moving to the countryside and seeing ghosts 2
real cabin essence
I've been in this town so long that back in the city
I've been taken for a lost and gone
An unknown for a long long time— Beach Boys, Heroes and Villains (1967)
San Narciso lay further south, near L.A. Like many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts—census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway. — Thomas Pynchon, The crying of lot 49 (1965)
My grandfather built his house in the countryside in the mid 1970s. He came from the country side (e.g. big hands) and rarely went to the city. Back then lots of other people did the opposite thing and moved from the village to the city. This phenomenon, that appeared in the industrialized (indie) countries of the Western Hemisphere would in Germany be called “Landflucht”, which translates to “fleeing the land” but can also be read as “fleeing of the land”, as in “fleeting landscape”. Which is facts, because moving to the cities back then didn’t yet mean to colonize the city centers but to extend the city on its fringes, making the landscape retreat. I think people sometimes like to compare the extension of the urban sprawl to the way a cancerous tumor spreads in the body but I think that is a very rude picture.
Yet others moved from the city to the country side. That’s the people who we are today calling hippies (small hands) but what my grandfather back then must have called “Gammler” which in German literally means “the ones that are rotting” or just “rotters”. The rotters motivation to move from the city to the country side was grounded in the believe that real life was virtually impossible within the city and only to be found on the outside. Their suspicion of the cities was strong enough for them to move to the countryside and build their own counter communities. I don’t know whether the hippies really did find something real, or whether when the they arrived, they found the landscape had already fled and left. At least I’m certain the German hippies didn’t find anything because they had to go to Münsterland and Ostwestfalen and so on: very much not real.
Maybe hippies have never found real life, but they sure did pose a threat to what cat-boy_deleuze/deleuzean_thembo refers to as The Empire: the total interiority of things, the inability to be outside of a thing that is a big universalizing machine assigning significance to everything without creating meaningful ways of living (e.g. Ursula von der Leyen removing humans from divine grace)
Of course funny fact is that the hippies were an invention the of The Empire in the first place, a psy-op put in existence by the subculture-branch of the military industrial complex, looking to create a generation of hyper-individualized navel gazing stoners, easily deceivable (weed) and insatiable consumers (new flower shirt every week): The CIA introduced weed into colleges, funded French fashion houses for massive mini-skirt production and set up a 50-head committee of ex-military-song-composers to write songs to the made up concept band called The Beach Boys, delivering the “sound of a generation”. They literally MKULTRAed a whole culture into being flower children.
But by the end of the 60s the hippies had spiraled out of control. We don’t know why, but it might have been changes in the biochemistry of the marijuana crop somewhere further down the global supply chain, inducing political paranoia and group psychoses in the lonely stoner’s bodies. Instead of buying flowery perfumes the hippies stopped showering altogether. They started going on peace marches and attended all sorts of “happenings”, until coming to the conclusion that life in the city was broken and useless and that they had to take matters into their own hands. Things like the Whole Earth Catalog appeared, hippie google, that would contain thousands of DIY instructions how to attract birds, clean your pipe and build your own house. If the hippies were now going to move away and start they’re own enclaves of peace then the expensive psy-Op of Flower Power was about to deflate like a punctured Pinofit® ass-pillow.
Luckily the CIA played the ultimate prank on its hippies. They countered the DIY craze with the introduction of literal DIY stores (they started with Lowe’s). This was the first time the broad public was able to go and buy the necessary raw material and tools at one spot without having to depend on specialists. That way, The Empire was not only able to extract market value from the the hippies ‘moving out’ fantasies but was able also to control the material consistency of the hippie’s Utopias.
Maybe the CIA introduced asbestos to the DIY store-scene as some kind of deadly pointe against the hippies. To sell to “the ones that are rotting” a material that already in Wolfram von Eschenbachs Parzival (ca.1200) is described as “a wood that does not burn nor rot” seems to me like a massive sike. Mini-skirts yes, but never rotting. The CIA made bank on a 20 year toxin-time bomb that you could buy at Home Depot.
That way, whole Drop City was built in asbestos, and Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic Domes are mostly asbestos based as well. The CIA handed in their own articles into the Whole Earth Catalogue aggressively advertising asbestos sheets in the home improvement section. There is even instructions how to find your own asbestos in the ground and weave it to a beautiful silvery thread (even if this would reduce HomeDepot’s earnings)
So the hippies DIYed their own toxic paradise. you can leave society but society won’t leave you (your lungs). Maybe asbestos is the real “cabin essence” The Beach Boys (1967) were singing about:
Light the lamp and fire mellow
Cabin essence timely hello
Welcomes the time for a change