i'm so envious of everyone who was able to be there for this. it's a rare and beautiful thing to conjure up a sacred space under these conditions, with the right alchemy of freedom and purpose and determination and cooperation. i'm afraid the "postmodern economy of desire" has chased these sacred spaces even further to the periphery: it seems like, these days, having something like this with any regularity—unless it was a well-kept secret or overtly religious—would immediately start to tip into the profanity of mundane hedonism, without the ballast of a shared spiritual language to keep it upright.
we have a very popular annual music festival just up the road here. it's been going strong for over 30 years; i'm sure it felt exactly like what you're describing for the grown-up Flower Children who started it. it still retains some of that older, gentler, nurturing magic, but that energy is being smothered by the desperate, self-immolating hedonism of the younger generation. the music is still the same—but the drugs have gotten harder and the drinking is meaner. by Night 3 of the four-day festival, the fairground feels more like a besieged refugee camp than a celebration: kids in K-holes; drunks slumped in the wreckage of tents; fights and injuries; harsh vibes all around.
i can't judge: i was one of those drunks, not so long ago. but then again—when i was partying in my twenties, i probably would have benefited much more from a sacred space, instead of yet another venue for getting fucked up.
i'm sure there are still plenty of small, spontaneous gatherings that retain some sense of the sacred. i just worry that, the more we need them, the harder they are to find.
This got me thinking about The Great Good Place, Ray Oldenburg's book about what he called "the third place", the space that isn't the home and isn't the workplace, where you might spend a few hours a week, but which plays a disproportionate role in the life of community.
So many of the kind of spaces Oldenburg writes about have been driven out of business since he was writing, many of them, and the internet has acted as a refuge – a virtual third place – but been subject to the same patterns as the high street. And yet there's an almost irrepressible need to recreate them, to make pockets of sociability, everyday pockets of the sacred. (I think of Berger's description of the pockets of home created by migrant workers, quoted in my last post: "Nevertheless, by turning in circles the displaced preserve their identity and improvise a shelter. Built of what? Of habits, I think, of the raw material of repetition, turned into a shelter.")
But one thing I remember from Oldenburg's book was his description of how unprepossessing these spaces often are – they don't sell themselves to you, the aesthetic is underwhelming, they won't catch the eye of the stranger passing through, and if he wanders in, the welcome he'll receive may be a cautious one. All of this is part of their self-preservation.
And there's a clue there about making invitations that don't try to attract as many people as possible, but that resonate where they are needed. I think that's part of what we stumbled into doing with our festival.
Meanwhile, here are some seeds of hope that landed today from Adam Wilson:
i felt this acutely growing up in a place that was completely devoid of Third Places: at the top of a hill in the suburbs, without so much as a park within easy walking distance. my parents weren't drinkers, so we didn't venture into any of the dispiriting local bars, which were too far to walk anyway. it was a grim place to be a teenager; we resorted to stolen beer in the basement, until we were old enough to drink legally.
of course, unregulated Third Places also become the ad hoc shelters for the casualties of modernity—people who have nowhere else to go, or don't know where they are in the first place. the more desperate people there are, the more the good places are closed to those without invitations. it's a vicious cycle of isolation and despair.
but maybe we can look forward to some good old-fashioned publick houses on the other side of this apocalypse? here's hoping.
There is more to say than I suspect you’d be willing to read but there are a few synchronicities here for me.
I live in Longmont, Colorado just a few miles from where Allen Ginsberg taught and created the Jack Kerouac school of Disembodied Poetics. Kerouac writes in On the Road of Longmont and his first impressions of the Rocky Mountains laying in the grass at a gas station while hitchhiking to Denver to meet up with Neil Cassidy and Ginsberg.
