Beyond Cliches

Some dreams are ominous.

It's good to keep track of the puzzling dreams because eventually they make symbolic sense, or at least maybe we eventually perceive a mythic sense of timeless reality within the time of dreaming.

In one dream of the late Seventies I was at one of our frequent gatherings and I looked around at all of us. Some I'd met at University or Art School, some were simply amazing people. We had our children with us, we had our feasting, and for those of us who were born in Australia, there was all this new and fabulous food we'd never encountered before. There was music, there were astounding new books and ideas. In those years, there'd also been new insights into politics and history and somehow a world of possibility seemed possible.

Fiction wasn't simply trivial surface stuff.

Yet in my dream, something stopped me cold in this relishing of the wild, the beautiful and the creative and I uttered these words:

"Something terrible is going to happen to our generation!"

Well, even if prophetic utterances occur out of the blue and even if it's a dream aspect of oneself who has uttered, we have to carry on, continue work and study, continue to do the best for our children and the environment while the dreams stay hidden in a book for future examinations.

A younger friend, recently said to me,

'Oh, you people were just the Baby Boomers!'

This, I thought, this is the terrible thing that has happened. We have been dismissed by a despicable cliche which is as if we're less than normal because someone imagined that an entire generation had blissful lives.

As if!

I know several people who were able to accumulate or continue wealth and priviledge from those times but I think they were a minority in everyday life. Certainly there was a sort of faith that things might get better despite the shadow of The Bomb, the terror of Communism, the fixations about Immaculate Moralities and the everyday Brutalities of the School System then, but I don't remember the Fifties as Paradise.

If you were 'bad' (and who was good?), you could be threatened with one of those awful 'Homes' for the Wayward. And in the days before Birth Control, many families simply became so impossible that half the kids could be sent off to Orphanages.

Our parents by and large had suffered World War 11 and The Great Depression. Many of them were traumatised by what had happened within their own families and even if they desired the best for their children, the sheer ludicrous idealism of romantic media psychology, romantic filmic art didn't exactly encourage communication between the generations.

Neither did the assumption that adults should be treated as if they were gods.

I think that the empty materialism projected onto 'Baby Booming' is more intrinsic to these times that it was to those times.

We forget that these twentieth and twenty first century generations aren't the only ones who ever existed:

I have been in many shapes

Before I attained my harmonic form

I have been a drop in the air

I have been a shining star

I was in the Ark with Noah and Alpha

I am a wave of the sea

I am a tear of the sun

I am fair among flowers

I am a salmon in a pool

I am a hill of poetry

I am a god who forms fire for a head



And those words are from Robert Graves, quoted as I discovered yesterday in an autobiography by one our most glamourous and troubled 'boomers' of the times, Marianne Faithfull.

Marianne reminds me of the best parts of the Sixties even while her explorations of the worst were pretty thorough.

In my opinion, the best part of those times was the books. Spiritual insights and magical moments weren't spelled out for anyone in terms of mass culture Special Effects. Participation in terms of fashions and perceptions was possible.

Archetypes assumed great power in terms of the music and the momentous events of those times, but really anyone who had a curious mind could enter a world of possibility, because well, this was our priviledge, ANYONE could afford to buy books and music. We went to ordinary cinemas and we could just about see any cultural event we wanted to see.

Cliches corrupt, cliches are the basis of propaganda. That's what I reckon.