Robert Stone was close to ground zero all throughout the Sixties. Kesey and the Merry Pranksters parked their bus, Furthur, outside his apartment when they finally made it to NYC. Stone was there and, since he is a trained novelist, he remembers it well. If you want to know where the Sixties came from and some of where they went, you can't do much better than reading Stone. If you want to know how a writer keeps on writing throughout it all, you also can't do much better than Stone.
Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties by Robert Stone
NY: HarperCollins, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-019816-9
(39) The editors on the [New York Daily] News included some eccentric and cultivated characters. But as yellow journalists of the period [1958], they were serving an icon of their own creation. They were, or pretended to be, practitioners of right-wing populism. Their ideal imagined reader was a bigoted, tiny-minded, gun-chewing lout. Thus they became the slaves of their own golem. In the future of the century some version of this proletarian monster would reappear whenever class hatred needed to be dislocated from economics and drafted into service as a confusion.
(92) It [Kesey's La Honda house in the redwoods] was a halfway house on the edge of possibility, or so it appeared at the time.
This is what I call the intergalactic bus depot and I have experienced it in CA in a bungalow a block from the beach and in a block of rooming houses in Cambridge, MA among other places and times. It is an accidental gathering of heart where anybody might be a visitor from another reality and collectively the group feels like they can reach another dimension and sometimes do. What I've also learned from experience is that this realm of possibility is always within reach, if we care to open a hand and stretch out our fingers.
(133) I have come to believe that language, a line of print, say, is capable of inhabiting the imagination far more intensely than any picture, however doctored. the same principle applies to the novel, if it works. No Hollywood flick, no movie of any provenance, can ever provide an experience of the battle of Bordoino as intense as that provided in Tolstoy's pages. descriptive language supplies deeper penetration, attaches itself to the rods and cones of interior perception, to a greater degree than a recovered or remembered image. Language is the process that lashes experience to the intellect.
(176-177) So much can be said about the intersections of life and language, the degree to which language can be made to serve the truth. By the truth I mean unresisted insight, which is what gets us by, which makes one person's life and sufferings comprehensible to another.
(180) Selling my first book to the movies was going to buy me time to write my second novel - or to put it another way, to not write it. Once again the illusion of action could substitute for the production of fiction.
(206) The degree to which the Vietnam War consumed the vital energy of the nation, degraded the honor of its stand against the hateful ideologies of the twentieth century, and used up the lives of its youth was tragic. Tragic seems a paltry word, but what can one say? The ruin and death we inevitably brought down on Vietnam will always be held against us. It will be recalled as one of the crimes of history. In fact it was worse than a crime; as a coldly wise Frenchman said in another connection, it was a blunder. However, no one now requires more moralizing on that topic.
Those who need the moralizing are constitutionally unable to hear it. The Bush/Cheney junta and their fellow travelers will never learn.
(225) For one thing, facts unexamined can be made to subvert fundamental truth. Questions of this sort can be debated endlessly. But the intersection of facts and the truth was one of the problematic junctures I learned something about in Vietnam, which, I believe, made my going worthwhile.
(229) Our expectations were too high, our demands excessive; things were harder than we expected. Kesey's wise maxim about offering more than what he could deliver, in order to deliver what he could, described his life's efforts - and not only his. It is true, I believe, of every person, or any group of people who ever set out to advance anything beyond their own personal advantage. We must believe in the efficacy of our own efforts. maybe we have to believe in it to the point of excess. Excess is always a snare for those who demand much from themselves or from life. excess, in fact, is characteristic of romantics, or romantic generations.
Remember the last pages of The Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test? Kesey singing, "We blew it" over and over again over a guitar drone in an emptying club near Santa Cruz. Remember the last night by the campfire for Billy and Captain America in "Easy Rider" before the rednecks blow them away? The Captain says, "We blew it" as Billy tries to gloat about getting away clean with the coke money. We knew from the beginning that we'd blown it. Such is the tragic nature of life. What was different about the Sixties and what makes them reverberate down through the decades is that we tried and that's why the Bush/Cheney junta and their fellow travelers are still stuck in reaction to those days: they will always be deathly afraid of anybody who tries a different way.