Because of this I’ve had my own dive into 60s counter culture material looking to find what went wrong and also to better understand why it had such resonance. Flawed as he was, Kerouac’s belief in the sacred was sincere. He was devout and prayed for humility in his journals even as his work and actions seem so unbelievably contradictory at times. Rereading that material I could see parts that laid the groundwork that would tear apart millions of families, including my own. Even still I see that work as sacred, like the necessary end game to the story of separation. Your school called Home, is a fitting counter to that part of the counter culture.
Also for what it’s worth Dark Mountain was something that bonded me and my significant other when we first met. We had both unsuccessfully tried to go back to university to restart our lives in environmental fields in our 30s. Ten years later (almost to the day) I got to publish my first essay and my own short reworking of On the Road in the publication you started. Thank you for that and this post.
Thanks, Randall, this was good to read. It's strange to have come to the point where Dark Mountain has been around so long that it figures in the backstory of people's lives. I'm glad to know it gave you something to bond around.
Your comment about how political movements use people up like a kind of fuel is insightful. At times while marching in political rallies I have sensed a broad loneliness. So many people gathered together, but for an abstraction that no one actually touches. There's an industrial feeling to such social arrangements. We end up mimicking the machine-like structure we are trying to overthrow.
This takes me back to the thought (touched on in the previous post) that the story of modern political consciousness is often told as beginning with the formation of an industrial working class and the emergence of the labour movement, while the struggle over subsistence which preceded this is marginalised. So the patterns of what movements look like are rooted in this industrial history, mass movements for a mass society, a society based around the mechanical coordination of physical movement. We need other ideas of what agency can look like, how we can come together and act, that do not take for granted industrial-era assumptions about scale and causality.
Meanwhile, your mention of loneliness reminds me of a time in my mid-twenties when I threw myself into activism. I'd been through a personal heartbreak that left me unready for emotional vulnerability – and part of what I found in activism was a context that allowed me to feel strongly, but without those feelings being bound up in any intimate personal relationship. There can be (or was for me) a safety in abstract feeling.
i'm so envious of everyone who was able to be there for this. it's a rare and beautiful thing to conjure up a sacred space under these conditions, with the right alchemy of freedom and purpose and determination and cooperation. i'm afraid the "postmodern economy of desire" has chased these sacred spaces even further to the periphery: it seems like, these days, having something like this with any regularity—unless it was a well-kept secret or overtly religious—would immediately start to tip into the profanity of mundane hedonism, without the ballast of a shared spiritual language to keep it upright.
we have a very popular annual music festival just up the road here. it's been going strong for over 30 years; i'm sure it felt exactly like what you're describing for the grown-up Flower Children who started it. it still retains some of that older, gentler, nurturing magic, but that energy is being smothered by the desperate, self-immolating hedonism of the younger generation. the music is still the same—but the drugs have gotten harder and the drinking is meaner. by Night 3 of the four-day festival, the fairground feels more like a besieged refugee camp than a celebration: kids in K-holes; drunks slumped in the wreckage of tents; fights and injuries; harsh vibes all around.
i can't judge: i was one of those drunks, not so long ago. but then again—when i was partying in my twenties, i probably would have benefited much more from a sacred space, instead of yet another venue for getting fucked up.
i'm sure there are still plenty of small, spontaneous gatherings that retain some sense of the sacred. i just worry that, the more we need them, the harder they are to find.
This got me thinking about The Great Good Place, Ray Oldenburg's book about what he called "the third place", the space that isn't the home and isn't the workplace, where you might spend a few hours a week, but which plays a disproportionate role in the life of community.
So many of the kind of spaces Oldenburg writes about have been driven out of business since he was writing, many of them, and the internet has acted as a refuge – a virtual third place – but been subject to the same patterns as the high street. And yet there's an almost irrepressible need to recreate them, to make pockets of sociability, everyday pockets of the sacred. (I think of Berger's description of the pockets of home created by migrant workers, quoted in my last post: "Nevertheless, by turning in circles the displaced preserve their identity and improvise a shelter. Built of what? Of habits, I think, of the raw material of repetition, turned into a shelter.")
