Pamela
Johnson lives in Oregon House, a small community in Yuba County, but lived through
the late Sixties in Berkeley, the center of a spreading counterculture.
Woodstock
in 1969 was the high point, so to speak, "when," she writes,
"those present became one person in mind, in large part because of shared
psychedelic experience."
How
this came about, how life in the Haight-Ashbury area turned from the idealism
of the Summer of Love to something darker and more repressive after, is told in
Johnson's "A Nation Of Mystics" trilogy of novels, beginning with
"Intentions" ($4.99 for Amazon Kindle from Stone Harbour Press; also
from pamelajohnsonauthor.com).
The
story begins 1965 with Christian Brooks, eighteen, the son of a missionary,
raised in India and now attending UC Berkeley, haunted by something in his
past. How to move beyond anger?
Some
of the characters, like Amy, Christian's old lady ("a female partner and
lover in common law living or marriage," according to the glossary at the
end), fall head over heels for messianic religious figures.
Many
others, though, meld political action with LSD. (Johnson's description of the
sheer sexual energy of tripping is mesmerizing.) As Richard, one of innumerable
dealers in the Haight, tells his old lady, Marcie: "Acid teaches, reveals
the fragile soul-ego of each person. … I'm here to join with my brothers and
sisters to make spiritual revolution, using acid as our weapon."
Dealing
becomes a business. There's pot and LSD, then cocaine, heroin, PCP, meth. Later
in the novel the "pigs" recruit informants and there's a hint of
violence to come as the lives of the characters are taken into book two,
"The Tribe," and book three, "Journeys."
But
the Movement didn't die. It "grew, swelling the ranks of civil rights
workers, antiwar protestors, disarmament organizations, and the new
environmental groups. For many, the essence of the experience in the Haight was
spiritual. They had lived with love and communalism and passed the acid test.
They had stood before the White Light and touched the face of God."
Pamela
Johnson is the scheduled interview guest on Nancy's Bookshelf, hosted by Nancy
Wiegman, this Friday at 10:00 a.m. on mynspr.org.
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