An earlier version of this piece was prompted several years ago by the writer and film historian Joan Hawkins, who was organizing “Wounded Galaxies,” a multi-media festival and symposium on the year 1968 at Indiana University. The prompt was pretty much, “Think about 1968, and see what pops into your head.” In another mood, maybe other things would have popped into my head, and then there is the arrow of the present moment, when I rewrote this. What’s the mood? You decide.
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1968
I knew a man who keeled over one day and died of a stroke at the age of 38. The shock of this death was the shock of death, itself, coming at you around the wrong turn. This man taught a class when I was a graduate student at Columbia. He’d have students over to his apartment, near the university, and he had a small child who’d been a baby in 1968.
The baby had been standing in his crib, on the verge of saying his first words, when out of his mouth flew, “Irk muss oh.” For a solid week, at the end of April ‘68, the words “Kirk must go” had floated over the campus into the baby’s room and changed his life evermore. I don’t know what happened to the baby, but nothing can erase the fact of his first words and his eager, joyous parroting of the chants hurled at Grayson Kirk, Columbia’s president, who had linked the university to the defense department and promoted the construction of a large gym in Harlem that residents of Harlem would be restricted from using.
The shouts had risen up as demonstrators circled five buildings that students were occupying until, on the 8th day, April 30, Kirk called the police and 700 people were arrested. I was part of the human chain that surrounded the buildings. We wore black armbands after the arrests. It was my last year at Barnard College, and in June we would protest by walking out of our graduation and charging down the steps of St. John the Divine with our gowns flying behind us.
Earlier that year I’d marched in Washington against the war in Vietnam, and the previous year I was present when, on February 26, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman tried to end the war by levitating the Pentagon. I was married at the time. The man I was married to knew lots of things I didn’t know, and I liked being swept into understandings larger than mine. A few years later, I swam away from the marriage, and the marriage swam away from me. Grayson Kirk would resign from Columbia University before the end of 1969.
During the summer of ’67, the summer of love, I had a business that paid for ski trips and dinners out. I made colorful jewelry with bits of plastic I bought on Canal Street and with tissue paper I twisted into shapes and hardened with polymer medium. I made paper neckties with psychedelic designs on one side and on the other side personal ads from The East Village Other. The ads described sexual tastes I was curious to know more about, as I suppose was everybody entertained by the paper.
During the summer of love, I carried my wares to the head shops and hippie boutiques that had mushroomed in the West Village and the East Village. Everyone wanted them. Sometimes the man I was married to and I stayed up all night making neckties to fill orders. I hung them to dry on a clothesline strung down the length of our apartment. People wore the toe rings and finger rings I shaped into flowers and had a tendency to melt in rain. I didn’t look like a hippie. I looked like the studious girl I was.
In the fall of ’68, I began graduate school at Columbia and spent time with a gay boy in my class. His brother knew someone in the administration, and he lived as a sort of a caretaker in a mansion on Riverside Drive. The building had been a school. There were rows of sinks and toilet stalls in a bathroom. The boy camped out in one room with a mattress on the floor. That’s where, after class, we’d have sex, and then I’d ride the subway to the Village where I lived. I felt the man I was married to deserved someone better than me, and in a few years he found her.
The other night, I watched the first four episodes of the 6-part series Years and Years, a BBC show created by Russell T. Davies. It portrays a British society 15 years in the future from 2019, when the show was made. We follow a family, in which the issues of race and sexuality that lit up the 1960s are toast and jam. The family easily blends in its Chinese, black, bi-racial, and homosexual members. A Dark Mirror version of technology has eliminated privacy in a way that comforts as much as it suffocates. Any time a family member has a thought or an announcement, all the others are patched into a continual Skype and Facetime collectivity. One daughter has decided she’s transhuman and has had phone networks implanted in her hand and arm. Her hand works as a phone.
The show doesn’t look with horror at the merging of the organic and the prosthetic. Rather, it sees this as a development in the long history of human technology, invented by homo sapiens that are—with their opposing thumbs and environment-transforming minds—internally technological. Remember when, in the most economic jump cut in the history of film, Stanley’s Kubrick’s joyous ape tosses into the air a femur bone he’s just used as a murder weapon—and the bone becomes a floating space ship?
The horror in the show is the marketing of stupidity. Trump has won a second term and has detonated a nuclear device at a man-made Chinese island in the Pacific. Pence has won subsequent terms, and in the UK his political equivalent, portrayed by Emma Thompson, becomes Prime Minister. She’s won with the aid of CGI-made videos, showing her opponents making incendiary statements they never said. People vote for the Thompson character, even though they know the videos are fake.
The banks fail. People lose their savings. The North Pole melts. So far in human history, there is no example of people returning to hunter-gathering after they’ve become agricultural. It’s been assumed to be a one-way door. But now, in the apocalypse that has already happened, people who have not drowned in floods or burned in wild fires will have to forage to survive.
Years and Years is the bleak alternative to the hopes of 1968, not the logical flight of that arrow. The generation that was young In 1968 pressured two presidents—Nixon and Johnson—to resign. We ended the war in Viet Nam. We secured the right to an abortion. And fifty years later, we helped elect a black person as US President.
In Hudson, before finding the house we bought, we looked at a house we couldn’t afford that was beautiful and empty. Its beauty was in its emptiness. I walked up beautiful stairs, built in the shape of a ramp, and crossed floors of gleaming wood and tiles made of slate. I looked out the large windows into woods that were quiet except for birdsong, and I wondered if I could live anywhere. I have a friend who, even as a teenager, wanted a house and someone to love her. She has a house and has many times been loved. She didn’t know she was beautiful when she was young and beautiful.
I like remembering wanting things deeply and desperately. I remember times when I was shadowy to myself. Everything was personal. The way the world worked was personal. Before COVID, on the last flight to England with Richard, my feet swelled and lost their map of veins and bones, and when I looked at them I didn’t know where I was walking. in 1968, we thought securing the right to an abortion was a one-way door.
another banger, laurie. i hope you're right that "years and years' is the bleak alternative to the hopes of 1968 and not the logical flight of that arrow." despite its grim imaginings, do you like the show? i suppose we can never assume any door only opens out one way.
I always thought of June 1967 as the beginning of the “Summer of Love” at least where I lived, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Maybe it took a year for the vibe to make it to the East Coast.