But one thing I remember from Oldenburg's book was his description of how unprepossessing these spaces often are – they don't sell themselves to you, the aesthetic is underwhelming, they won't catch the eye of the stranger passing through, and if he wanders in, the welcome he'll receive may be a cautious one. All of this is part of their self-preservation.
And there's a clue there about making invitations that don't try to attract as many people as possible, but that resonate where they are needed. I think that's part of what we stumbled into doing with our festival.
Meanwhile, here are some seeds of hope that landed today from Adam Wilson:
https://peasantryschool.substack.com/p/speaking-of-gifts
i felt this acutely growing up in a place that was completely devoid of Third Places: at the top of a hill in the suburbs, without so much as a park within easy walking distance. my parents weren't drinkers, so we didn't venture into any of the dispiriting local bars, which were too far to walk anyway. it was a grim place to be a teenager; we resorted to stolen beer in the basement, until we were old enough to drink legally.
of course, unregulated Third Places also become the ad hoc shelters for the casualties of modernity—people who have nowhere else to go, or don't know where they are in the first place. the more desperate people there are, the more the good places are closed to those without invitations. it's a vicious cycle of isolation and despair.
but maybe we can look forward to some good old-fashioned publick houses on the other side of this apocalypse? here's hoping.
An old post but a good one! Such a lot of great work and fantastic things achieved.
Thanks, Lucy!
There is more to say than I suspect you’d be willing to read but there are a few synchronicities here for me.
I live in Longmont, Colorado just a few miles from where Allen Ginsberg taught and created the Jack Kerouac school of Disembodied Poetics. Kerouac writes in On the Road of Longmont and his first impressions of the Rocky Mountains laying in the grass at a gas station while hitchhiking to Denver to meet up with Neil Cassidy and Ginsberg.
Because of this I’ve had my own dive into 60s counter culture material looking to find what went wrong and also to better understand why it had such resonance. Flawed as he was, Kerouac’s belief in the sacred was sincere. He was devout and prayed for humility in his journals even as his work and actions seem so unbelievably contradictory at times. Rereading that material I could see parts that laid the groundwork that would tear apart millions of families, including my own. Even still I see that work as sacred, like the necessary end game to the story of separation. Your school called Home, is a fitting counter to that part of the counter culture.
Also for what it’s worth Dark Mountain was something that bonded me and my significant other when we first met. We had both unsuccessfully tried to go back to university to restart our lives in environmental fields in our 30s. Ten years later (almost to the day) I got to publish my first essay and my own short reworking of On the Road in the publication you started. Thank you for that and this post.
Thanks, Randall, this was good to read. It's strange to have come to the point where Dark Mountain has been around so long that it figures in the backstory of people's lives. I'm glad to know it gave you something to bond around.
Your comment about how political movements use people up like a kind of fuel is insightful. At times while marching in political rallies I have sensed a broad loneliness. So many people gathered together, but for an abstraction that no one actually touches. There's an industrial feeling to such social arrangements. We end up mimicking the machine-like structure we are trying to overthrow.
This takes me back to the thought (touched on in the previous post) that the story of modern political consciousness is often told as beginning with the formation of an industrial working class and the emergence of the labour movement, while the struggle over subsistence which preceded this is marginalised. So the patterns of what movements look like are rooted in this industrial history, mass movements for a mass society, a society based around the mechanical coordination of physical movement. We need other ideas of what agency can look like, how we can come together and act, that do not take for granted industrial-era assumptions about scale and causality.
Meanwhile, your mention of loneliness reminds me of a time in my mid-twenties when I threw myself into activism. I'd been through a personal heartbreak that left me unready for emotional vulnerability – and part of what I found in activism was a context that allowed me to feel strongly, but without those feelings being bound up in any intimate personal relationship. There can be (or was for me) a safety in abstract feeling.