Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [250]
MANIFESTO
WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF EVIDENT TO EVERYBODY EXCEPT GENERALS, INDUSTRIALISTS, POLITICIANS, PROFESSORS, AND OTHER DINOSAURS:
1) That the excretions of the mass media and the obscenities of school education are forms of mind-pollution.
We believe in meditation, discussion, communion, nature.
2) That possessions, the “my and mine” of this corrupt society, stand between us and a true, clean, liberated vision of the world and ourselves.
We believe in communality, sharing, giving, using without using up. He is wealthiest who owns nothing and needs nothing.
3) That the acquisitive society acquires and uses women as it acquires and uses other natural resources, turning them into slaves, second-class citizens, and biological factories.
We believe in the full equality of men and women. Proprietorship has no place in love or in any good thing of the earth.
4) That the acquisitive society begins to pollute and enslave the minds of children in infancy, turning them into dreadful replicas of their parents and thus perpetuating obscenities.
We believe that children are natural creatures close to the earth, and that they should grow up as part of the wild life.
5) That this society with its wars, waste, poisons, ugliness, and hatred of the natural and innocent must be abandoned or destroyed. To cop out is the first act in the cleansing of the spirit.
We believe in free and voluntary communities of the joyous and generous, male and female, either as garden communities in rural places or as garden enclaves in urban centers, the two working together and circulating freely back and forth–a two–way flow of experience, people, money, gentleness, love, and homegrown vegetables.
NOW THEREFORE
We have leased twenty acres of land from the Massachusetts Mining Corporation in North San Juan, California, four miles north of Nevada City on Route 49. We invite there all who believe in people and the earth, to live, study, meditate, flourish, and shed the hangups of corrupted America. We invite men, women, and children to come and begin creating the new sane healthy world within the shell of the old.
What to bring: What you have.
What to do: What you want.
What to pay: What you can.
FREEDOM MEDITATION LOVE SHARING YOGA
Address: Box 716, Nevada City, California
When I finished the front side and looked up, Shelly was watching
Let the paper remain on the desk
Unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen’d!
Let the tools remain in the workshop!
Let the money remain unearn’d!
Let the school stand!
My call is the call of battle, I nourish active rebellion.
He going with me must go well arm’d,
He going with me goes often with spare diet, poverty,
angry enemies, desertions.
WHITMAN
The practice of meditation, for which one needs only the ground beneath one’s feet, wipes out mountains of junk being pumped into the mind by the mass media and supermarket universities. The belief in a serene and generous fulfillment of natural desires destroys ideologies which blind, maim, and repress–and points the way to a kind of community which would amaze ‘moralists’ and eliminate armies of men who are fighters because they cannot be lovers.
The traditional cultures are in any case doomed, and rather than cling to their good aspects hopelessly it should be remembered that whatever is or ever was in any other culture can be reconstructed from the unconscious, through meditation. In fact, it is my own view that the coming revolution will close the circle and link us in many ways with the most creative aspects of our archaic past. If we are lucky we may eventually arrive at a totally integrated world culture with matrilineal descent, free-form marriage, natural-credit Communist economy, less industry, far less population, and lots more national parks.