Hippies

I was watching Tobe Hooper's Eggshells and it occurred to me that oftentimes you're really lucky when you've just got a camera rolling, only that you usually don't know in advance just when: just when the sun will light the scene just right, just when you'll meet an animal near the forest or a person in a mood, you'll not catch that person in again.

Now, sometimes however, you'll have plenty of opportunities to capture something extraordinary and still pass them by, because you start to think that it will never end, that something has changed and what you're seeing has become a part of a new normality. That is, some bizarre extremity you might capture, but the common heart of it you miss.

It's good that Tobe Hooper didn't make that mistake and clearly saw the extraordinary for what it was: a temporary public spike in care in face of the Vietnam War.

When I was six, eleven years after Eggshells was made, the local youth in my Zeitgeist-backwater still aspired to be Hippies, had long hair, sat in tree houses and talked about new ways.

Now, we can of course all talk about new ways and consider ourselves to be the ones entrusted with making this world a better place, but if we actually do so, it will always be accompanied by massive incompetence management, introducing every second sentence with I think or I feel, highlighting the virtue of the effort as such, affirming that virtue every time someone bows to practical needs, venerating one another's thoughts by building a shrine around every each of them, but then tacitly trying to push one's own shrines into the center of the vast reaches of the sanctuary that is forever threatened by forgetfulness.

As we say in Germany: We all cook with water, but when it comes to solving any kind of problem, the ratio between the efforts spent on sustaining the process and making progress is decisive and therein lies the extraordinariness of the Hippie culture.

That is not to say that it would be extraordinary, when everybody talked to everybody else, when all worked together, but it is extraordinary, when all become full-time members of the city council.

Yet, it actually happened, and the subtleties are worth beholding: the shyness, the embarrassment, the silent hierarchy, the tendency to establish oneself in the basement and inwardly turn away from the effort and the impulse to turn back to it, the difficulty to trouble a simple mind and the ultimate anguish of the complex mind to be caught up in it all.

It's all natural, but not in this concentration. In particular the bouncing back of bimbos is supposed to be more laborious.

So, nature can be trusted, but has to be put into its environment, those who employ too mindlessly create anomalies. But too mindful an employment, seeking not to let nature do its work, but to fit it to the purpose, won't end well either.