Health & Fitness
Time to get out of the Attic
Maybe you have love beads...Do you have the the ideas that go with them?
On 11/5/11 my wife and I were fortunate enough to attend a fundraiser for the Grateful Dead Archive at the University of California Santa Cruz. It was a lovely night, well attended with a lot of luminaries and academics with a bluegrass Grateful Dead cover band. The exhibit from the archive was fantastic showing many different sides of the Dead phenomena including all the latest artifacts like Furthur and Business Secrets of the Grateful Dead. It was called ‘Attics of Our Lives’ a play on the Dead song “Attics of My Life”:
Words by Robert Hunter; music by Jerry Garcia
Copyright Ice Nine Publishing; used by permission.
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In the attics of my life
Full of cloudy dreams unreal
Full of tastes no tongue can know
And lights no eye can see
When there was no ear to hear
You sang to me
I have spent my life
Seeking all that's still unsung
Bent my ear to hear the tune
And closed my eyes to see
When there were no strings to play
You played to me
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In the book of love's own dream
Where all the print is blood
Where all the pages are my days
And all my lights grow old
When I had no wings to fly
You flew to me
You
flew
to me
In the secret space of dreams
Where I dreaming lay amazed
When the secrets all are told
And the petals all unfold
When there was no dream of mine
You dreamed of me
I first saw the Dead in the panhandle of Golden Gate park in the late ‘60’s and many times thereafter in the ‘70’s. As I reflected on my experiences and the evening’s festivities, it occurred to me that the culture of the Dead, the part that hadn’t been digested by mainstream marketing and spit out into t-shirts, stickers and endless recordings; the ephemeral, glowing mirror-ball, sometimes spiritual, component, the social justice and ecological and collectivist philosophy has been long suppressed. What was once in full bloom at the time of Nixon’s resignation and the Apollo program, had long since been relegated to the attic as a forgotten curiosity.
Sure, some of these ideas were mainstreamed because they could be cleaned up, made marketable, commoditized and sold. Now, everyone wants to be “Green” drink espresso, and eat organic food.
On the other hand, social and economic justice and collectivism aren’t such an easy sell. They still make ‘liberals’ uncomfortable, and raise aggression among conservatives and the Tea Party.
So the name of the event seemed so appropriate, I felt at peace with it all, like it was the right place, time and so forth. Like synchronicity. Like everything “in the secret space of dreams” “full of cloudy dreams unreal” it just wasn’t quite that simple.
I started ‘backcasting’ the last 40+ years, the spirit of the Dead had been relegated to the attic by relentless drives back toward the conformity and homogeneity of the ‘50’s, but with a second millennium skin.
Except that this messy mixture of maligned minds really has been suppressed and repressed, leaving quite a few people depressed. Only now, the whole Occupy movement has cracked open the attic window, and some of these ideas are again gaining currency.
When liberation of what is now the GLBTIQ community began, there was a lot of talk about “coming out of the closet.”
I think it’s well beyond the time when all of these messy ideas escaped the attic.
Maybe I won’t be throwing pies at stock brokers, but the prankster element of political discourse is sorely lacking in today’s political polarization. Get all those hippie ideas out of the attic and re-examine them. Our country will benefit, and maybe we can defuse some of the harmful polarization before it does permanent harm.