we built our house first, and then changed the world?”
—Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever
“Behind the Curtain” – critiquing the early drafts of My Generation
Buy My Generation (paperback) now at Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk
Buy My Generation (ebook) now at Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk
YouTube Playlist (Top 50 – for my generation)
Published excerpts from My Generation:
“The Day Kennedy Died” Medium (November 2019).
“Woodstock on the Beach” Medium (June 2019).
“A Sixties Childhood” Numero Cinq (July 2017).
–“First Love” Wattpad (May 2014)
–“Youth, 1974” Wattpad (May 2014)
–“The Boys in the Park” Wattpad
–“Trumped in Peckerdom” Wattpad
