It underwent so much sheer speculative wonder, it never settled into established history. It was our treasure, our folly, our unregenerative space-out. 1967. Files of breakdowns, overdoses, splendors.

It was a shining day. Nobody could have predicted how it would go. We were able to feel the insurrection, the rebellion and the war was our nemesis. After Kennedy's murder, we were in a fit and nothing could stop us. Vietnam was a horror, a travesty, a terrible disease.

Staggering up from deep sleep, heroic brimful of status way below, I funged the distress out of her and she slapped back, doggedly

M. was a dazzling precursor to what fell into us, days on end. Speech came to us, as did our bodily rapport. Now what comes we almost own, thorough knowing what's going down. The sounds, the pleasure, the vocal surmounting. For a moment all is clear-the mountains, the high peaks, the structure that makes us reel. Now suddenly breaks apart our silences and we join in our straight-ahead forms of attention.

Follow up:

I could have known you once more, could have made sure you were empowered to strip me of my cares and leave me naked in the face of eternity. My bond with you was enlightened pleasure or perhaps the taste of something so delightful we could manage our makeover only occasionally, even though manifest triumph was our quest.

Suddenly, in the midst of the daily grind, there would be an ingested fire. Come what may, it made us rise. It made what was only light become some miraculous potency we craved and created. Look! It's as the song says, the longing comes over you and you rejoice, heavily, in the levity of the power we have been given.

Do you recall that time we stood ready to receive orders to reinstate our own vows? That uncertain momentum of voices and cares vanished and we stood before everything and felt we were the first humans to know this composed fury that sped up our processes, giving us a flash and a gladness we could never completely surrender. We knew what it was to become some totality, mired in the hiatus between physical form and the vast cosmos. This was our momentum.

--Can we go any further?
--You tell me.
--Follow me.
--I will.
--Not to be missed.
--I concur.
--Let's keep going.
--Yes.

So that affirmation becomes a pride and a surging of the song. 'He sang best when his powers were beginning to fail.' Or so saith what we conjoin in saying to one another across these divides. Keep sailing or riding or...My windy mind is made up, and this will be the occasion of uprising or deep genuflection to mysterious powers that will not stop recurring.

Hurry out and try yourself out in the world. It must be your home, even as it is given to others as well.

The road from the Dome into town was windy. It was sometimes impassable during winter. Our cars and trucks were no good in those days, but we tried.

The skidding, the stuck in the snow, the horrendous winter world not placated by breathing, but interior, in fires we stoked, brandy we drank, odds against the changing seasons. High in the mountains of the southwest, we learned to live.

Then the sorcerer, psychotic that he was, took it on himself to parade naked through the streets of the little village, and then came the busts. The idea that anyone was welcome seemed generous at the time, but then proved a liability. Some people should be given the boot, immediately. Screen for major mental illness, at least.

There were always options and we stood up to the times, in our own ways. Bobby Kennedy appeared at the Univ. of New Mexico, spring of '68, a small man, but with large ambitions. He could bring back the Kennedy songbook. He was in the running. And then he gets killed in LA, after winning that primary. M. and I headed for Mexico, no more of this shit for us. But then, caught in a hotel with major dealers from allover the world, we are busted as well. Spend time in a federal jail, hoping for rain. What a world.

No time that did not seem like it was truly our destiny. A fable of near-misses that could grind to a halt, that could make us content to be with the furious world. It was love, it was pride, it was acid, it was power, it was the death of a dream. Dallas put something to death. No matter the details might reveal a more sordid condition, the times were fraught with hope and catastrophe.

Sing it. White Rabbit. Somebody to Love. St. Stephen. Truckin'. A Day in The Life. Get through it all. Set up the microphones, we gonna make a recordin' that will last. Gimme that jug.

Allen Ginsberg gave a reading at UNM April 28, 1967 and it was a huge circus event. Afterward, we all went out to the Thunderbird in Placitas. Then we proceeded to the Lower Farm which was the scene of a several day acid high, and lots of wild conversation with the Great Gar Gonnelley, famous raconteur and rationalist madman. We kicked up the dust, did several scenes from King Lear and pitched 40 pound boulders into the nearby arroyo.

He had arrived in New Mexico from LA in April of '67. After months of Be-Ins, Love-Ins, San Francisco Oracle, Golden Gate Park, and his last days of student life at UCLA, he decided to head to the southwest with 100 hits of Owsley acid, Purple Domes and White Lightning.

That was then.  By the end of the summer I was married. M wanted us to go back to Boston to meet her family. 'He's brilliant,' she said to her mother, who was trying to get me to understand that what was important in life was 'the better things.' M's mother took me to Filene's basement and picked me out a nice suit. 'You look like an easterner,' she said. Then we went back out west, and I got a part-time teaching job in Northern California. The appeal of '67 had become diminished, and I was belatedly trying to be a player in the so-called real world.

