The first thing is the way we use our time, and I mean this to include, how much of ourselves we put into the things we do, also, not only the outward results of what we accomplish, but the inward sense, the intention which impels it and the meaning which abides in it. We derive our inspiration about these things much more from the role models for what we want to be than from a real necessity to do much of anything—but as the outward importance laid on the products diminishes, the need for some inward satisfaction remains, and lacks its outlet. Then but if you go looking for just that, you find all false and empty answers, detached from their real context—self-help and yoga and ennui—whereas the most basic chores and work of living—housekeeping, bookkeeping, a yard or garden or front porch—go neglected, and you ignore the connection between the two.
Go a little further afield, get more serious about being a good person instead of just making a living, living well, and perhaps you see some hope in service, through some organization dedicated to placing people just like you in the places where work needs to get done. But forasmuch as there is something good about this, and it makes you feel necessary and whole, there is something bad about it, too, something forced. Isn’t it that the person who should be doing this work be someone already there, and you find some work like this to do back where you are from? It is all to the good to have some experience of another place and another way of doing things, and while there learning it by doing the things—but then either you assimilate and stay there or you stay basically who you are and go back home to share it and better appreciate all that you had all along, leaving it to the people you met in that other place to take something of what you offered them and apply it to the particular needs they have, while you do the same.
What prevents this from working, in fact, are the structures that keep communities from being self-sufficient , and the thought-cliches arising from this status quo reinforce it—a nomadism, rootlessness, dog-eat-dogedness—into which step well-meaning organizations which go on reinforcing it. There are enough people in any community the size of a neighborhood to provide for all the physical and spiritual needs they are born having, and then some—enough not just to survive, which any individual or family can do, but to live a human life in peace and grow at it, which takes a community. Anything bigger—as soon as you can’t account for each person by name and relationships, and don’t notice if they go missing—stops being on a human scale, and starts to serve other ends than the human development of all its members. Things like the pride of a ruler or glory of a god. But to get back into a community takes time and space, which only those benefiting from the status quo actually have, and don’t seem inclined to use for this purpose, or else the kind of violent uprising which never achieves quite what it says, though it may more or less destroy what had been before. But let’s look at persuading the people who could live this way if they really wanted to, rather than preaching armchair manifestos.
Starting-places might be where a community is already implied, and only lacks the physical grounds for production and the actual proximity of its members in a more permanent way—places like churches, colleges, or various kinds of networks or organizations around a common cause. Sometimes these ties can become very strong, and to get stronger than the centrifugal effects of the status quo society requires some certain degree of belief or desperation, I can only conjecture, I’m not sure what it looks like—or whimsy, maybe, if the hippies had it right all along.
The other side to try and start on would be where people are already close together, with the land and property perhaps even already turned to agriculture in the rural places, or fertile enough in the suburbs, or in the city tenements you would have to get creative, a la Crowley in Little, Big, but anyhow the externals are more or less there, it’s the other thing that’s missing, the shared purpose or dream. These people don’t know each other and seem to have all they need as it is, but they’re just Frankensteins lurching around, sewn up from various other peoples’ dreams and imaginary lives, and for all their material prosperity and superior knowledge their hearts are hollow. There’s nothing sustainable there, nothing to fight for, and from one generation to the next even the external well-being frays and grows ever more fraught, and the yearning for meaning and for a dream grows more insistent, wayward, inarticulate, frustrated.
So what are the models for this movement, if there is going to be anything moving? Vaguely hearing of landless workers’ collectives in Brazil and Mexico isn’t necessarily going to appeal to your red-blooded American suburbanite, however compelling a sinking feeling they get when they look over the edges of their little life. That vertigo is the only teacher, and the leap it invites. You might invoke monastics of east and west, but the aim we’re going for is really the opposite, to appearances—a fuller connection with the world rather than an absconding from it for contemplation and mortifying the sinful parts—possibly there’s Rabelais’ monastery or convent he sketches out.
Maybe we don’t really want models, but want something distinctive and original, the creation of which is a big part of everyone’s buying into it thereafter. Certainly it has to be up to the kids to go out and explore other places and make their own way, they aren’t stuck in their parents’ community longer than they can’t support themselves—but they do have some responsibility to their parents when they can’t support themselves.. Always this pulling back and surging out.
We’ll avail ourselves of something of the past, that which speaks to the same strivings, without it being totally foreign to us, calling to the better natures in us we’re trying to live out. These are the books, stories, songs—Kierkegaard, Rabelais, Crowley—and the ways of looking and thinking about the world they imply—that there is beauty, there is truth, though we don’t necessarily agree about where, we are on the lookout for it. Something about this process of discovery is lost when the institutions are no longer questioned—even, especially, such a community has to be taken up at least once a generation, searched through, and founded anew down to its foundations, if it is going to remain living and relevant to its members—if it is going to be its members, their aspirations, their connections and love, and not some husk of dry traditions and vague memorized words.
This is the same process of learning, but from things and people, not only books. There have to be schools in these communities, and everyone has to go to them, if learning and teaching, discovering and discussing, is going to be the breath of the democracy. Every family and group of friends has to have their own house to go back to, but it won’t be like it is now, a huge empty thing they never willingly emerge from, but something simple, a kitchen, a bathroom, a bedroom, a bed, and they won’t have to lock their doors when someone is always paying a visit and they themselves are hardly at home.
I still envision it looking like Washington Grove, and much of the rest of Gaithersburg, but where now there are big stores and offices and parking lots, that land is cleared for cultivation. The train and metro still runs, but there is something in the air like India, because all the cars have been replaced by bikes and mopeds and buggies, and the roads are livelier and not so deadly, but not by much.
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