The Beat Poet and Art Bohemian Influenced Counterculture of the Sixties and the More Marxist Counterculture of the Seventies, and Beyond
Bernard Pyron
Many Hippies of the Sixties Counterculture were anti-Christian. But the more Marxist influenced Counterculture of the seventies was more systematically anti-Christian than the Hippies.
The hippies came partly out of the Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert LSD movement, which mixed mysticism of some Oriental religions with the psychedelic experience. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were both Ph.D. psychologists. So, they brought clinical and humanistic psychology into the mix of oriental mysticism and the psychedelic experience, Remember also that both came out of California psychology departments, Leary got his Ph.D. from Berkeley and Alpert from Stanford University.
The LSD drug movement was also promoted by Aldous Huxley. And Gregory Bateson at the Palo Alto VA Hospital helped to popularize the use of LSD. Bateson served in the OSS during World War II. According to http://postflaviana.org/gregory-bateson-and-the-counter-cu…/ Gregory Bateson played a role in the creation of the CIA. He was not a psychologist, but was an anthropologist.
Look at: http://madamepickwickartblog.com/…/merry-pranksters-joke-o…/
"Aldous Huxley – of the British Elite – was important in creating the LSD or drug movement in both California and in the Boston area through his protegees Gregory Bateson, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. Huxley promoted his LSD project in California by making use of Alan Watts and Gregory Bateson. Watts was the “guru” of a Zen Buddhist cult. Bateson, who had been with the OSS, became the director of a hallucinogenic drug experimental clinic at the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital. Bateson was one of the first to experiment with giving LSD to mental patients and others."
"Among Bateson’s Palo Alto recruits was the writer Ken Kesey. In 1959, Bateson administered the first dose of “LSD to Ken Kesey. Kesey soon organized a group of LSD users called “The Merry Pranksters.” They toured the country in a bus giving out LSD and helping to develop the then very small counterculture."
During the 1960-1961 academic year, Ken Kesey was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at the Stanford University Creative Writing Center, where a , quite different guy who became a well known American writer was also a Stegner Fellow, Larry McMurtry.
McMurtry and Kesey remained friends after 1960-1961, and after the death of Kesey, Larry McMurtry married his widow. McMurtry was born in 1936
on a north Texas ranch near Archer City. and grew up in the tail end of the Texas cowboy culture. McMurtry wrote Western novels, such as Horseman, Pass By (1962), The Last Picture Show (1966) and Terms of Endearment (1975). For those who did not know of his earlier Westerns, he is still well known for his Lonesome Dove series.
Larry McMurtry said that he spent his first five or six years in his grandfather's house on a ranch without books, but his family would sit on the front porch every night and tell stories.
In July of 1964 Ken Kesey and those on his LSD bus paid Larry McMurtry a visit in Houston.
Another major influence upon the Hippie movement which began in about 1962 were the Beat Poets, such as Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (who may still be alive at 98), Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure and Philip Whalen.
http://www.rattle.com/lawrence-ferlinghetti-is-alive-by-emily-sernaker/
"March 23, 2017, download audio ,
Emily Sernaker : “Lawrence Ferlinghetti is celebrating his 98th birthday this Friday.
| Kenneth Rexroth can be seen as a member of the Beat Poets, and maybe the American surrealist poet Kenneth Patchen. | |
In the summer of 1967 Justine Dakin and I were down near Lake Mendota below the Student Union Building on the University of Wisconsin campus when a portly man came up and began talking to us. This guy, who was a few years older than me, became a friend of mine, and from about 1971 to 1973 I was part of a group in Madison which I later called the Bob Watt Group. Watt motored over to Madison from Milwaukee's East Side near Lake Michigan every week or so in his Wattmobile, which he had decorated with his art on its top.
http://archive.jsonline.com/news/obituaries/art-scene-just-a-bit-dimmer-without-watt-063n678-136918553.html
"Art scene just a bit dimmer without Watt...........he was a Beat poet and mainstay of 1960s Milwaukee counterculture - reading his poems at the old Avante Garde coffeehouse on the east side, writing a column for Kaleidoscope, the city's first underground newspaper, and keeping body and soul together with the pest-control business he owned."
"There was nobody like him," said Bob Reitman, the Milwaukee broadcaster who was once the poetry editor of Kaleidoscope and the organizer of the Avante Garde poetry readings. "Of all the people I know, there was nobody who lived in that universe except Bob Watt."
"He ran at least one coffeehouse of his own - a place near Marquette University in 1965 called the Bavarian Brat Haus - a name chosen, said his friend George Rzezotarski, because "we wanted to fake out the city."
"For years, Watt lived in a house on the 3200 block of W. Juneau Ave., also jammed with his paintings and wood sculptures."
http://milwaukeerecord.com/arts/bob-watt-exhibition-the-last-of-the-bohemians-coming-to-grove-gallery/
"Watt died in 2012 at the age of 86, but his “so bad it’s good” art will live on in “The Last of the Bohemians,” a retrospective exhibit coming to the Grove Gallery October 21."
https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/author/watts-bob/first-edition/
"Watt's Happening., by Bob Watt, Quixote Magazine, Madison, Wisconsin,. 1972. Quixote Magazine published many of Bob Watt's poems in addition to Watt's 1972 book.