A new world or a world of malcontents trying to get to the next spectacular youthful momentum. Acid rock. O, and this was fun, just ask Kesey or the Pranksters. Who were the real hippies? What did they want? Eventful days, down on your luck, no way to find a middle class version of this. Trust fund hippies. Just in time. The Vietnam War fueled a fair amount of anguish, and then you had marching and feeling bereaved and then The Tet Offensive, and then...And back on the land, the birth if based on methodological raiment from long ago, of a kind of environmental movement. Growing your own, keeping a garden at the ready. Who did not love the appealing song of sex and dreaming that came our way? Surrealistic Pllow. Sergeant Pepper. The Dead. Screaming spectacular highs across the west, indulging in what had to be the rip-roaring agency we pronounced in our bodily war-time fury. Watch me go!

Utopia had always been part of the American dream. The experiments at Brook Farm. The Hog Farm. Drop City. Lou Gottlieb. California Dreamin'.

Manera Nueva. New Mexico. Whole Earth Catalogue. Stewart Brand. The innovative and counter-culture history: Steve Jobs and Apple. Keep to the free zones, the wonders of the rising expectations that announce a perfectly wholesome day.

Dawn crevicing between a great night of love and the aspirational feel that something must get done, something full of pleasure. You who came full-bore into the bargain were not afraid to manage an empire. We were together, or was it engaged in some declared mission nobody could prevent?

No doubt it was of the times, the elements had come together just then: cataclysm was in the air, and the shadow was loose. We were unable to fully score the music or distribute wealth in sufficient accord. We stood in the fullness of an old lunar landscape and we celebrated delight, pure and simple.

What else were we to do? Life had handed us a certain number of prescriptions and they proved irregular. Not even Elvis could keep us on track, especially after we learned the difference between hypocrisy and true politics. The politics that were beginning to gleam in our minds and visions was of the body, its fluent awakenings to knowing we were driving into amazing scenery, the channels of hopeful deliberation wide open.

Sunken states, blissed-out and then not so. How do you conspire to know how to construct a life? We pride ourselves on integrity. Seeing A Man for All Seasons, Paul Scofield as Thomas More, what a bravery of succeeding to stay integral amid all the transactions of Henry and his licentious condition- marriages, change of venue for the Church, the climate of intimidation and fear, and yet More stood for something, for law, for truth, and this occurred (in the 16^th century) & just so in 1967 USA, when so much was disintegrating or starting anew.

How you stood it, or didn't, flying off into midnight sun or overdriving into a huddle that came into view and then vanished. You were on the LA freeway one day and then split out to New Mexico, driving hard all the way, through the desert, past Arizona, past the remembrances, into freedom. We wanted to ascend and never come down. How do you do that?

Precipitate the text and find in your own digressions something to remark on. Delve furiously into time, its magnificent paradoxes, its lightning struck demise, its fortunes of coming beginnings.

There they were, the gods of the age, sitting in lotus on the stage there in Golden Gate Park-Ginsberg, Leary, Snyder, Watts-working their ideas on the crowd, flowers in their hair...A new era dawning and we are its equivalent novices of the moment-watch us sky-high to a grasshopper bounce from notion to notion-Zen, poetry, tune in, drop out, get to the bottom of this parable of a great age unfolding, the Age of Aquarius, the land meeting the mind, the sex, the splendor, the acid, the flowers, now come round in this brave rotunda of feeling, isn't it grand to be alive and singing?

Sanctified, dirt-blown, windy, the dust allover the place, high peaks of shameless delight, now coming into our own, salvaging our deep priorities, the dance we do in the wilderness.  Riotous connectives all through the prolonged wars of indecencies, the forms of our indigestible matters of fact. Gossip is not truth, is a game, and so we go on, and we wink at eternity and it gets us to those places we once loved. Stand up to these zones, the battle particulars as they dance in our crossfiring enigmas.

Spent what we had, now cornered in the place the heart knew so well. It is not shortcoming that keeps us in tow, but the harness round the body's persistence, the lead of the need that recurs, the intake, the price of the pace we need to keep up. Can you do it? Can you appear onstage and find in your own processes something goddamned wonderful?

But you have me there. I wanted to come up with an advisory, but you were too far gone, had run over the edge of all the terrain, and you were not coming back for more. You had made your peace with a permanent exit and nothing I could have said would bring you to your senses. The work of living had stung you into a remorse or depression and you simply wanted to split.

So you played your dicey game and you went naked through the little village, held a woman hostage and brought out the forces of repression. One step forward, two back. Known as The Sorcerer, you even pedaled your stupid brand of offbeat newageism on my wife, who received your little burning matchbox boat as some kind of omen she should accept. Bullshit was just below the surface of our acid-tested conspiracies against all transcendent visions. And then it came and full force knocked us down the steps of a dream world we bargained for and wanted to make manifest as a daily coherence.

