I am considering the gathering in the Ozarks. It's been a long time! I was reading Phil Coyote's article - really like to read the rest, prior to and after chapter five. Turn's out we were about the same age at that time. All those people Phil mentioned like Plunker, Garrick and so many other's. The incredible vibe of Table Mountain near Strawberry Lake in Colorado, 1972! The earliest days of the Tribe and all it's various participants. I really don't thrive in nostalgia, just finding some context for all of this that has somehow never died in "here". Does any of this have any meaning today - global warming, genetic engineering, genocidal globalist expansion invading the middle east and every corner of the world it can, crime far beyond anything we knew in the late 60's early 70's, etc.? That's not really for anyone person to say. I can say that there were at least as many things that discouraged and potentially dealienated me from the counter culture as they did draw me in. Never been too, too strong on groups and belief system adherency. Never had been able to settle into this, or that and yet had been deeply devoted to working to bring change. Now change is a terrible aberration and I wouldn't expect anyone to even want to "understand" that. To do so is devestating. Change implies that what we are - in the most essential and unkowable sense - needs to conform to some "change", or "revolution", or needs "salvation", or "enlightenment" that lies outside of what we are first and foremost - the living organism that thought cannot begin to deal with. Hell, I gave away most of my life, even while "questioning" it all, endlessly, to those uncertain principles. Now they have all fallen away and what you call "me" is left with pretty much what was there in the beginning! Real "hip", "beat", "dread", "punk" and so forth, prior to group approval and commercialization. Pure, wild, raving, primordial being that no one can do shit about. Something that old fascist thought in all it's labrinthian web cannot tie down, or even touch. To me all the movement's and such have failed! They were designed to fail, not intentionally, but intrinsically. They must give way under their own weight and woe be unto the poor mother fucker who finds ass underneath the amassing rubble of the constant past. We are something that can't be spoken. We are a "species" of being that is not more significant than any other and yet incredibly unique. We spew out contradiction after contradiction because thought can't support what it has struggled to dominate for thousands of years. A recently departed "friend" said it simply, "thought is the ultimate fascist". It's not that we can't get along - probably we can do that incredibly, SHOULD thought as a basis for our living somehow miraculously cease! However, we will constantly be in conflict unless it occurs to every BODY that thought is our only enemy. Thought is not the body functioning naturally. Thought is a tool gone fucking bezerk - in every possible direction. There is no future. That is the fraudulence of thought. That is how it perpetuates the myth that it will eventually solve every problem in the world. It won't, not in a million years! It won't because then it's over, done with! If we are incredibly fortunate, it will fill every body that thought is not the instrument that we save us and we do not need it's illusion of change. We need to function, along with every concievable life form, in a way in which thought returns to the background and the body emerges from it all and expresses itself fully with it's own natural intelligence. There is nothing to say about that quality. It has it's own flow! The gathering? All you rainbows and lovers, earth people and free spirits, anarchists and revolutionaries, wild visionaries and pragmatic activists - one wonders if it will occur to you that there is no end to the lock and the key unless the body can dance a dance that is not one based on our formidable neurological deformity! Whether that can happen, no one can say! Maybe I'll see ya there ...
One of my History profs (Dr James Alexander of the University of Georgia, if he's still of this Earth; he was getting on in years when I was in school.) said it well, too. "Humans are sectarian by nature."
the gathering 2008 will be wyoming . see ya at the hobo's ball , the homecoming dance , the medicine wheel rave , the hot cinder hop .
don't get in here too often - wanderingturnupII & tikoo, especially - as i notice that about three weeks have passed. for living in a moderate size city, recently, and spending a good amount of time online, i'm really outta touch with a lot of things. maybe there is just sooooo much activity going on in and out here! wyoming? i love. love the vast, suspended fields of flowering purple-blue sage after early spring flash rains. the sky, especially at night when stars take over. hmmm ... i don't know how someone implanted the idea that it will be in the ozarks. medicine wheel rave ... i don't know if, as indicated, that "human" is anything other than a projection. it certainly is a part of yet one more semantic cluster that thought comes up with to keep on wrestling with "itself". i'll "say no more, say no more" ... peace soup! shane