Then there are also the Art Bohemians who are forerunners of the Hippie Movement.. The art bohemians go back to 19th century French Painters, and the list of names include Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro and Paul Cezanne.
https://www.zum.de/whkmla/sp/1011/karajan/nwc1.html#I
"The Impressionist movement, famous for its perspective on art to draw the instantaneous 'impression' of a subject of the painting, finds its place from the 1860's to 80's in Paris. Led by painters such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Paul Cezanne, Edouard Manet, the movement, first criticized by the public and rejected by official salons, eventually got acknowledged for the originality and beauty the paintings possessed.
The Impressionist painters, along with other arts movements of the time, are associated with the Bohemians, due to the fact that both groups of people pursued art as their goal and went against the mainstream society."
"The term Bohemianism emerged in France in the early 19th century when artists and creators began to concentrate in the lower-rent, lower class gypsy neighborhoods. "
"It refers to both a lifestyle that rejects the bourgeois domination and rationality in the context of industrial society, and the search for an artistic ideal "
"Sometimes idealized for their freedom, sometimes criticized for its eccentricity, the Bohemian life finds its source in Paris under the influence of an artistic movement growing "...
The Art Bohemians emphasized freedom from the conventions of bourgeois society.
The Surrealists of about 1920 to 1940 mostly in France continued the lifestyle of the Art Bohemians. And after the end of World War II, the New York Abstract Expressionist painters and sculptors tended to be Art Bohemians. Since many of these painters and sculptors lived in he Lower East Side,of New York City, when the Hippie movement began, some early hippies mixed in with the Art Bohemian groups on the Lower East side and apparently absorbed some of the Art Bohemian Culture.
Even in surrealism there was some interest in mental states. Andre Breton, surrealist poet said in his novel Nadja , 1928, that "La beauté sera convulsif ou ne sera pas du tout," "Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all."
In the Hippie movement the interest was in mental or Brain States, and pot as well as LSD and other drugs were used by Hippies to change their mental states, Sex in the Hippie movement was a way of changing Brain States, Hence the interest of the Hippies in sex.
Marxism does not necessarily lead to such an interest in brain states and changes in brain states can be positive or negative. Brain states can be under the sympathetic nervous system or under the parasympathetic system. Brain states can be pleasurable or terrifying, and apparently both are sometimes experienced under LSD.
Marxism does not necessarily lead to an interest in using drugs to change your brain state.
But Marxism is so systematically opposed to the absolute nature of scripture and Christian morality that a devoted Marxist does not easily develop faith in Jesus Christ and in scripture. And all who follow Marxism do not know they are Marxists.
"In the eyes of the dialectical philosophy, nothing is established for
all time, nothing is absolute or sacred." (Karl Marx)
Some Hippies, under the influence of the LSD-Oriental- Mysticism-Beat Poet-Art Bohemianism did become Jesus Freaks.
The question is, did the Hippies as Jesus Freaks come out of those influences enough to have faith in Christ and come to love his doctrines? Was the mind of Christ in them? Maybe they could come out of the Beat Poet and Art Bohemian influence easier than they could have come out of New Left Marxism?
http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI3074101/
"This dissertation seeks to demonstrate that many Christian Right activists did not come out of a fundamentalist or Pentecostal or even new evangelical background but rather came out of the counterculture"
Thats an interesting idea. Could it be said that some members of the elect of Christ did not come out of fundamentalism but out of the Counterculture?. Usually what is meant by fundamentalism is dispensationalism - Christian Zionism.
Within the Counterculture of the early seventies there was a back to the land. rural commune movement and a movement for the use of herbs and other natural remedies for disease. In fact this was one of the points of origin for the alternative health care movement which gained popularity in the last decades.
The book, Hippies of the religious Right: The counterculture and American evangelicalism in the 1960s and 1970s, by Preston Shires, whose link is shown above, , goes on to say "But the countercultural spirit was indeed in evidence. And as one looks at the cultural pedigree of some of the radical activists of the Christian Right, one discovers that many of them were of countercultural descent."
Hippies of the Religious Right: ,From the Counterculture of Jerry Garcia to the Subculture of Jerry Falwell, by Preston Shires, Baylor University Press,: 2007, "This volume demonstrates that the Christian Right has a surprising past. Historical analysis reveals that the countercultural movements and evangelicalism share a common heritage. Shires warns that political operatives in both parties need to heed this fact if they hope to either, in the case of the Republican Party, retain their evangelical constituency, or, in the case of the Democratic Party, recruit new evangelical voters.".
This makes it clear that what Shires means by the Religious Right is dispensationalism.
We know that Chuck Smith at Calvary Chapel in Southern California accepted many Jesus Freaks into his congregation in spite of their being too smelly and poorly dressed to come into a conventional church. And we know that Chuck Smith was a dispensationalist. Most likely many of the Jesus Freaks under him became dispensationalists.
But probably the feminists and other Marxists - many of whom did not know they were Marxists - would have been less likely to want to go inside a Church to hear Chuck Smith preach about his Christianity.
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