But you did not stay, nor did I. That day when we found you were lonely and I had been fired for talking about Vietnam among schoolchildren was a sad comeuppance. We were not free. We may have been in love but we were not making it in the so-called real world. Such was the burden of the times; even as we were wandering around California looking for work or happiness, the hippy minions were falling down stoned in the Haight, and what was recently a rising expectation of incoming splendor became a haunted uptight deal that went wrong. Capital was moving in other directions, even though the gallant striving of our New Mexican experiment was laughingly going along with its treasured insistences, even in the face of forces opposed to the ground of our testimonial faith.

After such an amazing night, we were not ready for dawn to make its way, though it came anyway, and all we could do was watch. Look! The light has returned, and we will rise to greet it. Or maybe something else will come along and we can slip away from all this. Make a note of that. It stood in the open, all this cornering of bliss, and its oppositions. You just wait till something appears that is as formidable as your own spinal column and there will be a vibrating that you can connote as the beginnings of grace. Hold on.

Partners in heroics, they went hard over the ridge and sun-worshipped as they were all that summer of love, with its White Rabbit and Somebody to Love, there was still a disquieting thread that made its way into the mind, some awful constituency related to war and its horrid effects, its untimely ripped dislocation that made use of the shadow that came to be seen as the flipped side of the self that might begin to shape an empire of great possibility born of the freshness we were inheriting.

Checking into Camarillo State Hospital was a great idea. Then, he thought, he would have evidence he was mad when his next draft physical occurred. Great place for a breather, some guy standing in front of a clock circling with his finger the motion of the clock and laughing hysterically. Lots of big tranquilizers, half asleep most of the day. Worthy functioning of the vast interplay of scheme and digression. The doctor says to me 'you have three choices: you can go in the Army, kill yourself or direct a film.' A friend in the porn biz, Mike Storm, had arrived in his Continental, wearing a shiny Italian suit, and offered me a chance to direct a film. They released me a few days before my 10 days of self-commitment were over. The record was there, in case it was needed for the next physical.

Mounting sense of debris, listening to Forest and his jazz group while high on acid, down in Venice on Millbrook St., sliding into a daze on the shag rug, the room vibrating. The ocean was good too. Morrison and the Doors sitting on the stone wall of the Boardwalk there in Venice, smiling into the seaside and the sun. Billboard with their first record on Sunset. Felix took us to their first gig, at the London Fog. I found them too loud, and walked down to the Whisky for a drink.

Semblance of firecracker suites, the great holding company incorruptible and joining in the distant outcry, who would have guessed we would be so affable and getting to the stirrups for a long ride out of Dodge, there were particulars flying everywhere, lots of sex with MW, but she may have been having affairs allover town in Venice in those days, though we appeared to be a couple, did some shows together, including The Tempest, Brecht plays, and plays I wrote which Mike Storm produced at the little theater in Hermosa Beach.

Wanting to do something, there was revolution in the air, and we were part of it, bursting the bounds of times that were changing. And still without progress or a purpose that staggered the mind. The place we were entitled to was on the other side of our shaggy wherewithal, but we did take a close look at middle class analogies to pride in power and found something missing. John Kennedy, who had seemed to embody something carefully drawn from the intellectual left, whose place in world affairs you had witnessed in Berlin that summer of '63, was now no more than a relic of history, his splattered head a target for some nitwit asshole whose mail-order rifle and a good vantage from a book depository was enough to change history. And then we got Lyndon who had a good heart one supposes, passed Medicare and Civil Rights legislation, but was out of it when it came to Vietnam which he was told by McNamara and others was an important place to make a stand against communism, etc. when Vietnam itself was in reality a small nation with an urgency to create its own system, freed from colonial powers.

But the question was always what the hell could we do. We had no money, position or power. Many joined the Peace Corps, which was a Kennedy-Shriver idea, and that seemed a good thing for many who learned to be helpful in poor countries, many in Africa. But contradictions abounded there and privacy was not to be had in the big communal dorms, and sex demanded privacy, so that got old.

But there were good days, and the light in New Mexico was often unearthly. It shone with a grandeur, and the mountainous scenery was a joy, and a rallying of new forms of seeing. And the cadences of American verse came into the heart, and we could see a way of living out there, among the old Pueblo Tribes and the old Land Grant Hispanics, and the settlers who liked their drink and told stories of the hillbillies and sang the Hank Williams songbook. And then there was Shorty Gibbs, old cowboy who had his horse-thieving stories and days of yore on the range and living on the edge of the wilderness in rural New Mexico. Billy the Kid country, having a smoke and a snort and laughing long into twilight.

Surges of laughter, finally, the young brawlers finding a haven of split-second timing as the great psychedelic momentum entered the body and brain.

Circling, circling, the ocean at the ready, the sky full of blue, the fault lines in the mind, you who bespeak ceremony and the gilded edges of play, the float of a balloon, the skimming skid board, the surfer just getting into his wave, the way we played day after day by the sea, its inwardness full of distance and undiminished give and take. Come see it with me, see the flash of light on the distant ocean, see the day unfold, hour after hour, brilliance and promises of a dazzling current of human and world, land and water, the eternal and the vital present

Bill Pearlman
San Miguel de Allende, Gto., Mexico
Summer 2009